Saai Responds to Minister John Steenhuisen’s Foot-and-Mouth Disease Announcements

The family-farmer organisation Saai today expressed its serious concern and disappointment following Minister John Steenhuisen’s media conference on the foot-and-mouth disease crisis. According to Saai, the conference failed to present the necessary solutions for farmers who are currently facing a survival crisis and raised more questions than answers. Farmers expected firmer more decisive, clear and practical action to get their farming operations back on track and to gain certainty on how the national control strategy will be rolled out.

The scale of the crisis is clearly greater than what the Department of Agriculture understands or has the capacity to manage. Trust in the department among farmers is currently extremely low. The industry is expected to believe that the very officials who caused the crisis must now lead them out of it. Furthermore, there has been no indication of consequences for officials who failed to safeguard the integrity of control measures or to ensure the availability of vaccines.

With regard to vaccines, the announcement that future supplies will also be sourced from Brazil and Turkey is welcomed as good news. However, South Africa urgently needs as much supply as possible in the short term. Saai warns that if the state does not urgently supplement its capacity to produce locally developed vaccines by outsourcing production to private laboratories, the organisation will be compelled to force the state to do so through legal action.

Saai welcomes the request to declare the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak a national disaster, but points out serious shortcomings in the current approach. The absence of a strategy for stray cattle in informal settlements and communal areas, together with the collapse of law enforcement and infrastructure relating to the impounding of livestock, undermines the credibility of the national strategy.

Farmers have set out the following twelve core requirements for the minister:

1. A clear plan for financial assistance to affected farmers to survive while their operations are effectively paralysed.
2. Information on how the national state of disaster will make a tangible difference to the dairy, red meat and pork industries.
3. The promulgation of emergency regulations to mobilise more than just departmental resources.
4. A uniform inventory of manpower, vehicles, equipment and vaccine availability in each district for effective deployment.
5. The structuring of a partnership between the state and the private sector to align all stakeholders.
6. A clear process in each province and district for communication, logistics and execution.
7. A comprehensive resource plan and budget in which livestock farmers themselves play an active role.
8. Greater flexibility to expand vaccine production beyond state laboratories into the private sector in order to increase output exponentially.
9. Recognition of farmers’ capacity to vaccinate their own livestock and keep records thereof to save time and costs.
10. More information on planned record-keeping and monitoring systems.
11. A proper communication system to address the frustration of farmers who are left in the dark.
12. A review and finalisation plan to prevent gaps in the national vaccination campaign.

Saai rejects Minister Steenhuisen’s allegations that agricultural organisations are spreading disinformation or exploiting the crisis for membership recruitment. Such statements demonstrate how out of touch the minister is with realities on the ground. Organisations that ask critical questions do so because farmers understand that the state does not have the capacity to lead them out of this crisis without assistance.

Finally, Saai finds it inappropriate that the minister criticised organisations such as the Milk Producers’ Organisation (MPO) for approaching the courts to secure better access to vaccines. It was precisely this pressure that forced the department, after more than a year, to broaden its procurement focus beyond Botswana alone.