The Southern African Agri Initiative (Saai) confirms that Saai, Free State Agriculture, and Sakeliga’s attorneys has sent a formal demand to the Minister of Agriculture in response to the State’s continued failure to implement a workable, lawful, and effective response to the escalating Foot-and-Mouth Disease crisis.
This decision follows months of formal engagement, written submissions, and repeated warnings to the Department of Agriculture that the current approach is failing farmers, threatening food security, and accelerating economic damage across the livestock and dairy value chains.
Despite clear legal obligations placed on the State under existing legislation, the operational response to Foot-and-Mouth Disease has remained fragmented, slow and structurally incapable of matching the scale and pace of the outbreak. Saai’s decision is not ideological, political, or opportunistic. It is the direct consequence of prolonged state-caused vaccine shortages, the single buyer-supplier model adopted by the Minister and his department, uncertainty around supply, regulatory paralysis around permits and authorisations, contradictory messaging to farmers, and a widening gap between public announcements and practical implementation on farms.
Saai has consistently warned that the crisis is no longer one capable of being controlled by mere intent or planning, but by actual execution and capacity. That capacity already exists in South Africa today in the massive network of private animal health service providers, suppliers logistics networks and cold-chain infrastructure.
On 16 January 2026, Saai formally submitted a detailed proposal to the Minister of Agriculture, John Steenhuisen, setting out specific, lawful and immediately implementable measures to expand vaccination capacity. These included private-sector vaccine procurement and administration, fast-tracked permitting with defined turnaround times, legal clarity on movement rules and the protocols on the processing of milk and meat. To date, these measures have not been implemented.
Saai’s mandate is to protect family farmers, food production and rural economies. Saai will exhaust all legal mechanisms available to it in order to protect the interests of the family farmer, and which will include litigation where appropriate and necessary.
The organisation is deeply concerned that continued delay is already pushing law abiding farmers toward insolvency, incentivising informal and illegal practices, undermining confidence in disease control systems and risking a secondary economic collapse layered onto the animal health crisis.
Saai’s is requiring action from the State. Our sole aim is to ensure that rational and effective regulation of Foot-and-Mouth Disease, with solutions that remain focused upon protecting the livelihoods of family farmers.
Saai remains open to urgent, good-faith engagement with the State. However, the Foot-and-Mouth Disease crisis has moved beyond briefings and good intentions. It now requires decisive action.
