Australia sprints, while South Africa dawdles

Two United Nations agencies have issued a joint appeal for funds ahead of the expected impact on millions of poor people of the El Niño weather phenomenon later this year and into 2027.

El Niño, which occurs every few years, brings floods to some parts of the world and drought to others, including Southern Africa.

This year’s El Niño is expected to be particularly harsh, leading to the joint appeal from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme. This is the first time they have sought funds ahead of an expected humanitarian disaster, instead of reacting afterwards.

They are looking for a $202-milliion fund which they say would enable them to protect 8.8 million food-insecure people at risk from the predicted El Niño impacts.

“Strong El Niño conditions are developing, threatening food security, agriculture and livelihoods across multiple regions into 2027,” the agencies said.

“This El Niño is expected to bring significantly drier conditions to Southern Africa, Central America, parts of Asia and the Pacific, and Eastern Africa, while increasing the likelihood of floods and storms in the Horn of Africa and parts of Asia.”

Prioritised high-risk countries include Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Anticipatory actions include cash transfers, seeds of drought-tolerant or flood-resistant varieties, livestock support, and flood defences or water storage systems.

“For a vulnerable family, this means the difference between hunger and food on the table, a failed harvest or a productive one, and children who receive daily milk or go without it,” the agencies stated.

Stressing the need for urgent “anticipatory action at scale”, they said El Niño was converging with the economic consequences of the Iran conflict.

“Soaring food, fuel and fertiliser prices are already undermining food production and access in some of the world’s most vulnerable, food-insecure countries”.

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South African consumers are slowly warming to tinned chicken.

The slow market approval is reported in the Poultry Bulletin, official journal of the SA Poultry Association (SAPA).

Tinned chicken has been popular in Europe and North America for decades, but has only recently been introduced in South Africa after the idea was proposed by former Atral CEO Chris Schutte in 2024.

Tinned chicken was launched to compete with similar-sized cans of pilchards.

Tinned chicken not only suffers the disadvantage of being a novelty, Poultry Bulletin reports, but the price differential is exacerbated by the fact that tinned pilchards are VAT-free while chicken is not.

Astral, which has taken the lead in the production of tinned chicken, expects the price differential to narrow once tinned chicken is produced at scale. And Astral has not been deterred by the slow start.

It says tinned chicken has broad appeal, and feedback from both consumers and retailers has been very encouraging.

“Consumers appreciate the convenience, long shelf life and the meaningful chicken content compared to many traditional tinned protein products in the market,” commented Astral’s Yolanda Smit.

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We have an armchair government playing catch 22. Case in point: South Africa has a bird flu policy, if only the government would follow it. Instead, bird flu policy is running on empty promises and complications. Its policies require chicken farmers to follow policy, but government makes it almost impossible to apply the policy and then chicken farmers, particularly small farmers, get punished because the policy is not being followed.

Key takeaways:

• Uncompensated culling sabotages disease control: The government’s failure to pay farmers for culled birds financially ruins producers and discourages outbreak reporting, causing bird flu to spread faster.
• Complex vaccination rules leave farmers defenseless: Overly complicated regulations prevent poultry producers from actually accessing bird flu vaccines, leaving them unprotected against the next outbreak.
• Policy inaction hurts consumers and producers: Failing to implement announced initiatives, like VAT-free chicken and farmer relief, dooms small businesses and drives up food costs for poor households.

The Animal Diseases Act is clear about dealing with bird flu; when government orders a farmer to kill healthy birds to stop a disease, the state must pay. The courts settled this long ago. In the Bluelilliesbush case the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that culling compensation must reflect the full value of the animals, not a scrap value at the abattoir door. The reasoning was that government cannot ask farmers to cooperate in their own ruin and expect them to keep cooperating. 

Compensation is the price of a working disease-control system.

In a similar judgment, the High Court ordered the government to compensate for culled chickens based on market value. The government has appealed against that ruling.

When avian influenza tore through the industry in 2023, and farmers culled more than nine million birds on official instruction, government paid nothing. The Department of Agriculture told Parliament it had no money. This means that the policy applies to chicken farmers but not to government.

The same crazy catch 22 runs through everything.

Vaccination is an essential tool in bird flu prevention, and will reduce the need for culling. The World Organisation for Animal Health says so plainly and the SA government even published vaccination guidelines in November 2023. But it wrote such complicated rules that for eighteen months not a single producer tried to meet them. The first permit came only in mid-2025, for one farm, for five percent of one company’s breeding stock. 

This vaccination policy is a ghost; most chicken farmers heard about it but have not seen it. Cattle farmers also discovered this during the current Foot and Mouth outbreak Meanwhile, the next bird flu outbreak is on the way.

VAT-free chicken is the same story. Government promised to scrap VAT on chicken. The industry submission showed that scrapping value added tax on those pieces that poor households buy will cost a rounding error against total VAT taxes. Treasury was to decide by February 2025, but the industry has had to ask again for the 2026 Budget. Nothing. Meanwhile 28,8% of South Africa’s children are stunted because of malnutrition 

There is agreement about what must be done, it is just not being done. 

This is the pattern; policies are announced with confidence, then left to gather dust. The consequences of armchair governance affect us all.

Meanwhile the next bird flu outbreak is coming on the wings of wild birds that recognise no border and no budget cycle. When it arrives chicken farmers will face its devastation twice. Once from the virus. And once from their own government.

Farmers who report an outbreak know the state will order a cull, but not compensate. So the temptation, for the desperate, is not to report, or hide it and quietly move birds. Then disease spreads faster, not slower. Every veterinarian knows that compensation is what buys honesty. Remove it, and the disease breaks badly.

But a farmer who wants to vaccinate and so avoid the cull, cannot. The rules are too complicated and too expensive to implement. So, the small producer, unable to absorb a wipe-out, but who supplies the township spaza and the rural school feeding scheme has neither the vaccine to prevent the loss nor money to survive culling. And concentration, the very thing the Competition Commission claims to worry about, deepens with each outbreak small farmers cannot survive.

A consumer who relies on chicken as the only affordable protein pays more every time a flock is destroyed and not replaced. Government’s failures wipe the plates of poor people; by not paying for culling, disenabling vaccination, collecting VAT on all chicken.

This is the cruelty of armchair government. It appears like action with press statements and gazettes. But actual inaction leaves farmers exposed, small producers doomed, and consumers to carry the cost. Unimplemented policies are worse than none, because it leaves government comfortably dozing in their armchairs while lonely farmers vainly struggle on.

FairPlay has said before that government’s first duty is to do no harm. Government’s promises are causing harm through what it fails to do.

We call on government to govern according to its laws and policies. Pay for culling, as the law already requires and the courts have already ordered. Make vaccination workable for every poultry producer, including small farmers. 

Implement VAT-free chicken before another budget passes by. Implement your commitments in the Master Plan you signed. Tighten anti-dumping and end the costly, unnecessary Competition Commission enquiry that punishes an industry still recovering from the 2023 bird flu disaster.

Implementing policies is more affordable than inaction. The law is settled. The science is clear. What is missing is action: for government to do what it has already said it will do.

Outgoing Agriculture minister John Steenhuisen promised legislative changes that will make vaccination against bird flu easier, including for small-scale farmers. The devil will be in the detail of that legislation, including whether it revises onerous requirements and makes vaccination practical and affordable. Without that, there will be no mass vaccination programme.

The next bird outbreak will test whether the government that writes policy has summoned the energy for actual implementation. 

FairPlay calls on the South African government to pass the exam by recompensing losses for chicken culling, ensuring vaccination with simplified rules and helping poor households by implementing VAT-free chicken.

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The revised poultry master plan, signed recently, is big on chicken exports. So far this year, the results have been small.

The master plan punts chicken exports as the basis of the next phase of poultry industry growth. The aim is to double exports in five years, and treble them in 10.

Those were the same growth targets set in the 2019 inaugural master plan. Instead, chicken exports dropped from 50 000 tonnes in 2020 to 41 600 tonnes in 2025. 

For the revised master plan, the 2026 start has not been good. In each of the first four months of this year, chicken export volumes were lower than in 2025. The total for those four months was 12 500 tonnes, 15% below the same period last year.

Clearly, there’s work to do.

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The Association of Meat Importers and Exporters rudely declined our invitation to participate in this month’s webinar on boosting chicken exports.

Yet they listened to the webinar discussion, and subsequently offered comment in their mouthpiece, Chickenfacts. Those comments could have been raised and discussed in the webinar. AMIE, a signatory to the poultry master plan and its export ambitions, ducked the debate.

One of their perennial arguments is that anti-dumping duties are protectionist. As FairPlay explains regularly, they are nothing of the sort. Anti-dumping duties are part of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules to ensure fair trade.

When a country sells its chicken for less – sometimes far less – than the cost of producing them, that is not fair trade, it is predatory trade. The WTO recognises this as dumping, and authorises anti-dumping duties to restore fair competition.

Importers, of course, oppose curbs on imports, as that would reduce their income.

On the export side, AMIE has criticism of its own. They clearly share the concerns FairPlay has raised about investment in state veterinary staff and facilities to provide health certificates, and diplomatic energy to get government-to-government agreements on market access.

As a master plan signatory and representative of meat exporters, AMIE should be working to overcome these obstacles.

AMIE also declines to say what it is doing, or plans to do, to facilitate the chicken exports from which its member companies would benefit. Is it going to use its exporting experience and market knowledge to boost those chicken export volumes?

Tell us, AMIE. Take part in the game instead of shouting from the sidelines.

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The South African government has a few days to register for oral hearings on new United States tariffs, and a few weeks to lodge written objections.

The US plans to impose 12.5% tariffs on South Africa and 54 other countries in July, replacing the current 10% tariffs imposed in February that are about to expire. A further six countries will be subjected to new 10% tariffs. 

This will be the third set of US tariffs, each imposed under different US laws. The tariffs that expire in July (Round 2) replaced the original 30% “reciprocal” tariffs (Round 1). Those initial tariffs, announced in April last year, were ruled illegal in February and are now being refunded.

Round 3 of the US tariff assault was announced by the US Trade Representative. The basis this time is an investigation of 60 countries for what it said were failures “to impose and effectively enforce a forced labour import prohibition”. All 60 countries were adjudged to have done so, which was “unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts U.S. commerce”.

The proposals are open for public comment. Oral hearings will be held in the US on 7 July, and requests to participate must be submitted by 22 June.

Written comments must be submitted by 6 July.

The current 10% tariffs were valid for 150 days without approval from the US Congress. That period expires on 24 July and the aim is to have the new 10% and 12.5% tariffs ready by then.

After the inevitable legal challenge, will we have Round 4?

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