Minister Willie Aucamp: What farmers need now

Dear Honourable Minister,

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an email. You know the one: the one where a farmer’s serious, well-documented concern about foot-and-mouth disease was dismissed as “some amusement”. I wrote it because farmers I work with every day were angry, and they were right to be.

I’m not writing this one to relitigate that. You said yourself it’s a waste of energy to keep scoring the previous minister’s tenure, and I agree. What matters now is what you do with the seat you’ve taken.

So, as someone who sits across the table from farmers dealing with the state every week, what I hope for from you and your administration is:

1. Answer emails like the farmer is the client, not the interruption

This sounds small. It isn’t. The FMD email scandal wasn’t really about tone; it was about what tone reveals. When a department treats an urgent, documented industry concern as beneath a serious reply, farmers correctly read that as: you are not who this department is for. I hope your department answers hard, inconvenient, well-founded letters as if the person writing them is exactly who the department exists to serve. Because they are.

2. Finish the FMD rollout — properly, not just visibly

You’ve said the vaccines exist but are sitting in cold storage instead of reaching cattle. That’s not a communications problem; it’s a logistics and accountability problem, and it needs to be solved with the same urgency as the outbreak itself. I hope the measure of success isn’t a press release announcing progress, but farmers telling me directly that vaccines are in their herds.

3. Bring the same energy to water as you’re bringing to FMD

Agriculture doesn’t run without water, and right now the water side of the regulatory environment is in serious flux – a 90-day registration deadline has just passed with criminal penalties attached, and a National Water Amendment Bill is moving through parliament that would end private water trading and scrap the right to simply declare an existing lawful use.

Yes, these changes sit with a different department on paper, but they land on the same farmers you’re responsible for. I hope you’re in the room for those conversations, not leaving agriculture’s interests to be represented after the fact.

4. Let the wheat crisis be a test case for actually listening

ITAC’s rejection of tariff protection for local wheat producers is already being called a structural crisis for the industry, with real consequences for rural employment and, eventually, bread prices. This is a genuine test of the “listen to smart people, get people around a table, especially where they disagree” approach you’ve described. I hope it’s more than a good line; I hope it’s how the wheat decision actually gets revisited.

5. You keep saying race shouldn’t be the lens – and then act like it

You’ve said publicly that farming shouldn’t be divided along racial lines, and that the real question is “what helps every farmer succeed?” I agree with the sentiment. I hope it shows up in how B-BBEE compliance, land reform support, and access-to-finance programmes are actually administered; not just in how the department talks about them.

What I’m not asking for

I’m not asking for a minister who never makes a mistake, or who agrees with organised agriculture on everything. Farmers don’t expect that, and neither do I. What they expect, what I expect, is a department that treats their concerns as legitimate the first time, not after months of public pressure to force the point.

You inherited a department mid-crisis and mid-scandal. That’s a hard place to start. But it’s also, genuinely, an easy bar to clear if you choose to. I hope you clear it.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Food For Mzansi.