Agriculture Ministers from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have called for aggressive regional co-operation to protect food systems, improve food security, and combat devastating livestock diseases such as Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD).<\/p>\n
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Meeting in Victoria Falls, the Ministers approved a comprehensive regional framework aimed at harmonising fertiliser regulations across member states. They also endorsed a co-ordinated strategy to control FMD through enhanced surveillance, cross-border co-operation, and the strategic creation of a regional vaccine bank.<\/p>\n
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South Africa\u2019s Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen urged member states to speed up the adoption of these common fertiliser standards, warning that bureaucratic delays directly increase production costs and weaken agricultural resilience across the continent.<\/p>\n
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Beyond disease control, the Ministers raised urgent concerns regarding climate change, volatile animal diseases, and skyrocketing fertiliser prices linked to ongoing global conflicts. To mitigate these threats, the regional body called for the strengthening of regional food reserves, improved cross-border market coordination, and significantly greater support for smallholder farmers.<\/p>\n
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The delegation further emphasised the critical need to involve young people in agribusiness while strengthening collective efforts to tackle illegal fishing and protect vulnerable aquatic resources across the SADC region.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
–ChannelAfrica\/SADC–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14186,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[78,26],"class_list":["post-35948","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-featured","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"SADC have called for aggressive regional co-operation to protect food systems","published_date":"2026-06-01 13:13:08","news_description":"SADC have called for aggressive regional co-operation to protect food systems","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/35948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/35948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35949,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/35948\/revisions\/35949"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=35948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}