DA Alienating Farmers as AgriBEE Rules Harden

The Democratic Alliance (DA) leader and Agriculture Minister, John Steenhuisen, already under siege for his handling of the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak, is compounding the damage as race-based empowerment rules in agriculture harden under his watch, contradicting what were once central DA campaign promises and policy positions.

The DA has historically drawn strong support from commercial farmers seeking relief from regulatory overreach, policy uncertainty, and threats to property rights. Yet since the party assumed control of the agriculture portfolio following the formation of the Government of National Unity in 2024, Steenhuisen has presided over the entrenchment of black economic empowerment (BEE) requirements that increasingly condition economic participation on racial compliance.

Sakeliga, a business lobby group, says AgriBEE is the department’s officially adopted policy to make BEE compulsory in agriculture. According to Sakeliga: “While the policy of AgriBEE predates Minister Steenhuisen’s tenure, he has so far not only failed to take it under review, but he has also upheld his director-general’s renewal of regulations in accordance with the policy.”

Sakeliga said that in October 2024 it had “alerted Minister Steenhuisen that his [department] had renewed regulations that restrict quotas for reduced-duty agricultural imports and exports based on the race of farmers and business owners.”

This directly contradicts a series of historical DA policy positions. For example, in 2023, the party warned that enforcing BEE compliance on agricultural exports amounted to economic self-harm, threatening jobs, export revenue, and foreign currency earnings. That critique now sits uneasily alongside the persistence of the same mechanisms within a department it controls, and the absence of any visible reform effort.

In practice, empowerment is being shifted from an incentive-based framework into a system of enforcement. Sakeliga argues that once compliance becomes a prerequisite for regulatory survival, farmers are no longer competing primarily on productivity, quality, or efficiency, but on their ability to meet racial thresholds set by the state. The department is therefore not merely administering inherited policy but actively enforcing it through administrative discretion.

Export-oriented producers face particular exposure. Empowerment thresholds embedded in export protocols and industry schemes increasingly determine access to quotas, certification, and market participation. This introduces commercial risk unrelated to output or standards and raises the prospect of trade friction with partners such as the European Union and the United Kingdom, where non-discrimination principles underpin agricultural market access.

Statutory industry levies sharpen the contradiction further. According to Sakeliga: “Between October 2024 and January 2025, the minister promulgated at least three regulations to ring-fence millions of rands for ‘transformation’ as part of statutory crop levies. The levies are imposed on farmers, traders, packers, processors, exporters, and others in the value chains of three crops: soya beans, table grapes, and dried vine fruit.”

A crop levy is a statutory fee imposed on agricultural products, typically collected at the first point of sale or export, to fund industry-specific needs such as research, technology development, marketing, and transformation.

According to Sakeliga: “Contrary to denials by the department and industry role-players these past two years, there is indeed clear evidence that the Department of Agriculture is implementing its AgriBEE policy, which seeks to subject agricultural activity to BEE requirements.”

The BEE crisis is compounded by the contemporaneous mishandling of the FMD crisis. Read our report on the issue in today’s edition of The Common Sense.

As the DA transitions from opposition to governance, agriculture has emerged as an early fault line. If the party cannot reconcile its reformist and non-racial rhetoric with the lived reality of farmers facing compulsory racial compliance and heavy-handed crisis management, it risks forfeiting credibility among constituencies (which go far beyond just the farming community) that supported it precisely to resist the expansion of state control. How the DA resolves this tension will shape not only its relationship with agriculture, but its broader claim to be a reform-driven alternative in government.