Food security at risk as rural communities face daily threats to their lives, properties and operations

Police Minister Bheki Cele delivered his budget vote on Tuesday, 23 May 2023. Rural communities, including farmers and farmworkers, waited to hear whether it would address the crucial issue of rural safety.

These communities, which battle the same challenges as every other sector of the economy (inflation, rolling blackouts, deteriorating infrastructure), simply cannot shoulder the additional burden of poor policing and the absence of communication on a way forward for safety in rural communities as well.

Sadly, Cele failed to use the opportunity of his budget vote to address this critical challenge of crime in the farming communities that has an impact on food security in South Africa.

This was the first budget vote since the successful hosting of the Rural Safety Summit on 27 and 28 June 2022, and one would have hoped to hear the Rural Safety Strategy discussed in some detail.

Instead, Cele failed to even mention rural safety, rural farming communities or rural crime. This failure follows a disturbing trend in this regard, one which increasingly corrodes the agricultural sector’s confidence in his department’s commitment to the Rural Safety Strategy.

For example, it is commendable that the minister announced a greater focus on crime prevention, but this ought to go hand in hand with an emphasis on visible policing. That the minister understands this is reflected in the adoption of a plan to ensure that streets and highways throughout this country are saturated weekly with high-density operations.

Yet the minister failed to explain how this would be achieved in rural farming communities. The fact is that the most effective way to implement visible policing in rural communities is through a well-resourced reservist programme, but no resources were allocated for it in the budget.

The Rural Safety Strategy was also omitted when the minister spoke about the release of the third-quarter crime statistics in February 2023. On that occasion too he failed to address the peculiar challenges facing our rural farming communities.

Farming communities cannot be called upon to contribute more to the successful implementation of the [Rural Safety Strategy] while the government keeps us in the dark about its contribution to effectively implement this joint plan.