BN Daybreak: SA Foot & Mouth failure; Hersov’s GNU outlook; EU-US trade deal; DRC Ebola strain

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Daybreak on Business News is proudly brought to you by Bonitas, the medical aid for South Africa.

[00:00:10]>> [music] >> Good morning and welcome to the Business News Daybreak. Today is Wednesday the 20th of May. I'm Kerry Lanigan.

[00:00:21]Up first, let's get the latest overnight world news from our partners at Bloomberg. The European Union has finalized the text of its US trade deal.

[00:00:30]This is after months of negotiation. It clears a major hurdle to ratifying this agreement. The deal would see the EU erase levies on US industrial goods in exchange for a 15% tariff ceiling on EU exports. Here is Bloomberg's Rosalind Mathieson. Well, it has taken a long time to get to this point. I mean, this deal was initially struck in July. So, almost a year to get this far. And obviously, US President Donald Trump was getting frustrated about that. He was threatening that he was going to hike tariffs on the EU unless they got this deal over the line. He set this deadline, has extended it to July the 4th, but certainly that was front of mind for lawmakers in the EU. But, the EU had also said it did want to get this deal across the line. It's just a complicated block with a lot of factors to take in.

[00:01:19]>> Now, the EU Parliament and EU countries will now vote to ratify this finished text. The European Parliament is expected to ratify the deal in June. The Senate has advanced legislation that seeks to force President Trump to withdraw from the war in Iran. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy joined three other GOP senators voting to clear the hurdle and move toward a final vote on a resolution to cease these hostilities.

[00:01:45]Now, the vote comes as President Trump threatened to resume strikes on Iran in the coming days as part of the push for a deal to end the war. Trump's remarks come one day after he called off a US attack on Iran set for today. Here is Trump. I had made the decision. So, they called up they had heard I made the decision. They said, "Sir, could you give us a couple of more days because we think they're being reasonable." How long is the time for Iran Well, I I mean I'm saying two or three days, maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday, something, maybe early next week. A limited period of time. Now, at the same time Vice President J.D. Vance projected a slightly more positive tone. We think that we've made a lot of progress. We think the Iranians want to make a deal.

[00:02:29]The President of the United States has asked us to negotiate in good faith, and that's exactly what we've done. So, we're in a pretty good spot here. And we are being told that NATO is beginning to consider deploying to Hormuz to help ships pass through the blocked straight if the waterway is not reopened by early July. The US reportedly seized an Iran-linked oil tanker in the Indian Ocean overnight. The Wall Street Journal reports the tanker, known as the Skywave, was sanctioned by the US in March for its role in transporting Iranian oil. Now, this marks the third time the US has seized an oil tanker in connection with its crackdown of Iran-linked shadow fleet vessels. Back in South Africa, farmers are warning that the country's foot and mouth disease response is failing with vaccinated herds now also becoming infected. Chris Steyn speaks to FMD response essay spokesperson Andrew Mopofu. The virus is continuing to spread. There's There's foot and mouth outbreaks being reported regularly.

[00:03:29]But, the more concerning thing for us now is that we are finding vaccinated herds, particularly in dairy because they were prioritized up front, um are now being infected even post vaccination.

[00:03:41]And that isn't indication as to the failure of the the rollout plan and purely because we're not covering complete areas at the same time.

[00:03:52]And we're allowing unvaccinated animals to stay in areas around vaccinated populations. And vaccinating animals in isolation doesn't help. It a vaccine, like a flu vaccine, doesn't guarantee that you'll not get sick. It just helps one prevent it and two mitigate the symptoms of it once you have it. So, the kind of serious implications of this is we're spending huge amounts of money as a country vaccinating animals and we are finding that even those vaccinated animals are now getting sick because the rollout is just not happening fast enough and at a speed and scale that can prevent the spread of the disease. So, what is the only way now to stop the outbreak?

[00:04:34]So, the only way now is to take cognizance of the countries that have managed to achieve FMD-free status and our government has has stated that that is their objective now and we fully support that. And mass vaccination is really the only way if you want to follow a vaccination to live a program, then we need to follow a mass vaccination program. And countries in South America, like Brazil and Argentina, have left us very, very good examples of what needs to happen. And essentially, what they do is they vaccinate entire regions in very short windows. So, we are saying the entire South African population needs to be vaccinated in 6 to 8 weeks.

[00:05:18]Now, in South America, most companies countries, if you look at the dossiers that they submitted to the World Organization for Animal Health, their vaccination windows are somewhere between 30 and 60 days. So, that is the time frame that you're looking at. And what that does is it allows the the herd to build population immunity. They all are vaccinated in a short space of time.

[00:05:39]They all are immune at the same time.

[00:05:42]And you essentially starve the the virus. Um you give it nowhere to go.

[00:05:46]There are no pockets of susceptible animals for it to exploit, and that's what we're seeing at the moment. It's just continuing to circulate.

[00:05:53]So, we need those strict campaigns, and we need to set dates. We can't just have a kind of willy-nilly program where we vaccinate in little bits perpetually. We need start dates and end dates for campaigns. We need to commit enough vaccine to those campaigns. And then, because the vaccine gives us an immunity of 6 months, those campaigns need to reoccur every 6 months. And that is essentially the South American system, and all the countries that have fought their way out of it have done it that way, and there are no countries in the world that have ever regained or gained FMD-free status doing it the way we're trying to do it at the moment.

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[00:06:49]Visit bonitas.co.za [music] and find your plan. Businessman Rob Hersov joins Alec Hogg for a wide-ranging discussion on the GNU, Cyril Ramaphosa's future, and the state of South African politics.

[00:07:02]The GNU itself, you say a moment of reckoning.

[00:07:06]How do you think the business community is going to react to that? Because we hear all the time that the business community is so grateful that there is a government of national unity.

[00:07:15]So, I understand why the business community is 100% or very supportive of the GNU because it's created political stability. Frans Cronje would say democracy is moving forward uh based on his polls.

[00:07:27]I'm prepared to accept that, but I feel it's very slow. Overly slow.

[00:07:32]And so, the business community likes the GNU. It's stable, you know, the the DA, the Freedom Front Plus, Patriotic Alliance, ActionSA, no, ActionSA aren't in this.

[00:07:41]Are having an impact and a positive impact in the areas in which they manage but not on economic policy and not on foreign policy and not on the policies that matter. I'm interested in France Cronje.

[00:07:54]He has he's a guy with a lot of reputation and he says this morning uh in uh the common sense, he says that Gordon Hill Lewis uh should he or should he not rescue Cyril because Okay. Business wants him to rescue Cyril.

[00:08:10]Should he rescue Cyril or shouldn't he?

[00:08:14]The pros for rescuing Cyril is to extract and here he's got to be tough. He can't just do it glad-handed and for free. He's got to extract real value. And that real value if he makes it transparent it would be better.

[00:08:31]He needs to say to Cyril and make it transparent the DA wants finance uh trade industry foreign policy.

[00:08:43]Two two out of those three.

[00:08:46]Okay. Be interesting to see which one Cyril gives up if he does.

[00:08:50]And for that we will throw our votes behind a non-impeachment. Hm. Because we think you may be guilty, you may not. The courts will decide that but we think you are the best bet for the country and for the GNU. He needs to make that the point. Put the court case aside so that needs to follow its own course. We we're not unlike others going to obstruct that but we need you to have your day in court but we're not going to impeach you. We need you to stay. We believe in you.

[00:09:21]He'll also get other party. He'll probably get Gayton McKenzie doing the same thing. But he doesn't bring he doesn't bring the numbers. And finally, Bloomberg reports on the latest developments in the Ebola crisis after a US missionary tested positive for the virus following exposure in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Just talk us through how serious the the Ebola outbreak is right now.

[00:09:44]Well, Jimena, by the WHO standards, it's quite serious. And that is just if you take a look at what we are hearing from the WHO and also from a number of other agencies, largely because there is a risk of international spread and there's also a need for coordinated response. And that's really what we've been seeing over the past few days since we did get that emergency declaration by the WHO.

[00:10:08]And really that is because this new strain of the Ebola virus is one that many people fear has gone undetected for a number of weeks and potentially one that could have been gone undetected through borders at where many a lot of trading goes on. There's quite a bit of mining activity that goes on. And so at this point in time, Bloomberg reporting is suggesting that about 350 suspected cases are are taking have taken place in the DRC and just about 91 deaths. And really the concern is how far-ranging, how wide-ranging is this disease? And really considering we don't have a vaccine for this current strain, what are the protection measures that authorities are going to be putting into place at this point?

[00:10:55]You know, you mentioned that the there was a certain strain of this that was spreading undetected for weeks. And I just wonder how the cuts to US foreign aid have affected the response capacity on the ground here. Could this strain have been detected sooner had there not been those cuts?

[00:11:14]That has come up quite extensively, Jimena, in in the discussions as we've been talking about this crisis as it's unfolded because in previous outbreaks, a lot of the funding that has come from the US and USAID in particular has helped in in terms of detection and also deploying a vaccination. Now that we have of course seen the Trump administration and the US scaling back significantly last year on that, the concern is that potentially we are going to see the attacking of this virus a lot differently than we've seen in the past.

[00:11:49]I should point out though that what we did hear from the WHO over the weekend, this emergency declaration is meant to spur donor agencies and also countries into action. We did hear from the State Department and the US CDC on Monday saying that they are providing about $13 million in foreign aid. So we are seeing some sort of foreign assistance that is stepping in, but many people are again wondering what are the effects of these this USAID cuts, especially because we we have we've been reporting on some of the cuts having an effect on crisis zones, which of course is the DRC in this area in particular, and this having an compounding effect on weakening infrastructure and the response that a lot of these agencies and also workers in the region have had to deal with just given the scaling back of funding and support that they've had over the past year.

[00:12:43]>> [music] >> That's it for today's Business Daybreak.

[00:12:45]I'm Kerry Lannigan. Thanks for listening.

[00:12:48]Daybreak on Business News is proudly brought to you by Bonitas, the medical aid for South Africa.