South Africa's worst performance ever foot and mouth outbreak Neglected veterinary institutions and lapsed biosafety standards are ruining the country's animal husbandry industry, experts have warned.
The highly contagious viral disease is estimated to cost millions of pounds in losses as farmers' businesses are hit by quarantine restrictions restricting the movement of animals.
The government has declared a national emergency and one million Argentine vaccine doses arrived over the weekend to vaccinate the herd.
However, Pretoria's response has been strongly criticized, with experts blaming decades of underfunding, neglect and weak precautions for allowing a disease once under control to spread spectacularly again.
The country was earlier declared foot-and-mouth free, but since 2019, the virus has made a strong comeback.
The current outbreak, which began in 2021, has spread through herds in all nine provinces.
A nationwide outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle has prompted the South African government to declare the disease a national disaster – AFP
President Cyril Ramaphosa said in his annual address to the nation earlier this month: “While the rest of our agricultural sector is thriving, the cattle industry is experiencing one of the worst outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in our country today.
“This disease is damaging our economy, resulting in export bans, trade restrictions and the devastation of herds.”
disease affects Cattle, sheep, pigs and goats are not considered a threat to people. This virus causes painful blisters in animals' mouths, faces, and between their hooves. This can also lead to a huge decline in milk production.
Only one to five percent of adult animals die and most recover within a few days.
However it has an acute economic impact as stopping the spread requires strict movement controls that prevent the buying, selling and slaughter of animals and devastate businesses.
An outbreak in Britain in 2001 lasted 221 days and resulted in the deaths of six and a half million animals. The total cost then was about £5bn, or £10bn in 2026 prices.
The virus is endemic among buffalo in South Africa, but from 1957 to 2000 the disease was successfully controlled in the Kruger National Park and surrounding containment area.
Since then, biosecurity standards have declined, Melvin Kwan, an associate professor in the department of veterinary tropical diseases at the University of Pretoria, said this week.
“Over the past two decades, control measures aimed at keeping FMD confined to the Kruger National Park have lapsed due to low compliance and inadequate enforcement.
“The fence around the Kruger National Park is poorly maintained. The country's borders are porous.”
He said regulations on animal identification and movement, which allow authorities to track the outbreak, have become lax.
Cattle are lined up in a chute before vaccination against foot-and-mouth disease on a farm outside Cape Town – AFP
Furthermore, experts have said that respected institutions such as the ARC Veterinary Research Institute (ARC-OVR) in Onderstepoort were neglected and underfunded until they lost the skills and resources to deal with the outbreak.
South Africa was able to produce its own FMD vaccines from the institute until 2006, but since then has had to rely on unpredictable foreign stocks and supply chains.
Professor Kwan said local vaccine shortages “may have played a significant role in the number of FMD outbreaks seen over the past two decades”.
The institute has been able to resume low-level production in recent weeks as part of an emergency program to help combat the outbreak.
Yet the ambitious plan to vaccinate four-fifths of the 14 million national herd by the end of 2026 will still be largely dependent on foreign doses. Each animal requires two doses.
The Agriculture Department has said that 15 lakh more people are expected to arrive next week.
Starting in March, South Africa said it would be able to receive 5 million doses per month from Argentina and 6 million doses per month from Türkiye.
Professor Johan Kirsten at Stellenbosch University's Bureau for Economic Research said this week: “The lesson is clear: this was not a scientific failure, but a failure of planning, coordination and a lack of investment in an important public good.
“The entire cattle industry, which is the basis of household wealth in most rural communities, would have been destroyed two decades ago by simple neglect, poor decision-making and funding. This is not something that will be solved overnight.”
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