State mismanagement drives worst foot-and-mouth crisis in SA history

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JEREMY MAGGS: On to agriculture. Now, in South Africa, the livestock sector is facing what some are calling the worst disease crisis in its history. New analysis shows the country is losing the battle against foot and mouth disease, with outbreaks spreading faster than containment measures can respond. Obviously, the economic impact is severe, with beef exports restricted and farmers under unprecedented pressure.

Let’s open the window on this story. I’m in conversation now with Dr Theo de Jager from the Southern African Agri Initiative (SAAI). Theo, a very warm welcome. You’ve called this the worst livestock disaster in our history. That’s a strong phrase. What makes this current outbreak, in your opinion, so severe?

THEO DE JAGER: I thank you, Jeremy, for having me on the platform again. This is really hitting the farmers very hard. Livestock is the biggest sector in agriculture, and we have more or less 14 million cattle in the country. That ranges from the smallest of smallholder farmers to some of the biggest mega farmers, and everyone is affected by it.

Every day farmers contact us and say, my child cannot get her marks from the university because I could not pay the university fees because the 700 cows I was supposed to sell at the end of last year are still on the farm and I have to feed them.

Others who say, the banks are on my neck, and they don’t understand that I simply cannot do business now because of it.

The dairy sector has particularly been struck very severely and also, of course, the feedlots. This is why we see these skyrocketing prices of red meat on the shelves in shops. Unfortunately, there is nothing we as farmers can do about it because by law it is a state-managed disease. We are absolutely (reliant on) government officials to manage this, and they are not doing it properly.

Read/listen:
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Farmers head to court as foot-and-mouth disease crisis deepens

JEREMY MAGGS: Let me ask you this: are government interventions too slow? Are they too fragmented, or is it simply a case of them not being enforced?

THEO DE JAGER: Well, we picked up this outbreak in the northern districts of KZN in November 2024, and we alerted the department and they already knew about it, but they only declared a foot and mouth disease area about five months later, on 17 March. By that time, it had already spread like wildfire, and we simply do not have the capacity to produce the vaccines anymore.

Onderstepoort, which was a world leader in the production and development of vaccines, can no longer do it. The money which was allocated to get them up to standard again, R500 million in 2012, it is gone and no one knows where it went. The Minister of Agriculture, John Steenhuisen, committed himself to find it, but we haven’t had any updates on that. So now we are importing the vaccines from Botswana.

To the minister’s credit, he did two very brave things. Firstly, he appointed the very best scientists and veterinarians we have in the country on an advisory panel. But by December last year, a month ago, the department had not responded to one single bankrupt recommendation of that task team.

Then, secondly, the minister announced that we are going to vaccinate the whole national herd, all 14 million, like they’ve done in Brazil and Argentina. They wiped out foot and mouth in Latin America by doing that.

But we must now import the vaccines from somewhere. Botswana cannot produce the volumes we need, and they have not yet sent our local strains of foot and mouth, the three local varieties we have here, to the International Reference Laboratory in the UK, where vaccines must be matched with your local variants.

So yes, they are simply not doing what needs to be done to address a crisis like this.

JEREMY MAGGS: In that respect then, Dr de Jager, what immediate emergency action from government would need to be implemented to try and contain the situation? Or is it too late?

THEO DE JAGER: It is never too late. I think first we must declare this a national disaster so that we can soften the regulations, such as that only the state can do the vaccinations, can do the inspections and can cordon off the affected districts. It must be declared a national disaster, and we must try to assist farmers who are now going bankrupt because of it. We must try to build a financial bridge for them because the cattle are still there. The value is still there. The cash flow is not there.

Roadblocks

Then secondly, we must beef up our capacity to safeguard the areas where we have these outbreaks. When we still had the commando system – I farm here in the Letaba district, where most of our outbreaks occur because it’s endemic to the Kruger National Park – and we used to have these roadblocks, and we would spend some hours there.

Whether you go there as a member of the farmers’ association, a member of the commando, the police were there, the local traffic police were there, and the army was deployed. We could contain it, similar to what they are doing at the moment in Namibia and in Botswana, to keep foot and mouth out from South Africa.

Then thirdly, we need to aggressively vaccinate, not just say, yes, we are going to do it. There must be a plan with logistics in it: how to receive it, how to transport it, who should be able to do the vaccination. Our proposal is let farmers do it themselves. The country trusts us to vaccinate against lumpy skin disease and brucellosis. Why can’t we just vaccinate our own cattle? It will save us literally millions and millions of rands to bring out veterinarians.

JEREMY MAGGS: Dr de Jager, just a final question. If the situation continues, what specific risks do consumers face, in your opinion, in terms of food prices and also protein availability?

THEO DE JAGER: Oh yes, it is too ghastly to contemplate, Jeremy. Already you have seen what happened to the price of beef. Last week and at the beginning of this week, for the first time, we saw cattle dying of it. Up to now, cattle did not die of it, but calves and also pigs died earlier this week of foot and mouth. It is not only red meat anymore, but for sure we will pay for meat what the Europeans are paying for it.

In our whole region we sit with shortages of protein. We are the only area left in the world where we still have stunting because of shortages of animal-based protein in pregnant mothers and for children below the age of two. So there is a knock-on effect to human health too.

JEREMY MAGGS: I’m going to leave it there. Dr Theo de Jager from the Southern African Agri Initiative, I appreciate the assessment and your time today. Thank you.

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