At a high-level indaba held in Pretoria today, the department of agriculture brought together key stakeholders in a bid to chart a new course for managing foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in South Africa. Convened in response to the country’s ongoing biosecurity challenges, the urgent gathering aimed to find lasting solutions to repeated FMD outbreaks that continue to threaten the livestock industry and broader economy.
Minister John Steenhuisen said South Africa’s livestock industry was under immense pressure, not just from the biological spread of disease, but from the consequences of policy failure, institutional fatigue and an outdated response model that no longer meets the scale or complexity of what we face.
“The presence of so many role-players here today – scientists, regulators, provincial officials, producers and private veterinarians – speaks to a shared understanding that if we continue as we have, we will continue to fall short. And when we fall short, it is not only the state that pays the price, but also farmers, workers, exporters, retailers and the public at large,” he said.
He said FMD was not a new threat, and the lessons of the most recent outbreak were sobering, and in some cases, a painful lesson.
Systems failure
“What we saw was a response system stretched to its limits, with breakdowns in communication, severe delays in vaccine availability, confusion over movement controls, and an alarming lack of readiness at several levels of government.
“Farmers were unsure of the measures. Provinces were uncertain of the protocols. And while the virus spread, trust in the state’s capacity to respond continued to erode.
“The core lesson is this: we cannot continue managing FMD outbreaks with outdated structures and fragmented authority, hoping that a patchwork of short-term measures will deliver long-term stability. We need an innovative approach – one that is science-based, constitutionally aligned, and practically implementable,” he said.
Steenhuisen noted that every credible trading nation in the world understands the principle of regionalisation – that an outbreak in one part of a country should not result in blanket trade restrictions for the entire nation.
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“Let me be clear: the failure to regionalise is not due to a lack of veterinary science. It is due to a lack of institutional coordination, legal clarity and capacity. To address this, I have appointed two senior veterinarians, Dr Emily Mogajane and Dr Nomsa Mnisi, with extensive field, government and international trade experience, to lead the development of a comprehensive national regionalisation framework.
“It is unacceptable that South Africa takes years to respond to import health questionnaires – delays that have cost us market access and weakened our negotiating position. This is not a regulatory issue; it is a capacity issue, and we are taking steps to fix it,” he said.
The minister said another crucial area where the system broke down during the recent outbreak was vaccine availability.
Action plan
“We are stabilising OBP, but that will take time. In the interim, we are securing imports and working to establish forward-looking supply contracts that will ensure minimum stock levels of FMD and other priority vaccines – before the next outbreak, not after,” he said.
According to Steenhuisen, the FMD Indaba is meant to fix what has gone wrong, and to build a system that can withstand the next outbreak – and the one after that.
“We must break the cycle of reactive containment and move towards proactive, coordinated disease management,” he said.
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