South Africa needs to urgently embark on an aggressive vaccination strategy to curb and potentially eradicate foot-and-mouth (FMD) disease through a concerted effort that includes logistics and allowing farmers to do it themselves.
In an interview with radio presenter Jeremy Maggs on Moneyweb@Midday, the executive director of the South African Agri Initiative, Theo de Jager, made a strong case for protecting the national herd of 14 million but stressed that the Department of Agriculture was failing.
He said the agriculture minister John Steenhuisen had announced that the department was planning to vaccinate the country’s livestock but Onderstepoort couldn’t meet demand. Vaccination in Brazil and Argentina has wiped out FMD.
“We need to import vaccines because they’re simply not doing what needs to be done to address a crisis like this.”
He said Botswana, identified as a potential exporter of vaccines, had not yet received samples of the three strains of FMD in South Africa to match vaccines via the Rare and Imported Pathogens Laboratory before assisting South Africa.
So serious is the threat to the national herd, De Jager said, that it should be declared a national disaster.
He said this would help to soften regulations so that the farming community could step in where the department was failing – meeting aggressive vaccination demand, rolling out comprehensive inspections, and effectively cordoning off affected districts.
De Jager, who farms in the Letaba district in Limpopo Province, said because of the impact of FMD, some farmers were facing bankruptcy.
He said in previous years all measures necessary had been deployed to combat FMD, including reliance on the South African National Defence Force.
“The police were there, the local traffic police were there, and the army was deployed, and we could contain it, similar to what they are doing at the moment in Namibia and Botswana.”
Asked what a worst-case scenario would be if the issue was not critically addressed, De Jager said: “It’s too ghastly to contemplate.”
He said the price of beef was already an indication of cattle dying because of the highly infectious disease, cautioning that local consumers could end up paying the same price for meat as in Europe.
Since FMD was also threatening more affordable protein sources such as pork, De Jager said a massive vaccination campaign must be implemented urgently.
“We must not just say we’re 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, and our proposal is to let farmers do it themselves.”
