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Having attended the press briefing by the Minister of Agriculture, Mr John Steenhuisen, on his department’s so-called “proactive vaccination strategy” to combat foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), I am compelled to place several serious concerns on record.

During the briefing, I posed the following question to the Minister:

“Minister, you have stated that vaccination is not a silver bullet and that it cannot replace proper on-farm biosecurity. You have also acknowledged that outbreaks are underreported due to stigma and economic consequences. Given that the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and Onderstepoort Biological Products (OBP) have lost the ability to produce sufficient vaccines due to chronic mismanagement and infrastructural decay, how can the very institutions responsible for this failure now be trusted to lead a proactive vaccination campaign? Are they capable of doing so?”

Instead of dealing with the question, the Minister remarked that it was “highly unusual” for a Member of Parliament and a member of the Portfolio Committee on Agriculture to ask questions at a press briefing, suggesting that parliamentary channels should be used instead.

This response misses the point entirely. The Minister chose to brief the media without first briefing the Portfolio Committee. It is precisely for this reason that I attended: to obtain first-hand information in order to fulfil my constitutional oversight responsibilities. Parliament has a critical role in holding the executive to account, and in extraordinary (“highly unusual”) circumstances such as a national disease outbreak, extraordinary oversight is not only justified, but necessary.

As a country, we should have learnt from the Covid-19 experience that uncritical acceptance of government assurances and regulations during disease outbreaks can have devastating economic, social and psychological consequences.

The facts are stark. This outbreak began in 2021, yet only now are we seeing an intensified response. Worse still, those individuals and institutions tasked with safeguarding livestock biosecurity — institutions that have demonstrably failed, such as the ARC and OBP — remain at the epicentre of the response.

Of particular concern is the Minister’s continued silence on the investigative report into the disappearance or improper accounting of approximately R500 million at OBP, funds intended to upgrade vaccine production facilities to meet Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards. This failure lies at the heart of South Africa’s vaccine shortage and undermines confidence in the current strategy.

My engagements with farmers and industry stakeholders further confirm that the department lacks the capacity to manage the scale and consequences of this outbreak. While I welcome the Minister’s acknowledgement that success depends on collaboration across the sector, acknowledgement alone is insufficient.

Equally troubling was the Minister’s evasion of questions related to compensation for farmers. Foot-and-mouth disease is a state-controlled disease. If the state fails to control it, farmers cannot be expected to bear the full economic burden alone. Even the department’s own head of biosecurity, Dr Mogojane, stated that “failure to act swiftly allows the disease to spread.”

The department’s heavy reliance on livestock movement controls, in the absence of compensation for production losses, livestock deaths and the loss of irreplaceable genetic material, is fundamentally flawed. Red zones effectively impose zero income on farmers, create severe price distortions, and place both farming operations and farm workers at risk. Faced with these realities, farmers will inevitably move livestock in order to survive.

ActionSA firmly believes that an effective response requires urgent and genuine public-private collaboration in research, vaccine production and vaccination programmes. Bureaucratic gatekeeping and rigid adherence to outdated legislation will only worsen the crisis. Legislative and regulatory reform is urgently required, as the department does not possess the human or technological capacity to manage this outbreak alone.

The availability of effective vaccines for high-risk and disease-prevalent areas remains deeply concerning. To borrow the Minister’s own metaphor of “waging a war” on FMD: you cannot fight a war without ammunition, nor without the capacity to deploy it effectively.

It also emerged from the briefing that ARC, OBP and the department have been delinquent in regularly submitting FMD samples to recognised reference institutions. The Minister’s acknowledgement that he has only now instructed that strains be prepared and sent is alarming and raises further questions about the seriousness and competence of the response to date.

This outbreak has escalated into a national crisis. If this briefing marks a turning point, then the Minister and his department must now adopt a genuine “all hands-on deck” approach to extinguishing the veld fire that foot-and-mouth disease has become—before even greater damage is done to farmers, food security and the rural economy.

Issued by ActionSA Parliamentary leader Athol Trollip