Ramaphosa declares foot-and-mouth outbreak a national disaster

President Cyril Ramaphosa has declared South Africa’sfoot-and-mouth disease outbreaka national disaster, warning that the cattle industry is facing one of the worst outbreaks the country has yet experienced. In hisState of the Nation addresson Thursday, Ramaphosa said the disease was inflicting severe damage on the economy, triggering export bans, trade restrictions and “the devastation of herds”. In response, the government has decided to vaccinate the country’s entire national herd of about 14 million cattle, requiring an estimated 28 million vaccine doses over the next few months.

Ramaphosa said the state would centrally facilitate the acquisition of vaccines to ensure that the correct formulation was used to combat the specific strain of the virus circulating in South Africa. “Like during Covid-19, many people felt tempted that they wanted to acquire vaccines for themselves but because we are a regulated economy and country, we wanted everything to be approved by our authority, the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra). Similarly, in this case, with cattle vaccines, Sahpra … will be the one single organisation that will give approval,” Ramaphosa said.

“We will work closely with the private sector to enable an efficient rollout and most importantly, we will ensure that commercial, private and communal farmers have immediate access to vaccines.” The president said he had established a task team comprising farmer organisations and technical experts, working with the minister of agriculture and the department, which will report to him monthly on progress in containing the outbreak. “We do this because we’ve got experts; we’ve got people with great knowledge. We need to mobilise them. We need to bring them to work with the government because they have the know-how and the wisdom.” Ramaphosa noted that classifying foot-and-mouth disease as a national disaster would allow the government to mobilise all necessary state capacity to respond to the crisis.