SA working with SADC to combat foot and mouth disease: Steenhuisen

Minister of Agriculture John Steenhuisen says the Department is working closely with its regional counterparts in the Southern African region to develop a unified approach to the foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak.

Steenhuisen and Botswana’s Acting Minister of Agriculture, Onneetse Ramogapi, led the department’s fifth nationwide mass vaccination rollout campaign near the South Africa and Botswana border in Swartkopfontein, North West.

The mass vaccination drive is focused on communal livestock which are vulnerable to trans-national biosecurity threats.

Farmers say they are concerned about the spread of the disease.

“We are so unfortunate because we are very close to the border of Botswana and there is no fencing. There is no proper fencing. So, some of our cattle jump to the border on the other side of the country of Botswana, and then some of them, they just get infected while they’re at the other side of Botswana, ” says one farmer.

Another farmer adds, “Vaccination without control of the border post is just a waste of time. We need to get to have a fence, a border fence, from Kopfontein border up to the Ramatlabama border where cattle will never be able to get across.”

Both the South African and Botswana authorities emphasised the need for better regional coordination and partnerships to prevent a further spread of the disease.

Steenhuisen says: “We do need to work together if we’re going to combat foot and mouth disease in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. So, we will be convening a SADC FMD meeting in the coming weeks. It will bring those countries together to look at how we can talk about a unified approach but also discuss how do we develop a regional vaccine bank that will ensure that it doesn’t matter where the outbreak happens. We’ve got vaccines that we can deploy quickly to deal with those particular issues.”

Meanwhile, Ramogapi is adamant that they will deal with foot and mouth disease.

“There’s no way you can fight FMD without working together because the cattle don’t respect the borders. They don’t use passports to cross…Botswana has a lot of experience in controlling FMD so we have (had) this protocol for a very long time that if the cattle cross to South Africa or to Zimbabwe where there is a foot and mouth disease outbreak, then we slaughter that cattle and then we compensate the farmer.”

Additional consignments of vaccines are expected in the coming weeks to expand coverage and strengthen herd immunity.

Concerns that broken border fences could compound cross-border foot and mouth spread: 

-Report by Tsholofelo Sekwena