By Simon Nare
Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen has appealed to the livestock industry especially the red meat, dairy and game sectors to start co-financing vaccine procurement in the event of foot-and-mouth disease.
In his keynote address to open the Food and Mouth Disease Indaba on Monday, Steenhuisen said the industry needed to be proactive and not be caught off guard when there was an outbreak of the disease.
Structured partnerships must be created to ensure the industry was always on alert.
“The time has come to build a nationally managed but jointly funded vaccine bank, not only for FMD, but for lumpy skin disease, brucellosis, Rift Valley Fever and all other controlled diseases affecting trade and production,” he said.
Steenhuisen reminded guests that during a recent outbreak, the department was forced to turn to Botswana to purchase vaccines after the country ran out of them because the national vaccines bank was depleted.
He said the vaccines bank ran out because the production cycle was not aligned and notably the Onderstepoort Biological Products lacked the infrastructure to produce vaccines at the scale and speed required to respond to outbreaks.
“As a result, we were compelled to import vaccines from Botswana, to mount even a partial response. This situation is unsustainable for a country with South Africa’s livestock footprint and export ambitions. Government is taking this seriously.
“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. But this cannot be done by the state alone,” he said.
The minister said the industry should not use the indaba to apportion blame, but rather fix what has gone wrong and build a system that could withstand the next outbreak, and the one after that.
He said going forward, the industry should break the cycle of reactive containment and move toward proactive, coordinated disease management.
To do so the industry would require:
• Stronger provincial implementation
• Clearer national coordination
• An empowered veterinary corps; and
• A private sector that sees biosecurity not as a burden, but as a precondition for growth.
The minister promised immediately after the indaba to put together a dedicated team to consolidate proposals and insights to ensure that it was not just a talk shop.
He added that the team he would assemble would be tasked with finalising a practical, time-bound operational plan, which reflected both the urgency of the challenge and the collective wisdom.
The minister said to effectively reduce the spread of animal diseases, while also responding to the growing challenges of climate change, the industry must invest in scientific research and development.
Steenhuisen the government funding alone was not sufficient and, therefore, the captains of the livestock industry must come on board and partner with the department.
He added that in the coming weeks, he would be meeting the National Agricultural Marketing Council to determine how a portion of statutory levies could be earmarked specifically for research and development, with a focus on both animal health and climate resilience.
The minister also said Agricultural Research Council (ARC), South Africa’s sole statutory research institution in this field, was undergoing a remarkable turnaround.
“For the first time in over a decade, it has recorded a surplus.
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