Does SA’s foot-and-mouth disease strategy have the endurance it requires?

A reasonable case has been made for the importance of maintaining international standards, state oversight and surveillance integrity in South Africa’s foot-and-mouth disease response. That case is not wrong. Strain selection matters. Regulatory rigour matters. The state must remain the competent authority over what goes into the national herd. These are not contested points.

But farmers are not arguing science. They are raising a structural question: whether the current control architecture can be sustained at the biological intensity the disease actually demands. That is a different argument – and it deserves a direct answer.

Compliance is necessary – it is not sufficient

Compliance does not prevent outbreaks. Immunity does. The distinction matters, because the path from compliance to immunity runs through a chain of dependencies that is easy to overlook in a crisis: immunity depends on timing; timing depends on throughput; throughput depends on execution capacity. Break any link, and standards become theoretical.

The biology is not negotiable. Foot-and-mouth disease vaccines use an inactivated (killed) version of the virus. They are highly effective at preventing clinical disease. But the protection they provide does not last the way many people expect it to.

In cattle, high-potency foot-and-mouth disease vaccines provide strong protection for a defined period – generally shorter in younger animals and longer in repeatedly vaccinated adults. This is why countries managing the disease operate on regular booster schedules rather than one-off injections.

The duration of immunity is not a footnote. It is the foundation on which any vaccination strategy is built.

There is a second biological reality that makes this even more important, and it has nothing to do with the vaccine itself. It has to do with the herd.

Livestock herds are not static populations. Animals leave – they are sold, slaughtered or culled. And new animals arrive, primarily as calves born.

Even if every animal in South Africa’s national herd of roughly 14 million cattle were vaccinated tomorrow, new susceptible animals would begin entering the system immediately. Within a year, millions of calves would have been born without immunity of their own. Within two to three years, a substantial portion of the herd would consist of animals that were not present during the first vaccination campaign.

The births keep happening. The herd keeps renewing. The protection must keep pace.

Phase one: stabilisation

The first phase of any emergency vaccination response is necessarily uneven.

Doses arrive in batches. Disease pressure dictates geographic priority. In KwaZulu-Natal the target is 2.4 million cattle vaccinated within six months. At that pace, the campaign requires about 13,000 vaccinations per day. That is a reasonable mobilisation, and achieving it would meaningfully reduce clinical spread and demonstrate operational capability.

What it does not do is create synchronised herd immunity. During a rolling emergency response, doses go into animals as they arrive. One district vaccinates in March, another in May, another in July. That is understandable when supply is uneven and the priority is getting the vaccine into animals as fast as possible. But it produces a herd where immunity peaks and wanes at different times in different places. Some animals are near full protection while others, vaccinated months earlier, are approaching the edge of it. There is no single point at which the country’s cattle are maximally protected all at once. Think of it as staggered protection – there is always coverage, but never a single moment of maximum protection.

The virus does not encounter a wall. It encounters a patchwork – and a patchwork has seams.

Phase two: synchronisation

The alternative is what epidemiologists call a synchronised or windowed vaccination model. What this means in structural terms is that a region’s eligible animals are immunised within a defined campaign period, typically eight weeks repeated every six months.

The result is that the region’s herd reaches peak immunity at roughly the same time. The virus, when it moves, encounters far fewer susceptible animals across the board. Instead of finding scattered pockets of unprotected animals throughout the year, it hits a wall.

The virus does not need to evolve or outsmart the vaccine – it simply needs to wait for the gaps.

Countries that have successfully controlled foot-and-mouth disease understood this from the start. Their programmes were not designed around a single decisive vaccination event. They were built on rhythm and repetition.

Argentina, during its decades-long campaign to control and ultimately eliminate the disease, vaccinated cattle under two years of age every six months. Older animals received annual boosters. Brazil followed a similar pattern, running synchronised campaigns twice a year across entire regions, covering tens of millions of cattle and buffaloes at each round.

These were not panicked responses to outbreaks. They were planned, disciplined, routine cycles – because the biology of the disease demanded it.

The arithmetic of synchronisation is considerably more demanding than the arithmetic of stabilisation. To vaccinate KwaZulu-Natal’s 2.4 million cattle within an eight-week campaign window – the kind of compressed timeframe that produces genuine herd-level synchrony – requires about 43,000 vaccinations per day. That is more than three times the daily rate of the six-month target. And it must be sustained for the full duration of the window.

Repetition converts rhythm into structural strain

An eight-week, high-intensity campaign is not, in itself, the challenge. Emergency systems can surge. The structural question is what happens when that surge must recur – reliably, on schedule – every six months. Emergency mobilisation is a different animal from a recurring operational rhythm. One requires exceptional effort for a defined period. The other requires sustained institutional capacity that does not degrade between cycles.

When compressed execution cycles repeat under capacity strain, the failure pattern is predictable: logistical friction accumulates, scheduling slips, coverage gaps appear and immunity – and therefore standards – is compromised from within. This is not a hypothetical risk. In the words of Gideon Brückner, former president of the OIE Scientific Commission for Animal Diseases: “An important prerequisite for the endorsement of a national control programme for foot-and-mouth disease is that it must demonstrate progress and sustainability of moving towards freedom from disease.” Sustainability is not an aspiration. It is a criterion.

The World Organisation for Animal Health has explicitly stated, in a reply to African Farming, that it does not mandate who supplies or administers foot-and-mouth disease vaccines – that discretion lies with each country’s state veterinary authority.

In South America, the long-term solution was not to centralise execution, but to distribute it. Multiple approved private suppliers, parallel distribution channels and hundreds of thousands of producers administering vaccines under state supervision created a layered system. Oversight remained centralised; execution did not. The result was structural resilience: if one component faltered, the disruption was contained rather than systemic. No single institutional failure could stall the entire programme.

There is another practical reality that follows from this logic. When vaccines are scarce and the disease is spreading, people do not simply wait – they look for solutions. A reliable, authorised supply reduces the incentive to seek alternatives. Building redundancy into procurement and distribution is therefore not a commercial concession; it is a safeguard for the integrity of the programme.

Wildlife extends the timeframe

South Africa has more than 3,200 registered disease-free buffalo farms, according to a Department of Agriculture media statement on 11 February 2026. That statement also acknowledged what the science has long established: African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) are not spillover hosts. They are permanent maintenance hosts of all three SAT serotypes of the foot-and-mouth disease virus. Once a buffalo population is infected, the virus cannot be eradicated from that population. The department’s own outbreak reports from KwaZulu-Natal confirm the implication directly: “Complete resolution of this event is unlikely due to the foot-and-mouth disease carrier status of the buffalo populations in these affected game reserves.”

This does not necessarily make vaccination permanent. But it does mean that national campaigns cannot safely cease until sustained, systematic surveillance has established with confidence which of those 3,200-plus buffalo populations remain genuinely disease-free – and until the integrity of those clean populations can be demonstrated over time. Without that confirmation, the epidemiological baseline for any freedom claim is unstable. This strongly suggests that synchronised vaccination cycles will need to continue for years.

Duration is what converts a recurring high-intensity operational requirement into a structural design challenge rather than a temporary inconvenience.

The chain holds or breaks together

The argument for complete state control rests on a coherent foundation: control protects standards, and standards protect trade credibility. That foundation is not challenged here. What is challenged is the assumption that control, on its own, can carry the weight placed upon it.

Standards require coverage. Coverage requires synchronised immunity. Synchronised immunity requires repeated high-intensity execution, on time, every cycle. If execution capacity cannot meet that biological rhythm – not once, but durably, over the years – then control alone cannot deliver the credibility it is meant to protect. The chain holds together, or it breaks together.

If every six months the national herd must be vaccinated within an eight-week window – and the reality of buffalo as permanent reservoirs extends the duration of that requirement across years of sustained surveillance – can a single state execution channel sustain that rhythm, cycle after cycle, without compromise?

Biology sets the clock. Only execution capacity can keep time with it. DM

Andrew Morphew is a dairy farmer in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. He holds a B.Com (Hons) from Rhodes University and writes on agricultural biosecurity and policy.