Listen here.South African farmers are furious with the State's failures in its handling of the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak and vaccination programme. In this interview with Chris Steyn, Andrew Morphew, the spokesperson for FMD Response SA says: “We are seeing the virus is continuing to spread. There's Foot and Mouth outbreaks being reported regularly. But the more concerning thing for us now is that we are finding vaccinated herds… are now being infected even post vaccination. And that is an indication as to the failure of the roll-out plan and purely because we're not covering complete areas at the same time…And we're allowing unvaccinated animals to stay in areas around vaccinated populations.” Morphew says the only way to stop the spread is for the entire South African population to be vaccinated in six to eight weeks. Morphew details the severe financial losses being suffered by farmers. “We are desperate to engage with the Minister… we don't fully understand why there's now a barrier to taking the next step and doing what needs to be done to actually fundamentally fix the problem and put a system in place or a plan in place with dates and timelines and vaccine schedules…it is fundamental that the government and the private sector now start to talk and get around the table and figure out how we actually make this happen”..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Edited transcript of the interview.Chris Steyn (00:01.257)South African farmers are furious with the State's failures with regards to its handling of the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak and vaccination programme. I speak to Andrew Morphew, the spokesperson for FMD Response SA. Welcome Andrew.Andrew Morphew (00:19.672)Chris, thanks very much for having me on.Chris Steyn (00:22.633)Can you give us an update on what is happening on the ground, on farms now?Andrew Morphew (00:27.694)So, yeah, so it's still dire. We are seeing the virus is continuing to spread. There's Foot and Mouth outbreaks being reported regularly. But the more concerning thing for us now is that we are finding vaccinated herds, particularly in dairy, because they were prioritised upfront, are now being infected even post vaccination. And that is an indication as to the failure of the roll-out plan and purely because we're not covering complete areas at the same time. And we're allowing unvaccinated animals to stay in areas around vaccinated populations. And vaccinating animals in isolation doesn't help. A vaccine, like a flu vaccine, doesn't guarantee that you will not get sick. It just helps, prevent it and, two, mitigate the symptoms of it once you have it. So the...kind of serious implications of this is we're spending huge amounts of money as a country vaccinating animals and we are finding that even those vaccinated animals are now getting sick because the roll-out is just not happening fast enough and at a speed and scale that can prevent the spread of the disease.Chris Steyn (01:40.009)So what is the only way now to stop the outbreak?Andrew Morphew (01:44.5)So the only way now is to take cognisance of the countries that have managed to achieve FMD free status. And our government has stated that that is their objective now. And we fully support that. And mass vaccination is really the only way. If you want to follow a vaccination to live programme, then we need to follow a mass vaccination programme.Countries in South America, like Brazil and Argentina, have left us very, very good examples of what needs to happen. And essentially what they do is they vaccinate entire regions in very short windows. So we're saying the entire South African population needs to be vaccinated in six to eight weeks. Now in South America, most countries, if you look at the dossiers that they submitted to the World Organisation for Animal Health, their vaccination windows are somewhere between 30 and 60 days. So that is the timeframe that you're looking at. And what that does is it allows the herd to build population immunity. They all are vaccinated in a short space of time. They all are immune at the same time. And you essentially starve the virus. You give it nowhere to go. There are no pockets of susceptible animals for it to exploit. And that's what we're seeing at the moment. It's just continuing to circulate. So...we need those strict campaigns and we need to set dates. We can't just have a kind of willy-nilly programme where we vaccinate in little bits perpetually. We need start dates and end dates for campaigns. We need to commit enough vaccine to those campaigns. And then because the vaccine gives us an immunity of six months, those campaigns need to reoccur every six months. And that is essentially the South American system and all...the countries that have fought their way out of it have done it that way. And there are no countries in the world that have ever regained or gained FMD free status doing it the way we're trying to do it at the moment.Chris Steyn (03:48.553)So what progress is being made with ensuring cooperation between the private sector and the government.Andrew Morphew (03:59.212)So we are seeing progress in the Section 10 Scheme that was published allows for more cooperation. But in our view, it deals with administrative aspects. It allows for vaccination activity. It doesn't allow for population immunity. And this is what we're saying. The countries in South America focused on the biology of the disease first. You look at how the disease operates, the timeframes that we need to work within in order to deal with the biological impact of that disease. And then you work back from there and you structure a system that'll work to control that disease. We are looking at it from an admin perspective and we're expecting the disease to stick to our stipulated timelines. And it's not gonna do that. We need to look at the biology of the disease and work back from there and structure a plan that actually addresses those fundamental issues.Chris Steyn (04:55.08)Now you've outlined the solution. How quickly could it be implemented if you had the cooperation of everybody involved?Andrew Morphew (05:04.557)It could be implemented very quickly. I mean, the government is saying that there's a lot of vaccine coming into the country now by the end of the month, apparently 15 million doses will have been procured. And that is enough to vaccinate our national herd. So if we decided to focus on these vax campaigns, we could do it. But it does require massive private sector involvement. It is something which has been shown the world over that no straight State structure can be expected to have the ability to vaccinate at that kind of scale. You can't do it without private sector participation because it's a massive task. So it needs a massive amount of involvement. And that is really where we need to sit down and talk and plan and...I believe it is feasible and we could do it quite quickly if there is vaccine in the country.Chris Steyn (06:05.246)Who's on board from this side of the private sector?Andrew Morphew (06:10.111)I think everyone's on board. You've got all the producer organisations who have been doing an incredible job in trying to move this forward. I don't think that there is anyone in the private sector that is not on board with rolling up their sleeves, getting involved in making this happen. But we need it to happen all the way from procurement, distribution to application. The entire supply chain needs to be opened up so that we can move vaccines quickly and effectively into the areas that need them and for commercial farmers as well. There are a lot of commercial farmers we've spoken to that are very happy to take care of the communal and small-scale farmers around them given the opportunity to do that. So there is a lot of resource that can be allocated to this. It is just really putting it together in a way that makes sense and that works for everyone.Chris Steyn (07:02.888)Well, meanwhile, this sector of our agricultural industry has been devastated by the slow response to the outbreak and then the government's approach to the handling of the vaccination programme. Can you give us an indication of the financial impact that this has had on farmers?Andrew Morphew (07:25.719)So for individual farmers, it's dire. For a dairy farm where we've got the most numbers, we had the 2024 outbreak and it's been significant in the dairy industry up until now. You're looking at roughly 6,000 Rand a cow for a dairy herd that gets infected. And if you extrapolate that, the average herd has a thousand cows. You're looking at… five to six million Rand an outbreak for a dairy farm. And for piggeries, we're just seeing the numbers coming through now and it looks like it's 9,500 Rand... Piggeries are big businesses in the commercial context. So you're looking at anywhere around 10, 20, 30 million Rand is the impact for a Piggery operating in that space. And so it hurts significantly at a farm level. And these are not things that you, a farm can deal with over and over again. One outbreak is pretty crippling, two outbreaks, it's almost business over for you at that point. And then you see the knock on effects. So I, for example, on my farm haven't yet had it, but we're not doing any capital expenditure. We're trying to nest away as much of our resources as we can, because if we get it, we know this bill is coming. So you don't buy new equipment, you don't expand your farming enterprise, you don't invest back into your business because you are worried about having to fund this disaster when it arrives. And as a result, you're seeing the greater agricultural industry suffering. Everyone that just surrounds agriculture and it's a big industry. You're looking at feed mills, tractor dealerships, equipment suppliers, down to your buildings in town and that kind of thing. All these entities are feeling this quite acutely. And that is why as FMD Response SA, we are getting a lot of support from not just farmers, but people within the greater industry, because they understand that unless we get on top of this quickly, it is gonna have a devastating effect on the agricultural economy.Chris Steyn (09:38.558)I read somewhere that if a feedlot got infected that it could, you know, lead to financial damage to the tune of 120 million. Is that correct?Andrew Morphew (09:51.528)That is, I mean, I've seen that number as well. And absolutely, that is correct. Feedlots you get in every scale as well. But for a big feedlot, it is financially devastating. And those numbers are easily true.Chris Steyn (10:07.134)So, calling on government, what do you expect it to do right now?Andrew Morphew (10:15.109)We really expect government one to talk to us, cooperate with us. We are desperate to engage with the minister and try and understand why from their perspective they do not feel the plan that is being proposed by us, by industry. And there are a large number of the members of the Ministerial Task Team that also feel the same way we do, that the target is population immunity. It is not numbers vaccinated over time. So I'd like to understand why from their perspective, the plan is not feasible so that we can try and work something out that is feasible, because this needs to happen. It's been proven to be effective in a number of countries across the world. And in our view, it is the only way that we get to the point where one, we stop the transmission of the disease and the local damage, but two, we get to FMD free status and then regain the markets that we lost in 2019. So it is fundamental that the government and the private sector now start to talk and get around the table and figure out how we actually make this happen.Chris Steyn (11:29.234)How do farmers feel about Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen’s handling of the crisis?Andrew Morphew (11:36.749)Because I think that's a hard question. We’re looking to work with the minister. We have a lot of respect for what he's done. He took the hardest decision, which initially was deciding to vaccinate the national herd. I mean, that was unprecedented at that point. And it was absolutely fundamental that that decision was made. So we respect that that took leadership and that he's made strides in resolving this. But we…don't fully understand why there's now a barrier to taking the next step and doing what needs to be done to actually fundamentally fix the problem and put a system in place or a plan in place with dates and timelines and vaccine schedules that will stop the transmission and lead us towards FMD free status. So from our perspective, I think we are confused about why the approach is not following one which makes sense to us.And we really want to engage and understand what is going on and how we can push it in the right direction.Chris Steyn (12:41.022)Okay, that was Andrew Morphew, the spokesperson for FMD Response SA. Speaking to BizNews. I'm Chris Steyn, Thank you, Andrew.Andrew Morphew (12:51.586)Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me on.