Director’s Cut: Foot-and-mouth fallout – Athol Trollip warns of zero income and food insecurity

From dairy farms to feedlots, South Africa’s agricultural economy is under siege. Athol Trollip outlines how foot-and-mouth disease has crushed production, frozen incomes and exposed deep failures inside the Department of Agriculture. A conversation every business leader and taxpayer should hear..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..Watch here.Listen here.BizNews Reporter.By the time Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen stepped up to the podium this week to outline government’s latest plan to “wage war” against foot-and-mouth disease, many farmers had already decided the battle was lost.Not because the disease is unbeatable, but because the state is fighting it with empty hands.Foot-and-mouth disease has been spreading through South Africa’s livestock sector since 2021. That is four long years of quarantines, collapsing cash flow, dead calves, broken breeding programmes and mounting psychological strain on farmers who are watching generations of work unravel. Yet only now is government talking seriously about a national disaster declaration.For Athol Trollip, ActionSA’s parliamentary leader and a farmer by background, the minister’s words rang hollow.“You cannot wage a war without ammunition,” Trollip told BizNews. “And in this case, ammunition means vaccines. We do not have them.”That absence lies at the heart of the crisis. Foot-and-mouth disease is a state-controlled disease. Farmers are legally required to report outbreaks. Once they do, their farms are effectively shut down. No animal movement. No sales. No income. In dairy, the consequences are immediate and brutal.Milk production collapses as infected cows develop high fevers, mouth lesions and damaged hooves. Many develop mastitis. When production eventually recovers, it rarely returns to previous levels. Calves die, often not directly from foot-and-mouth but from secondary infections that also require vaccines which are increasingly unavailable.For stud breeders, the damage is even deeper. Genetics built over decades become unsellable overnight. Bulls, heifers and breeding lines are frozen in place. Zero income is not a theoretical risk. It is the lived reality.Despite this, government has offered no compensation framework. Farmers are expected to report outbreaks, absorb the losses and somehow survive.“This is not how you treat a quarantined business,” Trollip says. “If you shut down a business in the national interest, you must support it. Otherwise people stop reporting and the disease spreads even faster.”The irony is that South Africa once had the tools to manage outbreaks like this. Onderstepoort Biological Products was an internationally respected vaccine producer. It supplied local farmers, exported across Africa and maintained buffer zones that prevented outbreaks from becoming national disasters.Today, that system is broken. A half-billion rand upgrade intended to modernise vaccine facilities disappeared without results. Production capacity collapsed before replacements were in place. Now, officials admit they cannot manufacture sufficient vaccines for a national herd of around 14 million cattle.At a recent briefing, government officials suggested production could reach 20,000 doses a week by mid-February. Even if that happens, the maths does not come close to working. Some vaccines require multiple doses. Others need repeat inoculation within months. At current rates, coverage would take years.Meanwhile, outbreaks spread like veld fires.Government’s response has leaned heavily on biosecurity. Farmers are told to fence better, isolate better and control movement better. On paper, that sounds reasonable. On the ground, it is fantasy.Large parts of South Africa have no functional fencing between wildlife areas and livestock farms. Communal grazing areas have no fences at all. Cattle mix freely. Animals are bought and sold to pay school fees, settle debts or respond to emergencies. Birds, dogs and scavengers do not respect quarantine notices.As one KwaZulu-Natal dairy farmer told BizNews, “A crow does not know where one farm ends and the next begins.”Trollip argues that officials advising the minister are out of touch with these realities. Some senior decision-makers, he says, appear to have no direct experience in disease management or farming operations.That disconnect matters. Because the people best positioned to monitor outbreaks, apply vaccines and track recovery are not sitting in offices in Pretoria. They are on farms, every day, working with animals they know individually and intimately.During COVID-19, South Africa tore up rulebooks, fast-tracked approvals and mobilised private capacity to address a national emergency. Vaccines were procured before trials were complete. Regulations were bent in the name of urgency.Farmers are asking a simple question. Why is agriculture treated differently?“We are not asking for miracles,” Trollip says. “We are asking to be allowed to protect our own assets. Let farmers buy vaccines. Let private labs produce them. Remove archaic barriers. Collaborate instead of controlling.”The emotional toll of inaction is growing. In the UK’s 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, mass culling triggered a wave of farmer suicides. The difference was that farmers were compensated. In South Africa, losses are borne alone.“This is psychologically devastating,” Trollip says. “People are watching their herds suffer and die, their income vanish, and they feel abandoned.”If foot-and-mouth disease continues unchecked, the consequences will extend far beyond farmers. Milk and meat shortages will follow. Imports will rise. Local producers will collapse. Food security will weaken. Once lost, rebuilding capacity will take years.South Africa has avoided food insecurity for decades. Bad decisions could change that.After four years, the warning signs are no longer subtle. The disease is not the only problem. The deeper crisis is a failure of urgency, accountability and trust.Wars are not won with press conferences. They are won with preparation, partnership and decisive action.Right now, farmers say government has none of the three.

Director’s Cut: Foot-and-mouth fallout – Athol Trollip warns of zero income and food insecurity

Related Stories