Andrew Morphew: Who has been in control of the FMD fight?

DA Cabinet Minister Willie Aucamp has suspended the acting CEO of Onderstepoort Biological Products over pricing allegations tied to SA’s Foot-and-Mouth Disease vaccine. No finding has been made. But strip away the individual case and a harder question emerges: for most of this outbreak, the state has bought the vaccine, tested the disease, and judged its own performance — through single channels with no outside check. The Agricultural Research Council does the same, doubling as both vaccine manufacturer and referee. Before we ask what happens next, KZN farmer and FMD activist Andrew Morphew asks the more uncomfortable question: who has actually been in control of this fight?.By Andrew Morphew.Over the weekend, the Minister of Agriculture, Willie Aucamp, confirmed the precautionary suspension of the Acting Chief Executive Officer of Onderstepoort Biological Products (OBP) over allegations concerning the pricing of Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) vaccines. No finding has been made against him. The process must be allowed to run fairly.But the detail that matters most is who the buyer was.The vaccine at the centre of the allegations was procured for the national FMD response and paid for with taxpayer money. This was not farmers being overcharged at a shop counter. A state-owned entity supplied the state's own FMD response. In that arrangement, there is no market, no competing quote, and no customer who can walk away. The only protection is oversight.And if the allegations prove unfounded, the structural fact does not change. For as long as everything ran through one channel, there was no competing channel against which the price could be tested.It is worth remembering how we got here. For most of this outbreak, South Africa's FMD response ran through single channels. The state procured the vaccine and the state supplied it. Farmers could not choose another route. The risk in that design was pointed out repeatedly: when everything runs through one bottleneck, one failure of pricing, capacity, timing or judgement is carried by the whole system. In July the architecture changed. By agreement, made an order of court, farmers and their veterinarians may now buy vaccine directly. That is simply the new fact of the system.The lesson from OBP is not that single channels always produce abuse. Most people inside them do their jobs honestly. The lesson is that a single channel removes the ordinary checks that competition and independent participation provide, and a crisis magnifies that risk. In an open market, pricing problems surface quickly, because buyers compare prices and walk away. In a closed channel, a problem can sit unseen for a long time. This one needed a Minister to bring it into the open.The problem with a single channel is not that it is wrong. It is that you have no independent way of knowing whether it is right.Which brings us to the last major single channel in the FMD response.Onderstepoort Biological Products (OBP) and the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) are separate institutions, and nothing alleged at one should be read into the other. But the structure is similar. The ARC's institute confirms the country's outbreaks, performs its FMD testing, advises government on vaccine selection, and manufactures its own FMD vaccine for the same response. It is both a player in the vaccine market and the referee.ARC itself describes the arrangement as unusual. Its website says most FMD laboratories around the world are either diagnostic and research institutes or vaccine-production plants. Those functions are split for a good reason. ARC does both.And note what is still missing. Vaccination at scale has been under way for months. No independent national programme has been publicly established to measure whether that vaccination is producing herd immunity. Activity is being counted. Immunity is not being measured.A virus is not a trade secret. Information about a virus moving through the national herd becomes more valuable the more it is shared. External laboratories and vaccine manufacturers should be able to see enough current strain and matching information to independently confirm what South Africa is seeing and keep vaccines matched to what is actually circulating. This is not about distrusting the ARC. It is about whether the system can be checked from outside. The world reference laboratory for FMD at Pirbright publishes records of what it receives from member countries. South Africa sent a once-off submission of FMD field strains to Pirbright in January this year, for the first time since 2011. The principle is simple: a routine share of South Africa's samples should go to Pirbright on a strict schedule, so that the results are checked outside our borders.Because a laboratory result is not just science. It decides which international meat markets South Africa can access and which vaccines are bought. Information that is consequential should never depend on a single point of failure, however competent.The Minister has now shown, at OBP, that oversight over a state entity can be exercised when a critical part of the FMD response comes under question. And note how it happened. By his own account, the Minister took the allegations to the entity's board. The board then acted. The decisive check came from outside the institution..Read more:.FMD: Farmers can now vaccinate their own herds — Andrew Morphew unpacks what’s changed.For most of this outbreak, that has been the pattern across the response: the critical functions of buying, pricing, testing, and judging have run through state entities with their own interests and momentum.So the honest question this week forces is not about the future. It is about the record.Who has been in control of the critical parts of South Africa's fight against FMD: the Department of Agriculture, or the state entities through which those functions happen to run?.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 every morning on 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. 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Andrew Morphew: Who has been in control of the FMD fight?

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