Private sector involvement critical to halt FMD spread, warn farmers

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JEREMY MAGGS: South Africa’s foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) crisis, I think, is turning into a direct threat to farms now, also to jobs and food prices. With a new industry grouping warning that the state’s vaccination plan is simply too slow to stop the disease from spreading.

The organisation FMD Response SA says the science is clear, and this is what it says: vaccinate 80% of the national herd within six to eight weeks or risk reinfection, deeper losses across beef, dairy and pork, and even higher prices for already stretched consumers.

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From the organisation, FMD Response SA, Steve Butt, a very warm welcome to you. If I read this correctly, you’re effectively saying that government’s plan will or is failing.

Maybe just explain to the uninitiated what is wrong with vaccinating 80% of the herd by the year end? Why is that too slow to matter, in your opinion?

STEVE BUTT: Thanks, Jeremy, and thank you for having me on. It’s great to be with you.

We’re concerned not so much with vaccinating 80% of the herd. In fact, we would love to see 100% of the national herd vaccinated. The challenge is the speed at which that happens.

There’s a view that possibly this is Covid 2.0. That is not the case.

The challenge with FMD is we have large numbers of naive animals being born every year into the national herd, and we need to vaccinate the whole herd as quickly as possible, preferably in an eight to 12-week window.

Then we follow up with booster vaccines to effectively deprive the disease of anywhere to go.

To use the analogy of fighting a fire, we can’t continue to fight the spot fires without putting out the raging fire at the core. That’s effectively what we believe, that’s what the science suggests, and we believe we have a plan to get it right.

JEREMY MAGGS: What do you think is blocking the speed right now then, where is the logjam here?

STEVE BUTT: In our view, resources are a challenge. In many spheres of South African society, we’ve seen challenges with the government’s ability to respond to challenges, whether it’s electricity generation or transport infrastructure or crime, and we’ve seen examples where the private sector has deployed resources, skills, capacity, capability to assist government to solve some of these challenges.

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We believe FMD is no different, the solution lies in the private sector and a stronger private sector role in terms of resolving this problem, bringing vaccines quickly onto the ground and ensuring that we achieve this vaccination target in a short period of time.

JEREMY MAGGS: And in that respect, if I’ve read this correctly, only four million doses have been imported, against a need for 14 million. Where then is the bottleneck? Is it supply? Is it state procurement? Is it distribution or maybe even political will?

STEVE BUTT: I think it’s probably a combination of all those things. What we do know is that there isn’t a supply issue internationally. Globally, as I understand it, the world vaccinates two billion animals a year, or certainly two billion doses of vaccine are deployed.

So international supply is not a challenge. The procurement and the distribution of the vaccines is. Again, that’s largely a function of resources, state capacity that hasn’t had to deal with a crisis like this.

This is a crisis that belongs to all of us, and we all have a role to play in resolving [it].

We stand as farmers and protein value chains, ready to assist government to deploy resources at scale and with speed to resolve this problem, to bring vaccines into the country at a greater speed, and then distribute them to where they need to go.

JEREMY MAGGS: As we have this conversation right now, are you confident in government’s ability and the agriculture minister’s (John Steenhuisen) ability to actually get this job done?

STEVE BUTT: We are concerned that to some extent the disease or the response thereto has been politicised. This is a challenge that needs to be resolved with good science and all working together.

As an organisation, we are not interested in pointing fingers. We’re looking to find solutions to work together with government.

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Government is a critical role player. We’re not trying to cast off any regulatory shackles, we need to work in a coordinated fashion with government to bring resources to play.

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To answer your direct question, we’re not confident that at the current speed and scale at which we’re operating, we’re going to resolve this problem.

For this to be successful, to execute this campaign successfully, we need to vaccinate with a certain intensity and a rhythm that we’re currently not doing.

JEREMY MAGGS: In fact, you go on to say this, that there’s an artificial shortage, which I think is a serious accusation. Is the suggestion here, Steve, that vaccines could have already been sourced if the private sector, in other words, organisations like yours, had been allowed in earlier?

STEVE BUTT: I think that’s 100% correct. Obviously, we understand that the state has certain constraints in terms of legislation and regulations around procurement and tenders and so on, and the payments process takes longer.

The private sector is much more agile and that’s the point we’re making, is that if we had multiple procurement channels, the private sector could probably move with much greater speed.

The vaccines do exist internationally. We’ve now sent samples to the Pirbright Institute (in the United Kingdom) and the matching is taking place.

Listen: Government assigns council to manage foot-and-mouth disease response

So we don’t see that there’s any reason why we couldn’t be procuring vaccines far quicker than what we are, and then distributing them with greater haste than what we currently are.

JEREMY MAGGS: Critics, of course, might say this sounds like your industry wanting to take over a public health response for your own commercial survival.

STEVE BUTT: Yes and no. The reality is, if you look at the role that commercial farmers increasingly play in rural areas, we are intimately involved in safety and security, providing private medical security, assisting Eskom to keep the lights on, grading our own roads and filling potholes.

So we’re already doing a lot of the state’s work, and we do it in a responsible fashion, and we don’t seek to do it outside of a regulatory framework.

This is a crisis probably never seen before, certainly not since the rinderpest. We need all hands on deck. It requires different solutions and we are not being critical, we are being solution driven.

What we’re not saying is we want to jump on aeroplanes and come back with suitcases of snake oil.

We want to work inside a regulatory framework, but in in a way that will allow us to solve this crisis, which currently the status quo is not going to get us over the line.

JEREMY MAGGS: I just need a quick answer. If all of this goes wrong, what’s the real cost? You’ve obviously quantified this.

Are you able to give me hard consequences in terms of farm closure, job losses, milk and meat prices, and the likely damage to provinces adversely affected like KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape?

STEVE BUTT: There are obviously the direct consequences of higher meat prices for consumers. The inability not only of farms to continue to operate at the current scale, but to grow.

We ourselves are in the process of getting into dairy farming. It’s very difficult to do that when you can’t procure, call it, clean animals.

Then the knock-on effects in terms of the role, as I alluded to earlier, farmers play in rural areas in terms of sustaining these rural economies and societies and their inability to do that meaningfully going forward, and what that means in terms of job security and social security more broadly.

JEREMY MAGGS: Steve, Butt, thank you very much indeed, chair of FMD Response SA.