Gauteng prioritises containment over compensation as foot-and-mouth disease rages

Despite the scale of the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) sweeping across South Africa, the Gauteng provincial government has stated that compensating livestock farmers is not an immediate priority.

Instead, officials are focusing all available resources on containing the spread of the virus.

Parts of Gauteng have been classified as the epicentre of the current outbreak, with 228,000 cases confirmed in the province to date.

Government has faced criticism for failing to provide adequate vaccines quickly enough to stem the tide of the disease.

Addressing this supply gap, Vuyiswa Ramokgopa, the MEC for Agriculture and Rural Development, announced that the province will finally begin a targeted vaccination rollout this Friday.

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To support this effort, Gauteng has secured:

70,000 doses from the National Department of Agriculture.

1,700 doses from the Agricultural Research Council (ARC).

Ramokgopa emphasised that the primary objective remains minimising the long-term economic and personal damage caused by the outbreak.

While acknowledging the devastating impact on the farming community, she clarified that financial restitution is currently secondary to biosecurity.

“We acknowledge that this outbreak has caused severe damage to people's livelihoods, to people's businesses, and even in some cases to people's actual lives,” Ramokgopa stated. “Some farmers have even gone so far as committing suicide because of this. So this is not a small matter. At this point in time, the question of compensation is not really what we are focused on.”