Please find attached Afrikaans and English soundbites by Beyers Smit MP.
The Democratic Alliance welcomes the decisive action announced today by Minister of Agriculture, John Steenhuisen, to further advance the fight against Foot and Mouth Disease among South Africa’s national livestock herd.
This is a strong move in the right direction, and indicates that help is on the way for our agricultural community.
The DA backs and supports Minister Steenhuisen’s call for a national state of disaster concerning Foot and Mouth Disease, which would immediately unlock more resources to fight the outbreak, and would bring about much better policing of the rules of movement of animals which would stem the spread. Specifically, Minister Steenhuisen’s call for a state of disaster is welcomed because it would allocate more policing resources from the SAPS, to help fight the outbreak too.
Already almost 2 million animals have been vaccinated since the importation of vaccines from Botswana began in 2025, and more than R72-million has been spent by government on these imported from Botswana.
Steenhuisen’s very welcome announcement that immediate mass vaccinations will begin in the hardest hit provinces of KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Free State and North West, is good news. And the Minister’s commitment to repeat the mass vaccination in 3 months is a good strategic plan. This will amount to 100% vaccination of feedlots and dairy cows, 90% of commercial, and 80% of communal animals.
We welcome that increased testing capacity has been added, at ARC-OBP by working with existing state laboratories, and this will mean more timeous results to help identify infection and help prevent spreading.
Additionally, the department has broadened their number of suppliers to include ARC, a local producer, who have now started to produce FMD vaccines again.
Procurement of millions more vaccines from Argentina is a great credit to Minister Steenhuisen, as he has announced 1 million more doses procured in Argentina, to be sent in the coming two weeks upon necessary permits being obtained.
The supplier in Argentina will make another 5 million vaccine doses available by March this year, which is a tremendous number.
The DA agrees that South Africa needs more high-quality vaccines, with high-potency, and therefore the announcement that Dollvet vaccine has been approved for import from Turkey is good news.
We are encouraged to see that a Digital Livestock Identification and Traceability System is now implemented, as a modern and progressive way to ensure animal movements are safer and are properly tracked.
It is an ambitious but realizable target set by Minister Steenhuisen to reduce outbreak incidence by more than 70% in high-risk provinces, within 12 months. This would be a game-changer for the industry, and it is supported by the DA as we commend Minister Steenhuisen for not only this short term strategic objective, but the longer-term objective of ensuring that South Africa is 100% free of Foot and Mouth Disease by the middle of the next decade.