South Africa's Foot-and-Mouth Epidemic May Be Far Worse Than Official Figures Show

In 2025, South Africa's official count of foot-and-mouth disease cases came to about 32,000. Set against a national herd of 12 to 14 million cattle, that is less than 0.3 percent of the animals. GroundUp's analysts say that number does not match what farmers have lived through, and they argue the country's worst FMD epidemic has been much larger than the statistics admit.

The trajectory is not in dispute. From 2014 to 2018, the country recorded fewer than 100 cases a year, all confined to an area near the Kruger National Park. In 2019 the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) withdrew the FMD-free status that most of South Africa had enjoyed, and cattle product export markets took a heavy blow. Farmers have since described large financial losses, along with hardship for farm workers and for the animals themselves when outbreaks hit.

GroundUp gives three reasons to think the figures are too low. The first is the absence of a coordinated state response. The Department of Agriculture and the Agricultural Research Council have not provided a single, properly working central dashboard of reliable numbers. Industry bodies have filled the gap, among them the Milk Producers Organisation, Red Meat Industry Services and a company called Buffalo Analytics, sometimes working with provincial agriculture departments. A government-commissioned report in 2022 found a lack of leadership, management and trust across the animal agriculture sector, and GroundUp says its own coverage over recent months has confirmed that. It also points to a heavy dose of state corruption.

The second reason is that some farmers understate their outbreaks or do not report them. Reporting can bring quarantine, so some handle the disease themselves instead of cooperating with the state. Dairy farms are hit hardest because sick cows struggle to produce milk, but some beef farmers can wait out an outbreak and accept the loss of a small share of the herd. Small-scale farmers, whose animals make up about half the national stock, often work in informal settings where monitoring and record-keeping are especially difficult.

The third is how a case is defined. Even when farmers report, authorities count an animal only if it has a positive laboratory test, however obvious its symptoms. Only a fraction of sick animals are tested, so the recorded tally is probably very conservative. GroundUp says this is a suspicion, not a measured fact.

The publication argues that good data matters in practical ways. It lets the epidemic be monitored and modelled, allows preventive action, and gives government the evidence it needs to negotiate with WOAH so that FMD-free status might one day return. It draws a comparison with the English cattle plague of 1865-1866, when the government kept such good records that William Farr could build a model of the epidemic, work that fed into the modern mathematics of epidemiology. A century and a half later, with far better technology, South Africa is doing a worse job.

There is good news. Vaccination has been widely rolled out, even reaching remote villages in Limpopo, and nearly all dairy cows have been vaccinated, most of them twice. Yet vaccination figures also lack central coordination, and millions of doses have gone out without a reliable consolidated total. GroundUp says the Department of Agriculture should run a dashboard updated at least weekly, with statistics and maps, and cites the Western Cape department's as a good example. It was told that the nine provincial agriculture departments vary greatly in competence and are hard to coordinate.

The epidemic appears to be receding, likely because of mass vaccination, better control of animal movement and the natural waxing and waning of outbreaks. But FMD is endemic in South Africa's buffalo population, and eradication is not realistic without a major technological advance. Until 2019 the state limited monitoring and cautious vaccine use to a zone around Kruger, an approach that failed dramatically. The department stayed reluctant to allow widespread vaccination even after that was clear, which led to an acrimonious court case and, in July, the loss of agriculture minister Johan Steenhuizen's job. His successor, Willie Aucamp, has shown more leadership. Without two doses a year in nearly every bovine, and possibly other cloven-hoofed animals, GroundUp expects a new surge, and it says the country remains far from regaining FMD-free status.