Western Cape forced to impose new restriction to cope with National FMD failures

South Africa’s battle against foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) has exposed the limitations of centralised veterinary governance. While the national Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development (DALRRD) sets policy under the Animal Diseases Act of 1984, its response has been criticised as sluggish and inadequately resourced, leaving provinces to bear the brunt of containment. The Western Cape, facing outbreaks in Gouda in November 2025 and Mbekweni in February 2026, has adopted a markedly more rigorous regime, effectively compensating for shortcomings at national level.

These priorities have left the Western Cape exposed, but also increased its freedom of operation. Confronted with fresh incursions, the provincial government has imposed stricter measures than the national template requires. It has deployed 24-hour roadblocks at border entry points, including highways and weighbridges, and is pressing DALRRD for approval of a permit system for cross-border livestock movement. In outbreak zones, animal gatherings and movements have been banned outright, and the province has mooted full border closures. Quarantine zones of 10km radius around affected properties are enforced immediately, accompanied by epidemiological tracing and a co-ordinated “whole-of-society” response involving Agri Western Cape, municipalities and industry bodies – incorporating larger corporations into the policy process while shutting out ordinary producers.

Vaccination policy reveals the sharpest divergence. Where the national strategy proceeds in phased, risk-based campaigns, the Western Cape has moved to inoculate affected and suspected herds without delay—most recently in the George and Mossel Bay areas. To secure supply independently of the constrained national pipeline, the province has allocated R100m from its own budget to procure doses directly, a step permitted under World Organisation for Animal Health standards that grant subnational authorities latitude in vaccine sourcing and administration.

National policy remains aligned across provinces: quarantine, surveillance, movement restrictions and vaccination generally have to follow DALRRD guidelines. The department’s ten-year plan claims to be able to regain FMD-free status through state-monopolised private contracts for vaccination and broad surveillance. In practice, the national effort has concentrated on mass vaccination in the hardest-hit provinces (KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Free State, North West, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and the Eastern Cape) with buffer zones and biannual campaigns in hotspots.

Vaccine supply is centrally managed through partnerships with Biogénesis Bagó of Argentina, the Botswana Vaccine Institute and Dollvet of Turkey, at enormously inflated prices, without any tender process, cutting out local suppliers who could deliver millions of doses within days. Alongside this, there is a small effort to restart a domestic production line at the Agricultural Research Council. Initial distributions deliberately excluded the Western Cape (and initially KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape) in order to prioritise presumed epicentres.

The contrast is stark: a centralised, resource-stretched national programme struggling to keep pace with a dynamic epidemic, and a provincial administration forced to fund and execute more intensive controls to safeguard its livestock sector. The Western Cape’s actions, while formally complementary to national policy, underscore a de facto devolution of responsibility when federal capacity has proved insufficient.