If you were faced with the decision: Either have or risk getting FMD BUT keep most of your income OR be FMD-free with zero income, what would you choose?
By AAM Cattle Agents and Auctioneers
Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) control policies frequently prioritise biosecurity through movement restrictions and market closures. While biologically defensible, these measures often fail to account for the economic realities of livestock-dependent livelihoods. This approach argues that effective FMD management requires recognising biosecurity and economic survival as two interdependent pillars, rather than treating income loss as an acceptable collateral cost. When economic survival is removed, disease control measures may paradoxically increase risk through non-compliance, informal trade, and illegal livestock movement.
FMD outbreaks place governments and agricultural sectors under immense pressure to act swiftly. The default response in many regions, including South Africa, has been to restrict livestock movement and close formal markets under the banner of “biosecurity.”
However, these decisions are often framed as a binary choice: Either protect animal health and maintain “biosecurity” or allow economic activity.
This framing is both inaccurate and counterproductive.
Livestock systems are not purely biological systems; they are socio-economic networks. Disease control strategies that ignore economic survival risk undermining their own objectives.
Biosecurity as a Necessary Pillar
Biosecurity remains a critical component of FMD control:
• Reducing contact between infected and susceptible animals.
• Limiting long-distance spread through regulated movement.
• Enforcing hygiene protocols for vehicles, personnel, and equipment.
From a veterinary and epidemiological perspective, these measures are rational and necessary. No serious stakeholder disputes the importance of biosecurity.
However, biosecurity alone does not operate in a vacuum.
Economic Survival as an Equally Critical Pillar
For livestock transporters, agents, auction facilitators, emerging farmers, and traders, including dairies… having zero income is not optional.
Unlike vertically integrated agribusinesses, many participants in the livestock value chain:
• Operate on tight margins.
• Rely on daily or weekly cashflow.
• Carry debt for vehicles, livestock, feed, and infrastructure.
• Support extended families and employees with no alternative income streams.
When markets close and movement stops, income ceases immediately. “FMD-free with zero income” is therefore not a neutral or safe state. It rapidly leads to:
• Inability to pay workers.
• Compromised animal welfare due to feed shortages.
• Business failure and forced liquidation.
• Severe psychological and social stress.
For many, the economic damage of zero income is more immediate and irreversible than the biological risk posed by FMD itself.
Risk Perception and Behavioural Reality
When faced with the choice between:
• Managed disease risk with income, or
• Perfect biosecurity with guaranteed income loss.
Most actors rationally choose the former. This is not due to ignorance or irresponsibility, but because:
• Disease risk is uncertain and potentially manageable.
• Zero income is certain and immediately harmful.
This behavioural reality explains a well-documented outcome of blanket shutdowns: the rise of informal and illegal livestock movement.
When formal, regulated channels are closed:
• Cattle still move,
• Transactions still occur,
• But oversight, traceability, and biosecurity controls are lost.
Thus, policies designed to reduce disease spread may inadvertently increase it.
The False Binary in Pressures
Framing FMD control as a choice between “biosecurity” and “economic activity” creates a false moral hierarchy where:
• Biosecurity is portrayed as responsible.
• Economic survival is portrayed as selfish or reckless.
In practice, economic survival is a prerequisite for compliance.
Farmers, traders, and service providers who are financially secure are far more likely to:
• Comply with movement regulations.
• Report suspected cases.
• Invest in hygiene and risk-reduction measures.
Removing income without providing alternatives strips stakeholders of the very capacity needed to uphold biosecurity.
Toward a Dual-Pillar Approach
An effective FMD response must treat biosecurity and economic survival as mutually reinforcing, not competing, pillars. This requires:
• Risk-based market access rather than blanket closures.
• Controlled, traceable movement instead of total bans.
• Differentiated treatment of high-connectivity hubs versus low-risk sales.
• Enforcement against illegal movement rather than indiscriminate shutdowns.
• Meaningful compensation or support where income is intentionally restricted.
Such an approach does not weaken disease control; it strengthens it by aligning biological objectives with economic reality.
Conclusion
Biosecurity without economic survival is unsustainable. Economic survival without biosecurity is risky. Treating one as expendable in service of the other creates conditions that undermine both.
Sustainable FMD control depends on acknowledging that livestock systems are lived systems where livelihoods, behaviour, and compliance shape disease outcomes as much as veterinary science.
Effective policy must therefore be built on two pillars, not one: protect animal health, and protect the economic foundations that make protection possible.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of African Farming.
Also read:
Biosecurity breakdown in agriculture: A call for accountability and skilled professionals
FS agriculture department expresses serious concern over declining biosecurity compliance among farmers
FMD | Practical biosecurity advice from North West vets
Is biosecurity South African agriculture’s weakest link?
WATCH | Cost of FMD vaccines – ‘Now is not the time to make a profit,’ says Steenhuisen
