CAPE TOWN, Feb. 13 — South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on Thursday that the ongoing outbreak of the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) across the country has been classified as a national disaster.
The president made the announcement in the annual State of the Nation Address (SONA) before a joint sitting of the two houses of Parliament at Cape Town City Hall.
“While the rest of our agriculture sector is thriving, the cattle industry is today facing one of the worst outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease our country has experienced,” said Ramaphosa.
He warned that the disease “is damaging our economy, resulting in export bans, trade restrictions and devastation of herds.”
“We have classified foot-and-mouth disease as a national disaster and will be mobilizing all necessary capabilities within the state to deal with this crisis,” Ramaphosa said.
The government has decided to vaccinate the national herd of 14 million cattle, which will require 28 million vaccine doses over the next 12 months, he said.
“The state will facilitate the acquisition of the vaccines centrally to ensure that we get the right vaccine for the particular strain of the virus in South Africa,” Ramaphosa said. “We will work closely with the private sector to enable an efficient rollout, and most importantly, we will ensure that commercial, private and communal farmers have immediate access to vaccines.”
The president said that a task team made up of farmer organizations and experts would report to him every month on progress made in tackling what he described as a pandemic.
It is not the first time that South Africa has taken such a step this year. According to Ramaphosa, just a few weeks ago, catastrophic flooding in Limpopo and Mpumalanga was declared a national disaster, which claimed at least 45 lives and caused widespread destruction of homes, schools, clinics and other infrastructure.
FMD is a highly contagious viral disease that affects cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and other cloven-hoofed animals.
According to a recent report released by the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy, a total of 24,400 FMD cases were reported in domestic livestock in South Africa in 2025, significantly surpassing the previous 20-year-high of 7,700 FMD cases in 2022.
The ongoing outbreak spread to eight of the country’s nine provinces — excluding only the Northern Cape — in 2025 for the first time on record, with nearly 21,600 cases reported in the second half of the year.
In January 2026, Minister of Agriculture John Steenhuisen outlined a 10-year national strategy on FMD containment, announcing the launch of a nationwide vaccination campaign and plans to seek a declaration of the outbreak as a national disaster. (Namibia Daily News / Xinhua)
