By Andrew Morphew
Minister Steenhuisen loves talking about South America.
At the FMD Indaba in August, he told Farmer’s Weekly: “Countries like Brazil and Argentina have shown us that success is possible when all players work together.” In Parliament, he confirmed the national strategy is “modelled after systems used in Brazil and Argentina.” When Brazil was declared FMD-free this year, he held it up as proof that vaccination-to-freedom works, and that South Africa is on the same journey.
Good. So let’s talk about what that journey actually looked like over there – and then let’s look honestly at what we’re doing here. Because the more you dig into the South American model, the harder it becomes to see how our plan resembles theirs in anything but name.
WHO MADE THE VACCINES?
In South America, there was never a single state supplier. Private biotech firms – Biogénesis Bagó, Boehringer Ingelheim, Ourofino, and others – competed openly to produce FMD vaccines. Governments set the quality standard and approved products.
Industry met that standard and delivered. They moved early to high-potency oil-based vaccines that gave cattle six months or more of solid immunity, which meant a manageable twice-a-year vaccination calendar.
In South Africa, for decades, the law effectively funnelled supply through one entity: Onderstepoort Biological Products (OBP), a state-owned manufacturer. When OBP’s ageing factory broke down – after failing to meet international Good Manufacturing Practice standards for over 13 years – the entire national supply stopped. There was no second supplier. No fallback. No competitive market to absorb the shock. The system didn’t degrade gracefully; it just switched off.
And for years, we relied on water-based vaccines from the Botswana Vaccine Institute that washed out of the system in three to four months, demanding repeated boosters our logistics couldn’t sustain.
That’s the difference between a distributed system and a centralised one. When a distributed system fails, it fails locally and recovers fast — one manufacturer goes down, others fill the gap. When a centralised system fails, it fails nationally. And that is exactly what happened.
So the South American blueprint says: open market, competitive supply, the state sets the standard. What we built was a monopoly. It collapsed. And we are still scrambling for emergency imports.
WHO RAN THE LOGISTICS?
Here’s where the distinction between setting standards and controlling execution matters most – because it’s the part of the South American model the Minister seems to have skipped entirely.
In Argentina, more than 300 local farmer-run health foundations bought vaccines directly from manufacturers, hired their own vaccinators, and managed the cold chain from factory to farm. The state veterinary authority, SENASA, didn’t inject a single cow. It set the rules, audited the paperwork, and enforced compliance. In Brazil, farmers walked into a licensed agri-shop during the campaign window and bought vaccine like they’d buy any other vaccine.
The philosophy was simple: the state regulates, the industry executes. That’s not deregulation. It’s smart regulation. The state still had oversight. It just didn’t try to be the middleman, the logistics company, and the veterinarian all at once.
In South Africa, it is illegal for a farmer to buy FMD vaccine off the shelf. You must wait for a state veterinarian or animal health technician to arrive and inject your herd. If that official is underfunded, busy, or the provincial depot has run out of fuel or fridges, your herd sits unprotected while the virus moves from farm to farm.
Right now, Sakeliga, SAAI, and Free State Agriculture are taking the Minister to court to challenge this prohibition. Farmers across KZN, the Free State, and Gauteng are watching cattle with burst udders and hooves falling off, begging for permission to vaccinate animals they own with vaccines that exist. In South America, those farmers wouldn’t have needed permission. They were the vaccination campaign.
THE BAGÓ AFFAIR: A CASE STUDY IN CHOKE-POINT CONTROL
If you want to understand the gap between what the Minister says and what his department does, look at what happened with Biogénesis Bagó in the last three weeks. On 15 January 2026, Design Biologix – a private South African veterinary vaccine company – was appointed as the sole local agent for Biogénesis Bagó’s FMD vaccine.
This was welcomed as a breakthrough. Private sector steps up, Argentine manufacturer partners with a local company to handle importation, cold chain, and logistics. Exactly the kind of public-private cooperation the Minister keeps calling for.
Then, on 22 January, Minister Steenhuisen and senior Department officials met directly with Biogénesis Bagó. According to Biogénesis Bagó’s own letter which we have seen – the Department “clearly communicated” during that meeting that they preferred to work “directly, without intermediaries” and that Design Biologix must not act as agent.
On 2 February, Biogénesis Bagó formally revoked Design Biologix’s authorisation. Gone. The partnership that was announced as a milestone three weeks earlier was dead.
Meanwhile, the Department has said as recently as 6 February that the Department “have no objection to the use of designated agents, such as Design Biologix”. And here’s the part that should make everyone sit up: there are unconfirmed but credible reports that OBP – the same state entity whose factory collapsed and which still hasn’t achieved GMP certification after 13 years – submitted its own Section 21 application to SAHPRA on the same day as Design Biologix, to import the very same Bagó vaccine.
In South America, the manufacturer chose its distributor based on competence, capital, and reach. The state licensed and audited. It did not appoint, and it did not insert itself as the middleman. What happened with Design Biologix is the opposite: the state stepped into a functioning private arrangement, removed the private partner, and is apparently routing the supply through state-preferred structures.
That’s not regulation. That’s gatekeeping. And it recreates the exact single-point-offailure monopoly that brought us here in the first place.
OBP: REWARDING FAILURE WITH MORE AUTHORITY
This leads to the question no one in the Department seems willing to answer. OBP is a documented point of failure. Its factory stopped producing FMD vaccines in 2005 because it couldn’t meet international manufacturing standards. It requested R1.2 billion from Treasury to upgrade. It received R492 million. More than a decade later, the facility is still not GMP-certified.
And yet OBP is now being positioned as a central actor in the national FMD response. It is being paired with the ARC for local vaccine production – which delivered a first batch of 12,900 doses in February 2026. That’s welcome, but to put it in perspective: the national herd needs millions of doses. The ARC expects to supply 20,000 monovalent doses per week from March 2026. OBP is still the entity through which much of this must flow.
So the operational question is straightforward: how does concentrating more authority in the institution that failed improve speed, supply, or resilience?
That’s not an ideological question. It’s a systems design question. And in South America, they answered it decades ago by building systems where no single institution’s failure could bring the whole programme to its knees.
DOLLVET: THE PATTERN, NOT THE EXCEPTION
The Dollvet situation tells the same story from a different angle. Dunevax, the South African partner for Turkish manufacturer Dollvet, has been trying to get Dollvet’s oil-based DIVA vaccine approved for months. This is a vaccine that offers a huge improvement over the three-month water-based BVI product SA has been relying on.
It can distinguish between vaccinated and infected animals, which is exactly what WOAH requires for freedom-with-vaccination status.
Dunevax submitted serum samples to Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute for testing. OVI told them it needed to “optimise its methods” before it could run the tests — despite knowing for weeks the samples were coming. South Africa hadn’t submitted field strains to the Pirbright Institute since 2011. That’s 14 years of non-compliance with international reference lab obligations, which meant global vaccine manufacturers couldn’t even confirm their products matched our circulating strains.
The Dollvet import permit was eventually issued. The vaccine is expected in the third week of February. But the pattern across Biogénesis Bagó, Dollvet, and private vaccination more broadly is the same: every alternative pathway encounters friction unless it routes through state-preferred structures.
This isn’t a debate about whether any particular vaccine is good or bad. It’s about process obstruction. And it’s about a system that responds to its own failure not by opening up, but by tightening its grip.
THE WILDLIFE REALITY: WHY COPY-PASTE WAS NEVER AN OPTION
There’s one area where you can genuinely say South Africa has it harder than South America, and it deserves honest acknowledgement. In South America, wildlife like pampas deer and peccary were “spillover hosts” – they only got sick when the cattle were sick. Clear the virus from the herds, and it died in the wild. No fences required. Just fix the farm.
We don’t have that luxury. The African buffalo is a permanent, evolutionary host of the SAT virus strains. It carries the virus forever without showing symptoms. On top of that, kudu jump fences and warthogs burrow under them, acting as intermediaries that carry the virus from protected wildlife areas into farming zones.
Much of our current strategy seems to rest on the assumption that we know which buffalo populations are FMD-positive. But do we? How current is that data, how comprehensive is the surveillance, and who is responsible for maintaining it?
Our Red Line – the boundary between wildlife and livestock – is under more pressure than it has ever been. This means that even if we execute perfectly, our path to FMD-free status will be longer and harder than South America’s. When the Minister holds up Brazil as the model, he should also be honest about this: they never had to contend with a permanent wildlife reservoir. We do.
SO HERE’S THE QUESTION
The Minister keeps pointing at South America and saying “that’s our blueprint.” But their model was built on competitive private vaccine supply. Ours was built on a state monopoly that collapsed – and the response has been to concentrate more authority in the institution that failed.
Their model was built on farmer-led logistics, with the state setting standards and auditing compliance. Ours requires farmers to wait for a state official to arrive, and when lobby groups ask whether the law even prohibits private vaccination, they get accused of profiteering and threatened with the consequences of litigation.
Their model treated FMD as a logistics and incentives problem – get the right vaccine to the right farm at the right time, and let the people with the most to lose drive the execution. Ours treats it as a command-and-control problem, where every needle, every dose, and every distributor must be approved, appointed, or routed through Pretoria.
If the South American model is so good – and it clearly worked – why does every decision we make move further away from it? That’s not a political question. It’s a practical one. Because right now, cattle are standing unvaccinated – not because there’s no vaccine in the world, not because there are no willing vaccinators on the ground, but because legal and institutional bottlenecks built into the system are preventing supply from reaching animals.
The blueprint is right there. We just keep choosing not to follow it.
*Andrew Morphew is a KZN Midlands dairy farmer with a B.Comm Honours (Rhodes). Out of necessity, Andrew now combines farming with frontline agricultural advocacy, focusing on biosecurity and policy. When not on the farm, he is an avid trail runner, reader, and outdoorsman.
