South Africa’s battle against foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) revealed challenges that extend far beyond the spread of the highly contagious livestock virus strains (SAT 1, SAT 2, and SAT 3). The disease, caused by the Aphthovirus, affects cattle, sheep, goats, and other cloven-hoofed animals, resulting in painful blisters, lameness, weight loss, starvation, and declining milk production.

More than 24 000 FMD cases were reported in South Africa in early 2026. This led to severe economic losses, such as the 26% (R2.6bn) loss in beef exports caused by a beef and milk import ban by Botswana, Zambia and Eswatini. There was also a mass animal loss due to a mass depopulation to control the outbreak. This economic impact led to a national disaster classification on 13 February 2026. 

The South African Disaster Management Act 57 of 2002, (DMA) which equips the government with extraordinary legal powers to manage incidents that existing legislation cannot handle, was used to classify FMD as a national disaster. The outbreak affected the Eastern Cape, Free State, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North West and the Western Cape provinces. 

The magnitude of the FMD exceeded the capacity of the Animal Diseases Act 35 of 1984, legislation administered by the Ministry of Agriculture. However, the disaster classification empowered the Minister of Agriculture to enforce some of these regulations:

Non-compliance or violation of any of the above led to a fine of up to R8 000, two years’ imprisonment, or both. 

Disaster management legislation implications on FMD 

While the DMA is imperative to managing disaster risks such as FMD, it also reveals limitations concerning socio-economic inequality and the unequal distribution of the impacts of disaster regulations. The experience of COVID-19 provides a significant illustration of this limitation. The regulations distinguished between essential and non-essential economic activities, with businesses providing essential goods and services permitted to operate while many other businesses were required to close. The DMA’s regulatory approach exposed the weakness of the capacity to respond swiftly without guaranteeing an equitable response. The DMA does not provide safeguards that ensure emergency measures are proportionate and sensitive to pre-existing vulnerabilities. Therefore, the implementation of the disaster legislation should incorporate differentiated vulnerability assessments rather than a similar regulatory intervention affecting communities equally.

The socio-economic disparities

There is a significant gap between commercial farmers and small-scale farmers. Commercial farmers are profit-driven, mass producers of cash crops, and, in the event of a disaster, are covered by insurance. Unlike small-scale and communal farmers, they have limited financial resources and profit. In the event of a disaster, they rely on the government or local social networks. 

Regardless of these obvious gaps, South Africa’s biosecurity and disaster laws apply the same standards to all farmers, ignoring the vast differences in resources and realities between them. Indeed, the saying “equal rules, unequal capacity” is evident in this disaster classification. 

Some regulations, stated earlier, may be manageable costs for commercial operations, but for communal farmers, who often lack infrastructure, access to technology, credit, and formal support, these rules become barriers that exclude them from markets and threaten their survival. This inequality is especially damaging because livestock in communal systems is not just a commercial asset but a critical form of household financial security, a “green bank” used to cover essential needs like food, school fees, and medical care. When movement bans and compliance costs cut off access to local auctions without alternatives, communal farmers lose their primary source of income, revealing that the real problem is not non-compliance but a policy framework that fails to account for historically rooted economic inequalities.

The disparity has also been recognised by government. In 2026, the former Minister of Agriculture John Steenhuisen, acknowledged that traditional FMD outbreak-management approaches had often been designed around commercial farming operations, while communal livestock systems present different challenges because of shared grazing areas, multiple ownership arrangements and differing movement patterns. He stated that “our disease control framework must work for all livestock owners, not only for commercial farming operations. The realities of communal and peri-urban livestock systems require practical solutions that recognise how these production systems function”. This acknowledgement reinforces the need to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to FMD governance. If the government can recognise that communal livestock systems operate differently, then disease control policies must also account for these realities when implementing legal and biosecurity requirements. 

Bridging South Africa’s agricultural socio-economic divide in the face of a disaster

True biosecurity requires more than equal rules; it requires equal capacity. The government must invest in shared infrastructure, subsidised traceability and vaccines, and decentralised veterinary services so that all farmers can meet disease-control standards. South Africa must choose between enforcing rules that deepen inequality or building a system that protects both livestock and livelihoods. Biosecurity cannot become a privilege for those with resources while leaving vulnerable farmers behind. A genuinely risk-sensitive approach should recognise that poverty, informal employment, inadequate housing and limited access to services are themselves factors that shape people’s vulnerability to disasters.

If FMD is managed only through the lens of commercial agriculture, we may succeed in controlling the virus but fail the people who depend on livestock to live. Until the gap between the law and the land is closed, biosecurity in South Africa will remain what it is today: protection for the few, and a sentence of survival for the many.