Argentina did indeed eradicate FMD using a centralised national strategy. It is now WOAH-recognised as FMD-free with vaccination across its north-central zone, and FMD-free without vaccination in Patagonia. That outcome is real. The question is whether what we are doing in South Africa resembles what Argentina actually did.
It does not. And the difference matters.
Argentina centralised policy. South Africa is centralising execution. Those are different things, with different consequences.
The Argentine model rests on three conditions: enough vaccine, it moves fast, and it is used in synchronised windows. South Africa currently fails on all three.
The system, not the slogan
Strip away the language and the Argentine model is mechanically simple. The state sets the rules — vaccine standards, the national calendar, certification, audit, movement controls. The private sector executes everything else: production, distribution, and administration. Farmer organisations received vaccines directly from manufacturers and ran their own campaigns under SENASA oversight. SENASA inspected, certified and audited. It did not stand between the manufacturer and the animal.
South Africa has built something architecturally different. The state sets the rules, and it also controls procurement, distribution, allocation, and the sequencing of rollout. Every dose that enters the country must pass through Onderstepoort Biological Products before it can move. Private veterinarians have been authorised to administer, but only under what the Minister himself has called “rigid official state oversight.”
The difference is not ideological. It is architectural. And architecture determines what is possible.
VIEWPOINT- South Africa’s ongoing struggle to contain foot-and-mouth disease
Condition 1: Enough vaccine
Argentina has no state-owned FMD vaccine producer. It has not had one for decades. Vaccines are produced by private manufacturers — Biogénesis Bagó (the world’s largest FMD vaccine producer), Laboratorio CDV, and others — under SENASA standards and with batch-by-batch SENASA quality control. The system is competitive, redundant, and scalable. When one manufacturer has a problem, others fill the gap. Failure is distributed.
South Africa built the opposite system. Domestic FMD vaccine production at OBP and the ARC collapsed two decades ago and is now being revived, at 20,000 doses a week — scaling, optimistically, to 200,000 a week by 2027. To vaccinate 14 million cattle twice, the country needs roughly 28 million doses. The arithmetic is unforgiving.
Imports from Biogénesis Bagó and Dollvet are filling the gap, but every consignment funnels through OBP as the single national supplier. OBP is not a monopoly producer; it is a monopoly supplier. Every dose, regardless of where it was made, has to pass through one channel before it can reach an animal.
Argentina built a system that could absorb failure. South Africa built one in which a single point of failure controls the entire pipeline.
Condition 2: It moved fast
In Argentina, vaccine moves manufacturer → farmer organisation → animal. Multiple parallel distribution channels operate at the same time, with private-sector cold chain, private-sector logistics, and private veterinarians doing the work. The state audits; it does not transport.
In South Africa, vaccine moves manufacturer → OBP → state allocation → provincial veterinary services → rollout. Each handover is a queue. Procurement, allocation and sequencing are centrally controlled. Sequential approvals slow everything that moves. A million doses arriving on Monday may not be in animals for weeks.
Argentina built a network. South Africa built a bottleneck.
The fix is not complicated and does not require a change of policy goals. Vaccines need to move directly from private suppliers to private veterinarians, at speed and scale. The state can — and should — set the standards, audit the cold chain, and verify coverage. It does not need to handle the boxes.
Condition 3: It was used in windows
Argentina vaccinated in tightly synchronised national campaigns. The whole eligible herd was vaccinated inside defined windows. Immunity rose simultaneously across the population, and the virus encountered no gaps. The principle is simple: homogeneous coverage and timing.
South Africa is doing rolling, continuous vaccination. The target is 80% of the national herd by December — twelve months of administration, animal by animal, region by region. While some herds gain immunity, others remain susceptible. The virus does not have to wait for a gap; the gap is permanent and moves around the country with the rollout.
Argentina vaccinated populations. South Africa is vaccinating individuals.
An 80% target spread over twelve months is not herd immunity. It is a moving average of vulnerability.
Why the three conditions must exist together
The conditions are not independent. They multiply.
Without supply, you cannot plan a campaign. Without speed, you cannot execute one. Without synchronisation, you cannot reach the population-level immunity that stops transmission. Speed × Coverage = Immunity. Remove any one term and the product collapses to zero.
Argentina built all three. South Africa, on its current trajectory, has none.
What this means for the Minister’s claim
The Minister is correct that Argentina succeeded. He is also correct that Argentina’s success rested on a centralised national strategy. Where the analogy fails is in what “centralised” means in each country.
In Argentina, centralisation is about policy and standards. Execution is distributed across a competitive private sector operating under public audit. In South Africa, centralisation is about execution itself — procurement, distribution and sequencing all sit inside a single state pipeline.
This is not a disagreement about goals. It is a mismatch in mechanism. The policy framing borrows the language of Argentina; the execution architecture is its inverse.
What it would take
Argentina had enough vaccine, from a redundant private supply base. It had a fast distribution network, with vaccine moving directly from suppliers to vaccinators. It had synchronised campaigns that compressed coverage into windows the virus could not exploit.
South Africa has constrained supply funnelled through one state channel, restricted distribution slowed by sequential state handovers, and a rolling rollout spread thinly across twelve months.
Argentina did not just have a plan. It had the system required to execute the plan.
South Africa has adopted the language of that model without adopting the conditions that made it work.
Until vaccines can move directly from private suppliers to private veterinarians, at the speed and scale the biology demands, this is not the Argentine model in South Africa. It is its inverse.
