ROSE-MARIE BRUBALLA AND OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Monday
SOUTH AFRICA’S elite Scorpions crime-fighting unit has joined the hunt for a ship that may have brought a potentially disastrous livestock disease into the country, a government official said.
The move comes as government officials fight to contain the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that could cost South Africa billions of rand in lost export revenue and devastate the farming industry.
The region surrounding Camperdown in KwaZulu-Natal, where the disease first broke out last week, could be declared a disaster area, the Agriculture Department said.
A food supplier who sold the contaminated swill to a pig farmer in Camperdown is helping officials track down the boat that supplied him, said agriculture ministry spokesman Bongiwe Njobe.
The Sunday Times newspaper said that if the outbreak was not contained, South African agriculture exports could be banned for up to two years.
The paper quoted the Agricultural Research Centre as saying that such a ban would cost the country R2bn in lost export earnings.
“We have never had this virus here before and we have sent samples to the United Kingdom to get more data to help us contain it,” said Njobe.
The area, where stockbreeding is the main agricultural activity, has now been designated a quarantine zone.
One farmer who lives just outside the quarantine zone said meat and milk producers in the area faced serious financial setbacks.
Apart from having no immediate income, farmers in the quarantine zone were throwing away milk, and those unable to sell off their livestock had to accommodate and feed excess animals.
Farmers have already had to slaughter hundreds of pigs and cows on three farms in the Camperdown and Pietermaritzburg areas.
Army and police reinforcements are already patrolling the quarantine perimeter set up 10km around affected farms in Kwazulu-Natal.
Soldiers have erected barriers against errant animals and police are spraying cars and farm vehicles emerging from the zone with disinfectants.
The outbreak of the highly infectious livestock disease has provoked press speculation that it could be as financially disastrous as “mad cow” disease was to British farmers.
Singapore, Namibia and Mauritius have already banned imports of South African meat as a result of the outbreak. – AFP