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Sakeliga is taking measures to enable more effective and independent industry responses to the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak and its economy-wide implications.

In collaboration with industry roleplayers, we are seeking to remove or diminish the state’s harmful imposition of itself as gatekeeper on FMD control. 

The government continues to call FMD a “state-controlled disease”, but this is a misnomer. In many places, the disease is out of control. The restrictions on obtaining and administering vaccines – imposed by the Department of Agriculture and other state entities – on farmers, animal-health practitioners, agribusinesses, and others are not containing the outbreak; they are entrenching it by prohibiting and obstructing immediate, decentralised, and widespread responses by the businesses most directly affected.

Many other contagious and serious animal diseases are already being kept under control through non-state initiatives. Despite there being no scientific or practical reason why the same cannot be achieved in the case of foot-and-mouth, the government keeps choking these initiatives.

Measures undertaken by Sakeliga

Sakeliga’s measures are directed at enabling private and institutional roleplayers to implement independent solutions without government gatekeeping. These include:

Claims for damages: Sakeliga is providing farmers and other affected parties with legal information to improve their legal position in respect of potential future harm arising from the state’s actions and omissions regarding the disease. The attached pro forma letter may, with necessary changes and on the advice of each farmer’s own attorneys, be considered as part of their individual risk planning, to preserve rights and strengthen potential future claims for damages against the state.

Litigation to advance private-sector measures: Sakeliga is consulting with our legal team and industry roleplayers on litigation that would remove or diminish the government’s ability to obstruct farmers and other entities independently obtaining, trading, distributing and administering FMD livestock vaccines. Further announcements on litigation will be made, subject to the outcome of our ongoing consultations.

Underlying causes and solutions

The causes of this industry-wide problem are all too familiar to Sakeliga from other sectors of the economy: state failure and harmful state intervention. 

In all such cases – where the state either lacks the capability to execute its purported obligations or sometimes even seems bent on harmfully interfering – the only lasting solutions are those designed from the outset to be stateproof. Solutions are stateproof when they depend for their success not on a detached central state and government, but on civil institutions, industry organisations, businesses, and individuals with widely distributed special expertise and skin in the game.

Issued by Sakeliga