Impact of foot-and-mouth disease on livestock value chain activities in the municipalities of the three affected provinces in South Africa

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to determine the impact of foot-and-mouth disease on livestock value chain activities and to distinguish the level of livestock activities between FMD free, protected, and red zone areas. Outbreaks of the FMD are controlled by strict movement restrictions (Quarantine). Strategies and policies tend to generalize areas while monitoring and evaluation of local economy value chains within municipalities is often not prioritized. This leads to missing the bottlenecks in development. The study applied data from 73 municipalities from Limpopo, Mpumalanga, and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa. Local municipalities were used as a unit of analysis. Means, frequencies, and percentages were used to determine distribution of the occurrences. A hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted on the Statistical Program for Social Sciences (SPSS) using data imported from Excel. The hierarchical cluster analysis generated 4 clusters which were later regrouped into 3 clusters. They include the low livestock value chain activity cluster, high livestock retention cluster and the high livestock value chain activity cluster. These clusters were compared to the existing FMD free, protected, and red zone clusters. The results of the study indicated that the regrouped clusters consist of a combination of different clusters i.e., FMD free, red, and protected municipality as opposed to the existing clusters which isolate clusters by FMD classification or category. Moreover, the livestock value chain activity differs amongst municipalities within one cluster. This finding challenges the common assumption that FMD red areas always have the lowest performance on livestock activities. In addition, results revealed that the cost of marketing and advertising livestock in red zones is significantly higher than other zones. The study discovered that there are red zone municipalities whose value chain performance is higher or similar to those of municipalities within protected and free zones and vice versa. Multivariate analysis results confirmed that the performance of the livestock value chain variables is not affected by the category of FMD zone in which a municipality is situated. This confirms that bottlenecks differ in local economic development. The study recommends that a multi-stakeholder framework approach be created to determine the challenges of all stakeholders throughout the value chain as well as to create specific policies and strategies to each municipality considering the level of livestock value chain activity. Furthermore, it is recommended that an inclusive assistance approach be adopted, and all stakeholders take part in pooling resources for such assistance.