When people hear "foot-and-mouth disease," most switch off. It sounds like a farming problem, far away from town, far away from their lives. But make no mistake, this is not a farming problem. It is a South African problem. And it is hitting harder, and reaching further, than most people realise.

Think about it like this. Somewhere in this country right now, there is a farmer who cannot sell his cattle because the auction is closed. There is a woman on a street corner in a township who cannot get mogodu to sell because the supply has dried up. There is a mother in a supermarket queue watching meat prices climb, wondering how she is going to feed her family this month. Different people, different corners of the country but the same crisis, moving down the same chain, one link at a time.

That is what foot-and-mouth disease really is. Not an inconvenience. A business crisis that touches food security, jobs and survival.

Start with food security. When animals can't move and herds get culled to stop the disease from spreading, less meat reaches the market. Less meat means higher prices. And higher prices land hardest on the people who already battle every month just to put a plate of food on the table. This is not abstract. This is the difference between a family eating meat this week or going without.

Then there are the farmers. Trading is the heartbeat of this industry, animals moving from farm to auction to market, week after week. When that stops, farmers are left with animals they cannot sell, while every other cost keeps coming: feed, fuel, wages, fixing fences, keeping the lights on. A big commercial farm might have some cushion to survive that. A young farmer, a small farmer, someone still building their name and their herd, they don't have that cushion. For them, one bad season like this can undo years of hard work.

And then there's a group almost nobody talks about: the informal traders. The men and women who sell meat and offal on street corners, at taxi ranks, in townships across this country. This is not a side hustle for most of them, it is how they feed their own families. They buy small, they sell small, and they have no safety net when the supply chain upstream breaks. When farmers can't trade, traders can't trade either. And when traders can't trade, an entire informal economy that South Africa quietly depends on starts to crack.

This is the real shape of the crisis: a farmer who can't sell, a trader who can't buy, a mother who can't afford. One outbreak, three broken links and the whole chain feels it.

South Africa cannot keep treating this like somebody else's problem, a "farmers' issue" to be sorted out quietly in the background. It needs urgent action: faster containment and vaccination from the government, real financial support for farmers who are locked out of the market through no fault of their own and backing for the small and emerging farmers who are most exposed and least protected.

Stopping the disease is only half the job.

The other half is making sure that when it's over, the farmers and the traders who kept this country fed are still standing.

This affects all of us. It's time we started talking about it that way.

**Bokamoso Junior Mabudi is a livestock farmer and director of Ofentseboka Farming (Pty)  Ltd, Northern Cape **