Determinants and Control Strategies of FMD in Japan and Indonesia

Abstract

Foot and mouth disease is an infection caused by the aphthae epizootica virus which is easily transmitted to cloven-hoofed animals, including cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. Over the last 25 years, the disease has widely spread in Asian countries, including Japan in 2010 and Indonesia in 2022. We aimed to review the determinants and control strategy for handling FMD in Japan and Indonesia based on aspects of financial policy and the coordination relationship between central and local in each country. Concerning policy response, we find that the two countries have similar characteristics; restrictions on livestock traffic, culling dead livestock, and vaccination but there are differences in tightening the policy response which has implications for the spread of the FMD virus. In Japan, it only attacked one area in Miyazaki prefecture, while in Indonesia FMD has spread to 27 out of 38 provinces. In the financial aspect, the spread of FMD in each of these countries has an impact on the treatment budget in Indonesia which is larger (0.23% of GDP) than in Japan (0.02% of GDP). Both countries have different budget schemes. During the first outbreak, local governments in Indonesia relied on unexpected spending budgets to cope with the outbreak, while in Japan, government financial support tended to be structured from the central government (MAFF) to support the effectiveness of handling the affected areas in Miyazaki. On the aspect of central and local government relations, the Indonesian government tends to be centralized in dealing with the impact of FMD because of the limited budgets and a lack of technical preparation and infrastructure for handling FMD in the local governments. However, Japanese local governments tend to have greater authority and are organized to carry out detection so that they respond quickly through policies, surveys, inspections, and even have an FMD vaccination team. Besides the above aspects, Japan and Indonesia have different livestock scale conditions and local institutional support, which also affect the success of both countries' policies to control FMD viruses.