Foot-and-mouth Disease Management in Rwanda's Cattle Sector: A Multi-Model Approach Integrating Livestock Dynamics, Epidemiology, and Economic Analysis

In many developing countries, improving livestock production often faces systemic challenges. Among the most pressing issues are limited feed availability, inadequate access to veterinary services, recurrent animal diseases, and frequent droughts. The impact of drought is particularly pervasive, reducing feed production while increasing animal movement, contact, and disease transmission. Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) has persisted for years across Sub-Saharan Africa, complicating efforts to increase domestic production of high-value protein sources, such as meat and milk, and to enhance the livelihoods of cattle producers (Duguma and Janssens, 2016; Abakar et al., 2019; Mamphogoro, Mpanza, and Mani, 2024). FMD further restricts the market access aspirations that many developing countries maintain for their livestock sectors (Rich and Perry 2011). As developing countries strive to achieve food and nutrition security goals, improved cattle productivity will translate into increased availability of protein for consumers at more affordable prices (Weatherspoon et al., 2017). However, achieving these goals requires addressing the challenges that slow down livestock development, particularly those that reduce productivity, such as animal disease. A key limitation to formulating effective policies is the rarity of comprehensive quantitative analyses that assess the impact of government interventions on livestock systems and, more specifically, their broader economic consequences that are linked to their epidemiological implications. Few studies disseminate evidence-based findings that consider both micro-level dynamics, such as farm-level productivity, and macro-level outcomes, such as economic growth and employment. Moreover, even fewer analyses consider the tradeoffs between veterinary and economic domains which may influence uptake by competing stakeholders in government and the private sector alike. Ongoing collaborative research between the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Oklahoma State University (OSU) uses the case of Rwanda to assess the prospective opportunity costs caused by endemic FMD outbreaks on cattle production, market prices, and overall economic welfare. The central hypothesis is that targeted FMD mitigation strategies, such as vaccination and quarantine, will enhance cattle producer welfare by reducing productivity losses and improving market access. They also improve the cost-effectiveness of FMD management, providing a win-win solution that mitigates trade-offs between technical (epidemiological) effectiveness and economic cost. Consumers will benefit from increased availability of high-quality proteins at lower prices. Additionally, sustained production growth will yield economywide effects, including agriculture's contribution to domestic output, employment rates, and poverty alleviation. This research develops three interrelated studies, using four quantitative models to represent the dynamics of FMD, cattle populations, markets, and the wider economy. These models are interlinked in a coordinated framework (see Figure 1), where the herd dynamics model and the disease spread model engage in a bidirectional flow of information. Other linkages, such as those between the disease spread/herd dynamic models and the cattle sector (partial equilibrium) model or the economy-wide (computable general equilibrium) model, are unidirectional.