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Livestock can help war on poverty
2007-07-26 09:42:42
By Editor
The glimpse on national livestock statistics is finely impressive, as the range of numbers representing cows to chickens are all in their millions.
Even more encouraging is the country`s relative position in Africa in terms of cattle heads, as Tanzania`s livestock numbers are ranked third after Sudan and Ethiopia.
Frequent airborne travelers, however, can easily tell existing sharp differences, say between Tanzania`s and Ethiopia’s derived livestock wealth.
Upon landing at Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, one would quickly see and feel all the signs of a rich livestock economy.
It is the wide range of finished souvenirs based on livestock raw materials that distinctively tell what Ethiopian livestock industry looks like.
They range from world class leather and woolen jackets, leather shoes, hand and safari bags, belts and sandals to canned beef and mutton.
And even more pretentious, these products are boldly labeled `Made in Ethiopia`, or still juicier, `Genuine Ethiopian Leather Products`.
In sharp contrast, the duty-free shops at the J.K. Nyerere International Airport are hardly selling superior leather goods with value added right here at home. The best of them are imports.
And this goes as far as drinking neatly packed milk from Zimbabwe and Kenya, as well as canned beef from Botswana.
The logical question comes as why do we have to boast ourselves as one of the largest cattle herders in Africa?
Since independence, it can be shown; livestock sector has never been accorded the serious attention it would have otherwise deserved for wealth creation, most probably because it was regarded as uncared, pastoral activity, with associated patched development strategies and policies.
Unfortunately, we seem not to be ready to get out of this blind alley in a comprehensive manner with an aim of making the sector one of the strongest anti-poverty tools.
Sadly enough, this strategy, however, did not come out prominently in the Ministry of Livestock’s requested development votes for current financial year.
On some scores, it was great to hear the budget putting emphasis on such issues as disease and quality controls, establishment of ranches and feed lot system and so on.
When it comes to livestock products` export promotion drives, it looks as if such plans and strategies are now on the drawing board as the government liaises with stakeholders and see how to go about it.
Indeed, this is partly a mess-up, and we can just wonder how intended plans to revive livestock industry by the year 2010 would simply work out.
This sector is suffering from missing links forward and backward linkages that would ensure that private sector is effectively engaged in animal husbandry, processing, packaging as well as in domestic and overseas trading and promotion.
Needless to say, those private investors hardly require any liaison of sorts to engage in profit making undertakings.
For instance, having nationalized and consequently vandalized once world renowned Tanganyika Packers Limited, a private-public partnership (PPP) model of doing things should have long ago been tried out to revive the linkages.
It is encouraging though, to note that a PPP has recently been sought out by the government in its effort to revive the ailing national ranches.
This way, we can only hope that we can mint more cash from livestock exports, much higher than the paltry 17.3/bn earned last year.
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