The Sunday News
THE recovery of the country’s beef industry is a surmountable task, which will take time and large investments into cattle production, a livestock specialist has said.
Renowned livestock production and management expert, Dr Ronny Sibanda of Dial-Honour Consultancy said the country’s beef industry had been on a free-fall over the last decade and a half owing to a myriad of challenges chief among them a high death rate due to recurrent droughts and diseases as well as lack of requisite expertise by new cattle producers to properly manage their enterprises.
Dr Sibanda has been into livestock production for over 20 years, which saw him imparting his expertise at the Cold Storage Company (CSC), Ingwebu Breweries’ agricultural enterprises and a non-governmental organisation, SNV.
“I think fundamentally there is a need for investment in the industry because at its peak it was bringing into the country quite good levels of revenue. We are talking of $40 million per year and that was good contribution to the agricultural sector.
“Also apart from that there was a lot of downstream industry contribution from the beef sector where you would find that (stock) feed manufacturers would have somewhere to sell their feed because people were breeding,” Dr Sibanda said.
He said both the country’s calving and slaughter rates have been on the decline over the past years.Dr Sibanda said the average national calving rate was estimated to be 45 percent while that of the few commercial farmers was about 60 percent down from about 65 percent and 80 percent, which was achieved when the sector was at its peak.
“So if you are running at those sorts of levels where you have about 55 cows for every 100 that are not giving you production then productivity is certainly low,” he said.
The country’s cattle slaughter rate used to be hover around 600 000 annually but has gone down to between 250 000 to 300 000.
“From the slaughter supply of things we are lower than before but then if you ask the question why we are operating at those levels, there are many issues. One of them is that most of the farmers that are running beef heads are new.
“Their capacity is not to the level that we used to have. What I mean by that, is that smallholder farmers mostly from communal areas are now on resettled land and are learning how to produce cattle for commercial purposes,” Dr Sibanda said.
Newly resettled farmers also have to face the brunt of failure to access loans to finance their enterprise from banks due to stringent requirements by financial institutions. To add more woes to this grouping of farmers, facilities such as the Cold Storage Company’s cattle finance scheme were long folded.
“The Standard Bank and Barclays Bank used to finance a lot of farmers. That is very difficult to get now especially for smallholder farmers who don’t have collateral and all those things. Basically those things are not there and the performance is lower than that what we used to have.
“We would summarise the beef sector as kind of struggling with not so much hope for immediate change but I think there is quite a bit of interest among people to do something about it. So we hope things may turnabout at some stage but at the moment it’s a bit on a stalemate,” Dr Sibanda said.
He said although there has been slight growth realised by commercial farmers with their heads growing from 300 000 to about 600 000 this was not imperative as they were rarely selling their animals.
“The quality of stock presented in the market seems to be not as good as what we used to have. But obviously you would also acknowledge that we are not exporting by and large to areas like the European Union, which demanded high quality beef. So we are mainly focusing on the domestic market.
“In the domestic market, the niche for high grade is more in the tourism industry but the rest of the people’s income are not good and people will predominantly buy economic and commercial grades not out of preference but out of income constraints, this is what is happening,” Dr Sibanda said.
He however, said the country had made significant strides in disease control but Foot and Mouth Disease remains the only obstacle due to lack of adequate funding to source vaccines.
“I would say in terms of animal health issues we have FMD as a major one. Tick-borne diseases are under control and maybe not so well in the smallholder sector because people are not used to doing that for themselves and then the other diseases, I think generally are in control. Anthrax we do have a bit of it here and there. I think in terms of animal diseases we are averagely performing well,” Dr Sibanda said. EU banned beef exports from Zimbabwe in 2001 after the outbreak of FMD and this had a negative impact on the country’s Gross Domestic Product.“There has been thinking for looking for options around markets. We see that in the Southern African Development Community region for instance there are gaps, South Africa does require beef.
There are also a lot of opportunities in Angola. “In all these markets what we see is that there are some basic levels of disease control requirements. I think the whole thing is clouded by FMD as everybody doesn’t want to simply accept a product from FMD affected areas,” Dr Sibanda said. He said there was need for Government to find a strategic partner for the resuscitation of CSC as well as adopting a modern business strategy for the parastatal. “It’s clear that it’s not easy to get that sort of money where you could invest and turn around the CSC but what it also means is that we need to explore the different sort of arrangements of financing, like moving away from complete Government funding to involve other partners or investors who will be interested in the business and negotiate favourable terms in terms of company control so that they will have confidence of investing the money that is required,” Dr Sibanda.
