The Sunday News
Dumisani Nsingo, Senior Farming Reporter
THE Government has unveiled a $2,3 million African Development Bank Group funded support to beef and leather value chain technical assistance project aimed at enhancing the country’s livestock sector.
Project manager Mr Mervyn Chiwayu said the project’s main focus was to strengthen the livestock sector’s value chain.
He said this at a provisional programme for the stakeholder platform baseline survey validation workshop held in Lupane last week which was attended by livestock farmers and representatives from abattoirs, association of livestock, farmers groups, inputs suppliers, non-governmental organisations as well as agricultural institutions.
“The funding is mainly in technical assistance, which is going to be given to the livestock farmers up to retail. We have various nodes within the value chain.
“If you want you can say we have a beef value chain and a leather value chain. So in other words we want to strengthen the value chain so that it is competitive in terms of production, in terms of market,” said Mr Chiwayu.
He said the pilot project would be conducted in Matabeleland North Province and thereafter spread to other provinces.
“The idea is that we must start with a pilot project first in Matabeleland North. It’s a pilot project. Once it is successful in Matabeleland North then it will be replicated throughout the country. In other words we are saying Matabeleland North should not fail otherwise we will prejudice the whole country,” said Mr Chiwayu.
He said the project entails seven components aimed at improving the livestock sector across the value chain.
“We have seven components in this project. The first component is the stakeholder platform where all the stakeholders are supposed to come together and look at the regulations governing the trade, they look at the markets, finance side, capacity building and almost everything that is associated with the value chain so that we try to improve. If there are regulations we want to improve their regulations and facilitate the growth and competitiveness of the beef and leather value chain,” said Mr Chiwayu.
He said there was need to impart communal farmers to embrace livestock farming as business instead of rearing the animals for sentimental reasons.
“We want to turn our farmers from being livestock keepers into livestock production. If you are a producer you are looking at your output, saying how many cattle did I sell this year but if you are a keeper you will be interested in having the same animal for 10 years but treat yourself as a producer. So in other means we want to change the mindset,” said Mr Chiwayu.
