The Sunday News
Mhlupheki Dube
READING through snippets of a recent parliamentary discussion regarding the livestock situation within the country especially in the drier areas such as the southern part of the country, I couldn’t help but concur completely with submissions of the parliamentary representatives.
Members of Parliament passionately and emotionally urged Government to declare a state of disaster when responding to situations of this magnitude so that due attention is given to the situation.
I seek to buttress this view and amplify the voice of the need for Government to deepen and widen its intervention regarding a drought situation as it relates to livestock farmers.
It is about time Government discarded the laissez faire approach to livestock matters which has seen livestock farmers and stakeholders complaining all the time that the livestock sector is always given a tokenised intervention while huge amount of resources are always poured into the crop production sector.
An example is that every year farmers are provided with crop production inputs but there is hardly any inputs that are provided to the livestock production sector.
Foot and mouth disease has been a perennial problem to livestock farmers partly because of the recklessness of the farmers but largely because of the piecemeal in adequate intervention by the veterinary department as a result of being poorly resourced to provide a holistic comprehensive prevention package. Livestock inputs should not only be thought of in terms of expensive feed and chemicals, in times like this simple hay bales can be very critical in saving animals.
There is huge production of molasses as a by-product of sugar cane processing in the sugar producing areas of the country such as Chiredzi.
This can be made available nearer to farmers by the Government as part of important livestock production or survival inputs. Farmers will then be able to buy at Government subsidised prices and save their animals.
Year in and year out we receive huge figures of livestock mortalities as a result of poverty deaths and the response from Government departments is always lukewarm and it is always left to a few non-governmental organisations to run around and pick a few wards to distribute the subsidised stock feed and write glossy reports thereafter to attract more funding from the donors.
The response from NGOs, while commendable, is always not enough because they never cover the entire area, be it province or district, but will just pick say four wards out of a district with 30 wards. It is only Government which can and should attend to all the affected areas.
Hence, the idea of pushing the relevant ministries to always declare a state of disaster when there is a devastating drought in the drier southern areas of the country cannot be over emphasised.
National disasters cannot only be preserved for situations where human life is lost or when there is a complete national crop failure but even when there is such a challenge for the livestock sector.
Declaring it a state of disaster will enable Government to activate its relevant civil protection organs to protect the loss of human investment and national resource in terms of livestock.
Resources can then be mobilised to cover all the affected areas with critical requirements, be it survival feed provision or water provision. Like I have alluded before, Government may probably just need to summon resources and source hay bales from high producing areas in Mashonaland provinces and transport to needy areas for provision at subsidised rates. It doesn’t need to be always the expensive commercial feeds but even hay bales supported with molasses beneficiate.
All this starts with a serious commitment from Government and a realisation that the livestock sector is facing serious challenges in the drier areas due to the effects of drought. Then an appropriate national response can be crafted instead of the always crop production biased interventions.
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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