Mice farming: an option that Zimbabwe must pursue to achieve food security

Stanford Chiwanga

IN Zimbabwe, a significant number of the population eats rodent meat, while a good number are disgusted by the idea mice as a delicacy, many around the country see a rodent as a much an much anticipated culinary treat.

Particularly in Mashonaland, mice are not only a regular staple, but a popular snack, but surprisingly unlike other forms of meat such as goat, beef and pork, rodent meat is not farmed but hunted.

For a country where the majority are poor, the failure to farm rodents is a missed opportunity as mice meat could go a long way in improving the country’s food security. In fact examples from other countries show that rodent meat can be one way to develop the country economically as the meat can be exported, resulting in the country generating the much needed foreign currency.

According to Keene Doyle, an expert on small ruminants, Cambodia exports up to two tonnes of wild rats to Vietnam per day on the peak of the “rat‐season”. This has boosted the growth of a rodent farming industry and the creation of jobs in Cambodia.

Rodent meat is also sold in supermarkets in many Asian countries.

“Rats are tinned in the Philippines, sold as STAR meat (rats spelled backwards) in supermarkets, often eaten at weddings in Vietnam, and usually considered a delicacy by most South East Asians”, said Grant Singleton, an expert on rodent biology and management at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

Among members of the Adi tribe, in north‐east India, rats are valued not just for their taste, but also as a cultural item. Every year, on March 7, they celebrate Unying‐Aran, a popular hunting festival where the most precious prey are rats.

“Gifts of rats, dead of course, are also an important item in making sure the bride’s relatives are happy to see their daughter leave her old family and join that of her husband”, said Victor Benno Meyer‐Rochow at Oulu University, Finland, who published a study on the eating habits of this tribe.

The idea of Zimbabwe turning rodents from game to livestock is ideal says the Minister of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement Perrance Shiri, but it needs thorough research to ensure that it does not result in a health disaster as some rodents carry deadly diseases.

“A good number of our people eat mice but they hunt it, they don’t farm it. If we are to venture into rodent farming we will need to do thorough research because not all rodents are edible, some carry bacteria that can be deadly to humans.

“But there is no doubt that rodent meat could be a solution to the food security problem facing the country. But we will also need to appreciate that not everyone eats rodent meat so selling it in butcheries and supermarkets will be controversial. Some cultures will be up in arms,” said Minister Shiri.

For Mr Pathisa Nyathi, a renowned historian, the consumption of rodent meat is deeply embedded in the Shona culture but would need sustained campaigns for it to be accepted in some cultures as rodents still ignite disgust and even fear.

“One cannot judge a given culture for eating mice and it will be a welcome development if it is to turned into livestock but we must be careful not to impose it on other cultures because that might result in an uproar. The major problem is that rodents are seen as dirty and unclean animals that carry diseases,” said Mr Nyathi.

Research, however, shows that when cooked well, rodent meat does not pose a health problem. The main problem is in the handling of the meat.

“Slaughtering rodents is the more risky part, where people will be exposed to blood and other fluids. We simply do not know the health risks of butchering and eating wild‐caught rats,” says Steven Belmain, Professor of Ecology at the University of Greenwich’s Natural Resources Institute in the UK.

This risk is not hypothetical. In the Mekong River Delta region of Vietnam, where up to 3,600 tonnes of rodent meat were produced per year back in 2001/2002, waste water within and around the rat processing areas hosted the disease‐causing bacteria Clostridium perfringens and Enterococcus faecalis. The study also found that none of the workers handling the rats knew of the health risks of their trade or used protective clothing.

Health risks aside, this idea to farm mice is not new, according to a FAO report, at least 11 species of rodents are used throughout Central and South America as sources of meat, and similar number of species are consumed throughout Africa.

One approach would involve none traditional farming animals, such as rodents, to create “mini‐livestock”, according to Louw Hoffman, head of the meat science group at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.

“Rats are ideal species for mini‐livestock farming as they have a high fecundity (number of babies born per year), you can have a favourable ratio of males to females (1:5), can be housed in small enclosures, can be group housed and are great at converting waste food into quality protein fit for human consumption”, he explained.

Many rodent species could qualify as mini‐livestock, such as cane rats in sub-Saharan Africa, or capybaras, agoutis and guinea pigs in South America for different reasons, commented Ferran Jori at the Botswana College of Agriculture, in Sebele, Botswana.

“For capybara, it is certainly for their volume and weight. For cane rats and Guinea pigs possibly because they need limited space to be reared and they are very popular and several females can be reared in one production unit”, he said.

Cane rats, which naturally occur across West and Central Africa, are large animals that can grow up to 60 cm in length and weigh up to 10 kg. They are already hunted as bush meat or even domesticated as farm animals in Benin, Togo, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and other countries.

Owing to their size and abundance as a pest, cane rats have been a focus of current efforts to improve sustainable farming and could even be one solution to contain trade in bush meat.

“Colleagues have conducted a comprehensive review of this as well as other alternatives in the Central Africa region. The take‐home from this study and many others, appears to be that cane rat farming, in theory, has potential as an alternative to bush meat but there are a multitude of socio‐economic and cultural conditions that need to align, be effectively managed, and robustly monitored for such activities to (a) be economically viable, (b) promote sustainability and (c) actually be a substitute for bush meat. Where alternatives exist, in many cases, they act as supplements to rather than substitutes for bush meat,” said Heather Eves, a wildlife biologist from Yale University’s Energy, Resources and Environment Program.

According to FAO estimates, the human population on Earth is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, which will require a 50 percent increase in food productivity. Rodents could be an important part for addressing this problem, Singleton thinks.

“The planet cannot sustain the projected growth in demand for meat protein nor the harvesting of bush meat in forests. They are a pest, but instead of fighting rats as a pest we could welcome them as game,” he said.

Rather than using nasty chemicals to control them, harvesting rodents as food would create an ecologically clean and productive business for Zimbabwe, which could also countenance some of the losses crop farmers suffer as a result of rodents.