ILRI report says Africa’s veterinary services inadequate to deal with new disease threats

Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper reports on warning given by scientists about the insufficient capacity of Africa’s current veterinary services to deal with new disease threats.

‘According to new assessments, reported yesterday at the International Conference on Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition & Health in New Delhi, India, “Wealthy countries are effectively dealing with livestock diseases, but in Africa and Asia, the capacity of veterinary services to track and control outbreaks is lagging dangerously behind livestock intensification,” said John McDermott, deputy director general for research at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which spearheaded the work. . . .

‘McDermott, one of the co-author[s] with Delia Grace, said “In the poorest regions of the world, livestock plagues that were better controlled in the past are regaining ground,” they warn, with “lethal and devastating impacts” on livestock and the farmers and traders that depend on them. These “population-decimating plagues” include diseases that kill both people and their animals and destroy livelihoods. . . .

‘McDermott and Grace warn that new trends, including rapid urbanization and climate change, could act as “wild cards,” altering the present distribution of diseases, sometimes “dramatically for the worse.” The authors say developing countries need to speed up their testing and adoption of new approaches, appropriate for their development context, to detect and then to stop or contain livestock epidemics before they become widespread. . . .

‘Yet despite the great threats posed by livestock diseases, McDermott and Grace see a need for a more intelligent response to outbreaks that considers the local disease context as well as the livelihoods of people. They observe that “while few argue that disease control is a bad thing, recent experiences remind us that, if livestock epidemics have negative impacts, so too can the actions taken to control or prevent them.’”

‘An exclusive focus on avian influenza preparedness activities in Africa relative to other more important disease concerns, they point out, invested scarce financial resources to focus on a disease that, due to a low-density of chicken operations and scarcity of domestic ducks, is unlikely to do great damage to much of the continent. And they argue that a wholesale slaughter of pigs in Cairo instituted after an outbreak of H1N1 was “costly and epidemiologically pointless” because the disease was already being spread “by human-to-human transmission.”

‘McDermott and Grace conclude that to build surveillance systems able to detect animal disease outbreaks in their earliest stages, developing countries will need to work across sectors, integrating veterinary, medical, and environmental expertise in “one-health” approaches to assessing, prioritizing and managing the risks posed by livestock diseases.’

Read the whole article in Vanguard (Nigeria): Livestock diseases: Africa lacks capacity for veterinary services—reports, 12 February 2011.

 

Improving smallholder fodder through better knowledge as well as technologies

Busy fodder market in Hyderabad, India; farmers transport their fodder to this market, where it is bought by urban dairies (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

The magazine Farming Matters ran a feature on a Fodder Innovation Project funded by the UK Department for International Development and conducted since 2003 by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) with partners in Nigeria and India. The aim of the project is to improve the availability of good fodder for small-scale livestock keepers in those countries.

The partners in this project, says the article, discovered that the problems related to fodder availability have just as much to do with access to knowledge as with access to appropriate technology.

‘The innovation-focused approach of the Fodder Innovation Project led to some very interesting results. These are some of the outcomes:
• ‘In India, village dairy co-operatives that had gone out of business were revived when surplus milk became available. Some farmers collaborated with these co-operatives for fodder supply and payment recovery.
• ‘New and unusual partnerships emerged in both India and Nigeria. In Ikire, Nigeria, representatives of the Goat Sellers Association gave tips on feeding and rearing to goat farmers. The Justice Development and Peace Commission collaborated with the Nigerian Veterinary Research Institute to provide training to local service-providers and vaccination services to goat farmers.
• ‘Community-based organisations took the initiative of organising health camps in collaboration with the government to extend vaccination coverage.
• ‘A demand emerged for research into improved goat breeds suitable for Southern Nigeria –an example of farmers helping to set research agenda.
• ‘Closer and more efficient networks were set up in Rogo, Nigeria.
• ‘In India, new fodder production initiatives emerged, bringing together governmental departments and academics.
• ‘New responsibilities were shouldered at the level of policy-making, from organising trainings to liaising and co-ordinating on many fodderrelated issues.
• ‘India’s Foundation for Ecological Security was so impressed with the project results that it extended the use of networking and the creation of multi-stakeholder platforms to all its other programmes.
• ‘On learning of the project, India’s Planning Commission invited a representative to take part in national livestock planning discussions.

‘. . . As an action research project, the Fodder Innovation Project was successful in setting up networks and turning them into effective learning laboratories, but further improvements can still be made. Innovation platforms could be created around crop-livestock value chainsand strategies put in place to ensure that innovations are pro-women and pro-poor. The lessons must be sustained and expanded before they have currency in policy debates, but the fact that an apex organisationlike India’s National Dairy Development Board agreed to host the Fodder Innovation Policy Working Group is encouraging. The shift in perspectivefrom a technology-driven to an innovation-focused approach is well underway, but we need to gather more evidence before policy-makers take it on board wholeheartedly.’

The article gives the following example of how communities were encouraged to scale up their livestock enterprises.

‘In the Ikire area of southern Nigeria, farmers kept goats mostly as a saving and/or insurance against crises. While rearing goats at a subsistence level, fodder was a non-issue. They were mostly being managed by women alongside their domestic chores who preferred to let them browse freely on available feeding resources, irrespective of the season. Traditionally goat farmers do not access markets directly–they depend upon middlemen (who work independently within pre-determined boundaries) who tend to be exploitative. In discussions with farmers, it was found that the farmers recognise the potential of goat rearing as a supplementary livelihood option, as a chance to make extra money during festivals. However, as the right network was not in place, they never took scaling up of the activity seriously. Continued discussions revealed that farmers who were keen to move from subsistence to more systematic rearing of goats (on a commercial scale) would require not only an assured, adequate and year-round supply of the right kind of fodder, but would also have to confine their animals, and build appropriate networks. In turn, each of these factors would require a combination of technology-related and institutional interventions to be carried out by relevant individuals and/or organizations.’

Read the whole feature at Farming Matters: Reassessing the fodder problem, March 2010.

Watch a video interview with the project leader – Ranjitha Puskur

Or visit the Fodder Innovations Project website.

 

Physicians, veterinarians must close ranks to fight diseases affecting public health

A medical consultant at the Faculty of Public Health, University of Ibadan, Dr. Olupelumi Adebiyi, has solicited for more cooperation between physicians and veterinarians in the country in order to tackle the spread of diseases effectively, espcially zoonotic diseases.He made this demand in Ibadan when delivering a lecturer titled” “One world, One Health: Moore cooperation between physicians and veterinarians”, a programme organised by the Nigerian Veterinary Medical Association (NVMA), Oyo State chapter, as part of activities to mark this year’s World Veterinary Day.

Read more … (Nigerian Tribune)

 

Nigeria: Climate change and food challenge

Climate change has gradually dominated discussion in almost every country of the world because of the challenge it poses to the survival of individuals and whole nations.

In recent times, whole countries have been threatened by changes in climatic conditions ranging from draught, delayed rainfall, continuous melting of the polar region causing severe flood in some countries and speculation about the acid rain.

Early this year, the food Agricultural organization (FAO) reported that Mongolia experienced a severe change in climatic conditions that caused a great loss to farmers who are predominantly pastoralists because many of their livestock died after temperatures in the country dropped to -50 degrees centigrade killing 1.7 million heads of livestock and putting 21, 000 herder families at risk of hunger.

Read more … (Daily Trust)

 

Nigeria: swine flu not from pigs, says expert

The media has been accused of sowing confusion among members of the public and in the process causing loss among farmers over the true origin of what it describes as swine flu.

The chief veterinary officer in the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources, Dr. Joseph Nyager, told THISDAY, that the so-called swine flu is a human disease and not that of pigs; as it is being portrayed.

“What we call swine flu is actually a misnomer,” Nyager said. “It is actually know as H1N1. Why do I call the term a misnomer? It is because when you call it swine flu, people tend to associate it with pigs. But this is a disease of human beings.”

Read more (All Africa/This Day, Nigeria)

 

Nigeria: Farmer-pastoralists’ clash leaves 32 dead

A tense calm has been restored following clashes between pastoralists and farmers in central Nigeria’s Nasarawa State which left 32 people dead, scores of houses burned, and several farms destroyed, officials told IRIN.

Violence erupted on 18 December when pastoralists attacked the farming village of Udeni Gida – two weeks after a clash with farmers on 6 December when herdsman led their cattle into rice fields resulting in the death of a farmer, according to Mohammed Baba Ibaku, a local member of parliament.

Read more (IRIN: Humanitarian news and analysis)

 

Agriculture needs better innovation, not technology

Pilot projects in India and Nigeria point to possible benefits of a new approach to agricultural innovation, say Andy Hall and Susanna Thorp.

Read more … (SciDev.net)

 

Innovation systems: A testing process

It is a time of new opportunities as new technologies allow people to easily obtain new and more information, and local and global markets become more accessible. But coping with change is a complex process and it is unfortunate that a business-as-usual approach in agriculture and rural development often results in these opportunities being under-exploited. However, a pilot project in India and Nigeria is learning some interesting lessons from five very different sites about building capacity for change around the issue of fodder scarcity.

Read more … (New Agriculturalist)