Livestock rearing should be passion driven

Farming issues Mhlupheki Dube
THIS week we want to interrogate the merits and demerits of pro-poor targeting in livestock interventions especially in the development sector. It has become very fashionable and probably grant winning for most organisations in the development sector to adopt interventions targeting resource constrained members of the rural community. Huge amounts of resources have been poured into the rural communities targeting the poor and for all intents and purpose the outcome has been largely frustrating and in most of the cases with nothing left to show for it a few years down the line, especially in the livestock sector.

We have seen large resources being spent buying and donating all kinds of livestock from chickens, goats to cattle and even rabbits. In the majority of cases these have been distributed as freebies or in exchange for “tokenised labour” in some broken bridge, dip tank or dam wall.

The question that most people have conveniently avoided to ask is why do poor people who are the recipient of these freebies livestock gifts always seem to go back to owning nothing despite being jump-started with a free injection of say five goats?
Where did the free chickens, goats or heifers go, now that you are back to owning nothing?

My take to this is that owning and rearing livestock is a serious business and responsibility which cannot just be handed to someone without thorough and serious assessment of their capabilities and natural passion for the livestock. Personally I would rather give the responsibility of owning animals to someone who once had some form of livestock through his or her personal effort.

The point here is that rearing animals is a serious responsibility both in terms of labour and resource investment and that cannot be just dumped on the doorstep of a person who is resource challenged. Suddenly the person has responsibilities of herding the animals, taking them to the dip tank and watering points.

In some cases he/she suddenly has an added task of protecting those animals from predation especially in areas that share boundaries with wildlife concessions or the new resettlement areas where the population of wild animals is still high.

Most importantly the person now has to scratch hard to buy the medication that is needed when the animal is sick or even dosing remedies to control internal parasites. Remember this is a person who traditionally lives below one dollar a day and suddenly has “richness” thrust upon him, it just doesn’t wash!

Even in traditional ways of poverty alleviation such as ukusisa (leasing part of your herd to someone) it’s not just giving responsibility of managing part of your herd to any poor person in your community but serious vetting is done and mostly you find that such animals are leased out to someone who has a small herd of his own say one or two animals.

My take therefore, is that for such programmes where the objective is to empower poor members of our society so that they get to eventually own such valuable assets as livestock, development practitioners need to do very thorough preparatory work before burdening a person with riches which he or she is not yet ready to receive.

Without such preparation we will always come back to find that the person we supported with five goats has gone back to owning nothing, not even a cat which is traditionally given for free in our communities.

Livestock rearing is a serious business and it’s not for the faint hearted at times especially when one is confronted by disease outbreaks or livestock starvation. It is simply unrealistic to expect a person surviving on less than a dollar per day to suddenly be able to scratch around and raise 10 dollars for an oxytetracycline needed to treat his animal.

Also, I think development practitioners should consider fostering these resource constrained farmers on established farmers within the community for mentoring purposes on agreed terms for a certain period of time before they are left to their own devices. This will enable them to learn a thing or two or general animal husbandry and the responsibilities ahead of them.

There are obviously many reasons why the person did not own animals of his own and one of them could be that he simply did not have requisite management skills for running a herd.

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Opinions expressed in this article are personal therefore should be treated as representing only the views of the writer.