cow |
Mr Jacob Nabimanya,
a livestock farmer, owning about 78 head of cattle in Nabiswera
Sub-county, in a recent interview with Daily Monitor said, the
quarantine period which is not specified has encouraged animal smuggling
in the area.
"Some of our
colleagues are selling their animals to traders cheaply without
authorisation from the veterinary officers. We have information that
they are doing so under the guise of getting school fees for their
children," Mr Nabimanya said.
The Resident District Commissioner , Mr Dan Muganga, blamed the problem on government's delay to dispatch vaccines for FMD.
"We have quarantine
in place, but the delay in delivering the vaccines is prolonging the
fight against FMD in Nakasongola. My office has information that some
farmers have tactfully decided not to report the disease to concerned
authorities We need to handle this problem," Mr Muganga told the
district council recently.
Commenting about
the illegal practice, the district production officer, Mr Gerald Kitaka,
said: "We cannot rule out the possibility of animals being smuggled out
from the quarantined areas. It is difficult to estimate the number of
animals smuggled out since we do not have a monitoring system in place
to detect their movement."
He added: "However,
we have established cattle loading areas to allow some of the animals
which are disease free to go to the market. What we closed are all the
cattle markets in all the Sub-counties in Nakasongola District".
The district
chairperson, Mr Sam Kigula, appealed to authorities to expedite the
procurement process arguing that the livestock industry contributes a
big percentage to the district revenue and more than 60 per cent of the
residents derive a livelihood from livestock farming.
"We have been
promised that the vaccines will soon be in. The problem of animals being
smuggled out of the quarantined areas is complex since we do not have
the data about them," he said.
Dr Sam Eswagu, the
district veterinary officer, said procuring vaccines is a process since
they have to be procured from areas outside Uganda.
"We submitted our
requisition to the ministry of Agriculture and we were informed that the
vaccines would be procured from Botswana for this particular FMD
outbreak. This is what we are waiting for," Mr Eswagu said adding that
"We have so far lost at least 10 animals but the risk of the disease
spreading is high."
Cattle trade
Nakasongola
District has an estimated 268,000 head of cattle and more than 1,000
animals are transported out of the district to different market areas
daily.
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