Disease is crippling livestock industries.
Last year was a challenging year for the animal health and livestock sectors due to numerous disease outbreaks including foot and mouth disease, African swine fever, and avian influenza.
The National Animal Health Forum (NAHF), which promotes and improves the health status of the national livestock herds/flocks for sustainable livestock production and food safety, chairman Gerhard Schutte, said the shortage of critical strategic vaccines was the most difficult subject to digest.
“The private industry role players have actively worked with the livestock sector to consider solutions for this matter. Various vaccines have been registered to be produced in the private sector,” Schutte added.
Despite these challenges, Schutte said the animal health and livestock sectors could still be identified as one of the strongest sectors in agriculture. “There are good prospects in the red meat industry. The 2030 vision includes the potential to grow beef from 5% to 20% of local production and export live sheep and mutton products by between 1% to 5%,” he said.
The forum said navigating compromised herd immunity and disease outbreaks would continue to impact production and exports in the commercial and other emerging sectors.
The NAHF recently hosted the animal health innovation and technology cluster of the Technology Innovation Agency, and a strategic workshop was held to identify the priorities for the sector.
Schutte said through the approach of constructive engagement in the past year on foot and mouth disease, South Africa now had a functional technical committee driving the processes between industry and the government. “A few strategic vaccine registrations have come through,” he said.
But there are still challenges with the manufacturing of some strategic vaccines and engagements with the the national Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, he said. “Input costs and the lack of sufficient electricity also remains a concern. Luckily to a large extent our business is a natural resource and therefore we had a bit of an edge in terms of input costs to the abattoir and the feedlot.
With regard to load shedding, Schutte said on the primary production side, the impact was not that drastic, but once the product came to the abattoir or the milk was in the tanks or the chickens needed to be cooled and supplied of air it was a struggle to keep the supply chain in place.
The cold chain for vaccines need to be held at a constant temperature and this created additional costs in the value chain, he said.
According to the AMT’s Livestock Report released earlier this month slaughter prices for cattle and weaners could stabilise and trend upwards as the country moved closer to April. AMT is a South African-based company specialising in the analysis and forecasting of national as well as regional agricultural industry and market information.
For sheep, supply was said to have stabilised while demand decreased, which resulted in slaughter prices decreasing in the past few weeks. Slaughter prices were also expected to decrease over the next few months.
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