| dc.description.abstract | Kenya’s agricultural sector accounts for 20–30% of the gross
domestic product (GDP). Of this, the livestock sector alone makes a
contribution of about 50%. Thus, livestock contributes heavily to
the GDP and food security of its population. It also provides the
necessary thrust for other forms of development in the country.
Recent statistics indicate that currently over 50% of the country’s
livestock population is based in the arid and semi-arid lands
(ASALs), which form about 80% of the country’s land area.
However, comparative international statistics show that livestock
contributes 88% of the total agricultural output in Botswana even
though the country has half Kenya’s livestock population and is of
less agricultural potential. Thus, there is a huge potential
contribution that livestock can make to the Kenyan national
economy. Unfortunately, this sector receives only 10% of the
government’s agricultural expenditure and less than one per cent of
total spending, yet it is estimated that Kenya’s potential to export
livestock products if adequately exploited would earn more than the
earnings from tea and coffee combined. This then calls for new
thinking about livestock development strategies to harness the arid
lands.
The livestock sector accounts for 90% of employment and more
than 95% of household incomes in the ASALs. Most of the
livestock slaughtered in major urban centres originates in these
areas, with an annual slaughter of about 1.6 million Tropical
Livestock Units. Kenya’s livestock from the ASALs is worth Kshs
60 billion (US$800 million). The internal livestock trade in the
pastoral areas alone nets in about 6 billion shillings (US$80
million) a year.
In the arid areas of the ASALs, arable crop production is not
possible without some form of irrigation; while in semi-arid areas
rainfall may be sufficient for certain types of crops, requiring
special management techniques. Therefore, except for the areas
under cropping, the rest of the arid areas is used for livestock
GUIDELINES FOR EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK OFF-TAKE
production. Thus, livestock are one of the most important resources
of the arid areas, because pastoralists rely on them directly for their
subsistence and income generation. However, available statistics on
the nature and amount of livestock off-take, and how the potential
off-take during drought can be tapped to avoid excessive losses and
benefit the pastoralists, are inadequate and unreliable. This situation
exists because most of the production from arid areas is for
subsistence, and data on the quantity produced and marketed are
rarely collected.
Livestock off-take is the percentage of the current year’s herd that
is removed through sales, deaths, gifts, home-slaughters or theft.
This is an important measure of herd dynamics and therefore a
means for estimating output from a pastoral production unit.
Although non-commercial transactions contribute significantly to
the total livestock off-take in a traditional pastoral household,
commercial livestock off-take forms the main form of pastoral offtake
today. Commercial livestock off-take has increasingly become
important with the breakdown of traditional drought coping
strategies as pastoralism slowly evolves from solely subsistence to
a commercial economy, and as the frequency and severity of
droughts increase.
Drought is one of the most detrimental disasters distressing African
pastoralists. Droughts are known to have short-term and long-term
effects on pastoralists. The short-term effects are the shocks caused
by the heavy losses of animals due to a drastic and abrupt decline of
grazing resources, thereby exposing the pastoralists to severe
transient food insecurity. Thus, pastoralists find themselves with
excess animals in relation to land resources and with limited
options for disposing of them, direct consumption or finding extra
grazing and water. The effect of the drought of 1999/2000 provides
a good example of how obvious the lack of appropriate advice to
pastoral communities led not only to the loss of property in animals
but also to the rise in political tensions due to the movement in
search of pasture into inappropriate private lands. To avoid this,
assistance must be given to find market outlets or any other means
of disposing of the drought-induced extra livestock well before
droughts strike. This can be achieved through close communication
with the pastoralists.
The long-term effects of droughts on pastoralists are through
decreased food security and lost bargaining power. In addition to
loss of livestock, distress sales of livestock cause an abrupt decline
GUIDELINES FOR EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK OFF-TAKE
in livestock prices, making it increasingly difficult for pastoralists
to recover from such shocks, therefore rendering them more
vulnerable to future disasters, and ultimately promoting poverty and
hindering development.
It is important to facilitate emergency livestock off-take so as to
minimize losses during droughts and ensure that pastoralists get
reasonable prices for their animals, thus enabling the pastoralists to
remain viable during and after the droughts. The focus here,
therefore, is on the animal units that are available for the market
during pre-drought periods as a requirement to guide the planning
of emergency off-take in response to a looming drought.
A timely response with adequate lead time to impending drought
requires a reliable forewarning developed from in-depth
understanding of the focus and means of monitoring environmental
changes.
This study sought to develop guidelines for enhancing livestock
off-take in response to impending emergency through the following
processes, among others:
• Carrying out informal interviews with stakeholders—
government officials, professionals, relevant institutions.
• Carrying out a thorough review of the literature (desk
study) on past experiences.
• Collecting information through participatory means, by
using focus group discussions (FGDs) in the arid districts,
on past experiences and to solicit ideas for more proactive
strategies for increasing off-take in response to drought
warnings.
Off-take rates from the pastoral herds are currently estimated at 6–
14% for cattle, 1–3% for camels and 4–10% for sheep and goats.
These rates then translate into 220,130–513,630 head of cattle,
9,250–28,000 camels, 231,960–597,000 goats, and 156,600–
391,500 sheep, which are removed from pastoral herds annually. If
values are attached to this off-take, the total annual marketed value
both locally and nationally is close to Kshs 5 billion. In terms of
meat supply, the pastoral herds produce in the order of 71,118
tonnes of meat from the various livestock species annually.
Using the 1999 population census figure and a growth rate of 2.9%
per year, the Kenyan population is estimated currently at 32
GUIDELINES FOR EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK OFF-TAKE
million. Since the per capita consumption of meat is estimated at 12
kg, the amount of meat consumed annually is about 384,000 tonnes.
To this total, the pastoral areas contribute about 71,118 tonnes or
19% of the total national consumption. Using the same method to
estimate the current population of the pastoral districts, we obtain a
figure of about 3.8 million persons. These would consume 45,600
tonnes of meat. Thus, it implies that out of the total meat off-take
from pastoral herds about 60% is consumed locally while the rest is
a surplus which goes to support the rest of the country’s population.
In other words, pastoralists are net meat ‘exporters.’ At an average
price of Kshs 120 per kg of meat, the total amount of money
equivalent to 71,118 tonnes of meat is over Kshs 8.5 billion. About
40% of this accrues as direct monetary income that goes to meet
pastoral household requirements—clothing, shelter, health, fees,
etc.
Pastoralists adopt a number of strategies in order to cope with or
manage droughts and other related hazards. These have relevance to
emergency livestock off-take. These coping mechanisms can be
grouped into two: established and recently adopted. Whilst the
details of these may differ from community to community, the
principles are generally the same. Among others, the broad
categories of established strategies are movement of livestock to
areas with better water and grazing resources, sale of livestock,
prayer and payment to a rainmaker, resort to hunting and the use of
wild foods, and the moral economy.
A number of opportunities for reducing the vulnerability of pastoral
populations have been created in the recent past as a result of
deliberate actions taken in response to past experiences of deficits
due to drought and socio-economic changes due to national and
international forces. External forces have also contributed to socioeconomic
changes. These include immigration, improvements in
the transport system, liberalisation of most aspects of the economy,
education, development, and change of policy on tourism. The
result has been diversification of the herding economy to include
farming (where this is possible), trade such as running stores in
small rural shopping centres, an increase in returns from tourism,
especially eco-tourism, and migration into towns in search of
salaried employment.
Responses to droughts by government and other stakeholders have
differed from one drought to another. In the 1999–2000 drought, for
example, the Government of Kenya, mainly through the ALRMP,
GUIDELINES FOR EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK OFF-TAKE
was involved in a proactive rather than reactive manner in the
response process. This was by making a deliberate effort in terms of
contribution of resources and coordination to reduce the droughtinduced
suffering of the pastoralists. Among the lessons learned
from past assessments of the implementation of drought
programmes by the ALRMP and DPIRP is that an effective drought
management system must include all major stakeholders. Some of
the major stakeholders to be involved together with government are
pastoral communities, donors, UN agencies, NGOs, and local
institutions, including civil society organizations and pastoral
associations. Prior to the 1999–2000 drought, decisions for
intervention by the government were made based on reasons other
than technical information available from the EWS. It is only
during this drought that substantial attention by the government was
given to information generated from the EWS, for example. This
was demonstrated by the government’s decision to base targeting
and intervention decisions on available technical information. The
previous food-aid distribution was mainly done without proper
targeting.
EWS must, however, be combined with a strategy to enable the
government and donors to respond to, and mitigate the effects of
drought. If there is no capacity to respond to the information
gathered by the EWS, then the investment is wasted. The rationale
behind early warning is that it allows the government and donors to
respond rapidly and avert humanitarian crises by early intervention
to mitigate the impact of drought.
The Turkana example in northern Kenya has developed effective
drought contingency plans that are decentralized to the district
level. The main components of the Turkana plan included an
overall drought policy, setting out the plan’s objectives of
minimizing the impact of drought and a set of preparedness
measures; creation in advance of necessary physical infrastructure,
a bureaucratic structure to manage the plan across line ministries,
plans to negotiate with donors at an early stage of drought, agreed
procedures and information provision and training about them; a
definition of warning stages to be generated by the EWS and to
trigger responses from government; a set of plans for specific
mitigation, relief and rehabilitation measures; and a commitment to
the general promotion of drought resilience.
Most northern Kenyan districts now have a Strategic Drought
Management Plan with a set of contingency shelf plans to be
GUIDELINES FOR EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK OFF-TAKE
activated at ‘alert,’ ‘alarm,’ ‘emergency’ and ‘recovery’ warning
stages. These plans have yet to be fully tested. Some of the major
issues for drought contingency planning include the need to involve
communities in drought contingency planning, through wellconstituted
and supported pastoral associations; the continuing
difficulties in guaranteeing a flow of funds from donors (at issue
here is the continuing reluctance of donors to mobilize funds or
food aid in the light of early warning, hard evidence of famine and
the donors’ own appraisal being preferred, by which time it is too
late for mitigation); the administrative difficulty in Kenya of
keeping contingency funds anywhere other than the central
treasury; the need for a national-level body to interact with district
drought planning, and the tension between the ideas of national
drought planning and national disaster planning; and the need to
generate a broad national consensus that drought mitigation and a
last resort drought relief are worthwhile activities.
Specific to livestock off-take, and depending on the situation on the
ground, contingency plans may consist of emergency animal
purchase or the provision of subsidy to transport animals to the
market to enable herders to realize some cash for their animals
before prices collapse; maintaining the water supply for animals
and humans, or opening new water supplies; provision of
emergency grazing, including ‘cow-calf camps’ or other special
arrangements to protect breeding stock; a rapid increase in the
availability of livestock health service provision; flexible taxation
systems that do not tax pastoral populations during drought; support
for the private sector including pastoral associations in the
provision of relief food and other services, either directly or by
ensuring that pastoral household purchasing power is maintained;
and providing fodder for drought-affected stock. In most of the
districts visited, and based on the benefit-cost analysis of livestock
interventions, the most supported are emergency animal purchases
and slaughter for consumption by pastoralists, subsidies to livestock
transport, and water supply through trucking for severe
emergencies.
A method for estimating the desired level of off-take depending on
the severity of drought is presented. It is further recommended that
the EWS be strengthened by incorporating the traditional early
warning systems in the districts using elders’ committees or
Pastoral Associations where they exist to feed information to the
DSG. The EWS itself should be a tool to bring about consensus
among different stakeholders on the action to be taken at different
GUIDELINES FOR EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK OFF-TAKE
stages of the warning system and to reduce the time lag between the
approval of interventions and their implementation.
The handbook notes the need to generate accurate statistics on
livestock populations and their distribution to facilitate better
estimates on required off-take. It also notes the unanimous call by
pastoralists for the rehabilitation of livestock marketing
infrastructure and the development of outlets such as abattoirs as
the long-term solution to effective emergency livestock off-take. | en |
