The Honourable G M Oteng
Assistant Minister of Agriculture, Botswana
Mr Chairman, Director General of ILCA, distinguished guests, workshop participants, ladies and gentlemen.
It is a great honour and pleasure for me to have this opportunity to address the opening session of this workshop. I extend a warm welcome to those of you who have come to Botswana to participate in this important meeting and I hope that your stay here will be enjoyable and productive.
We in Botswana are highly honoured to have been requested to host this historic workshop. I say historic in the sense that this is the first workshop held by the African Feeds Research Network. This network is a result of the collaboration of three institutions; the Pasture Network for Eastern and Southern Africa (PANESA), the African Research Network for Agricultural Byproducts (ARNAB) and the West and Central Africa Forage Network (WECAFNET). It is our hope that your presence here in Botswana, and your deliberations throughout this week, will be of benefit to our livestock industry which, to a large extend is still dependent on natural rangeland.
In sub-Saharan Africa, livestock production is an important component of the agricultural sector, as evidenced by the large herds and flocks in this region. Most of the people in our countries continue to depend largely on agriculture for their livelihood. It is unfortunate that, in most of Africa, the livestock subsector has remained traditional and largely undeveloped. Management is poor, reproduction and growth rates are low, there is a high incidence of disease, and we have very low offtake rates.
The productivity of the livestock sector in our part of the continent has remained almost static for the past two decades. In fact, some countries have reported negative trends. Apart from those factors I have already mentioned, this has mainly been caused by adverse climatic conditions, such as poor rainfall and droughts, and by increasing populations that have aggravated the over-exploitation of natural resources, especially land. The uncontrolled population increase has resulted in serious competition for land, and so less land is available for agricultural purposes. This has increased the problems of overstocking and hence of overgrazing of rangelands in most of our countries.
As a result, most of sub-Saharan Africa has, up to now, not been able to produce sufficient food to feed its people. In the livestock sector we are still net importers of milk and meat. With the current lack of foreign exchange, most of our countries cannot afford to import these important commodities, and so our people are faced with unbalanced diets and, in some cases, not enough food. We all know, of course, that inadequate diets and poor nutrition, especially of children, will eventually lead to problems in the development of our manpower resources.
We need not be reminded that it is our responsibility as nations to feed ourselves. We cannot blame others for our plight, and neither can we depend forever on the goodwill of the international community to donate food to feed our people. Instead, we must strive harder to seek solutions that will reverse the current trend and indeed improve food security in our respective countries and the whole region. We should therefore commend those national and regional organisations which are making efforts to improve livestock production and arable agriculture in our region.
The International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA) has for a long time been involved in research programmes that seek to improve livestock productivity. In order to address the requirements of the various types of livestock, ILCA coordinates several disciplinary networks focusing on, for example, cattle and small ruminant milk and meat, feed resources and animal traction. These networks help to streamline research programmes in order to avoid unnecessary duplication.
Nutrition is one of the major factors that influence an animal's productivity, and so we are pleased to note that all the disciplines under ILCA which deal separately with forages, pastures, crop residues and byproducts have decided to form one network, the African Feeds Research Network. This network will endeavour to provide all the information available on livestock feed. We therefore commend PANESA, ARNAB and WECAFNET for their collaborative efforts that finally led to the establishment of this unified network.
As I said earlier, the livestock industry in Botswana still largely depends on natural rangeland. I believe that this is also true for many other countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Most of our farmers have failed to appreciate the need to improve pastures and to incorporate pastures and forages, crop residues and byproducts in their livestock production systems. We need a great deal of information on types of feed resources which are available, on their suitability for various ecological zones, on their nutritive value and on how to preserve, store and utilise them properly. This information will assist us to promote the production and use of fodder among our livestock owners.
We hope, therefore, that these institutions and networks of ours, and you the scientists, will work hard to ensure that we have access to all the information we need. We also hope that there will be increased effort to strengthen national research institutions in order to develop their capacity to carry out this important task. In addition, we should pay particular attention to the training and development of our scientists and researchers, in order to improve their knowledge and skills.
One way of achieving this is through the promotion of interaction among you scientists, which will ensure the exchange of ideas and information.
Finally, I wish to take this opportunity to commend ILCA and the various networks for their efforts in organising this workshop and for deciding to hold it in Botswana. I hope that your deliberations here will be successful, and will add to all our efforts to continue to seek solutions to Africa's food problems.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is now my great pleasure to declare this workshop open, with Botswana's national slogan.
PULA PULA PULA
