27 Apr 2017

The veterinary department on Tuesday started the roll out of qualifying and certifying communal farmers for access to EU market.
Botswana Animal Information and Traceability System (BAITS) coordinator, Dr Nlingisisi Babayani said during the roll out in Xanagas, Ghanzi south that they had re-defined the guidelines in an effort to allow communal farmers to access the lucrative EU market.
“The department has come up with guidelines to qualify the communal farmers to sell directly to the EU market without going through the feedlots,” Dr Babayani said in an interview.
The initiative, he said would be rolled out to a total of 13 farmers identified from Xanagas, Tsootsha and Karakubis in Ghanzi South.

After implementing the guidelines, he said the EUwould be informed so that they could audit it with a view to agree and modify it to their preference as they were the ones who prescribed the requirements.
Dr Babayani was confident that their guidelines would satisfy the EU market requirements.
He stated, “our hope is that once we have qualified these farmers we will snow ball and cover the whole district and subsequently the whole country. Farmers will stand to benefit on the prime returns from the EU market.”
He noted that all along farmers had to go through fenced farm or feedlot to sell to EU market.

He said the requirement was that their cattle spent 40 days in the fenced farm or feedlot before accessing EU market.
Dr Babayani said this was very difficult to fulfill under communal set up hence they sold their cattle through feedlots.
The redefined guidelines requires a farmer to clock all cattle husbandry management practices including watering, kraal-ling milking and vaccination.  

“We are not changing the way the farmer has been doing things, what we are saying is that document it,” the BAITS coordinator explained.
Under this re-defined guidelines a farmers should choose type of holding to be classified under and it is easier to clock the husbandry management activities.
Though he said they have five types of holding namely water point, feedlots, integrated farming, ranch and kraal, only three are applicable to communal farming which were water point, kraal and integrated farms.
He said when the farmer chooses the type of a holding, one must consider that all cattle in the selected holding should comply with requirement of EU market for instance all must be ear tagged and must be registered in BAITS. ENDS