Tag Archives: Francis Wanyoike

Amid soaring meat costs, officials from East Africa and Middle East seek plan to keep animal diseases from disrupting livestock trade

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Orma Boran cattle crossing a river in Kenya

New approach to Rift Valley fever outbreaks aims to ensure food safety as region boosts livestock imports from Africa (photo credit: ILRI/Dolan)

With increased trade in livestock products offering a possible antidote to high food prices, livestock experts from the Middle East and 12 African countries are meeting this week (13-16 June, 2011) in Dubai to develop a strategy that eliminates the need to impose devastating bans on livestock imports from the Horn of Africa, as prevention against the spread of Rift Valley fever. The strategy should expedite the flow of livestock products while increasing safety of the overall livestock trade in the region.

Convened by the African Union’s Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the workshop will encourage officials and livestock traders to use a simple ‘Decision Support Planning Tool’ to guide and moderate their responses to Rift Valley fever outbreaks.

The ‘decision support tool’ for Rift Valley fever was developed by 30 experts and decisions-makers from across the Horn of Africa with technical assistance from researchers at ILRI, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and other partners. The tool will be used by chief veterinary officers and other national decision-makers. Its framework identifies the sequence of events likely to occur as the risk of a disease outbreak increases.

Rift Valley fever is a mosquito-borne virus found in eastern, western and southern Africa, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Epidemics emerge periodically with prolonged rains. Climate and land-use changes could make outbreaks more frequent. A study done by ILRI economists Karl Rich and Francis Wanyoike indicated that the Rift Valley fever outbreak in 2007 cost Kenya at least USD32 million.

‘We must avoid unnecessary disruptions in agricultural trade between East Africa and the Middle East,’ said Ahmed El Sawalhy, director of AU-IBAR. ‘Livestock products must be safe and action concerning disease outbreaks must be in line with the actual threat.’ To this end, an animal health certification model suitable for pastoral livestock production systems and that promotes OIE standards has been developed by AU-IBAR in partnership with FAO and the Royal Veterinary College, London. The model is based on risk assessment and involves integration of both upstream animal health inspection and certification at entry points, markets and at the quarantines.

Time is also of critical importance in prevention and control of transboundary animal diseases. ‘In the last Kenyan Rift Valley fever outbreak, control measures were implemented late—not until there were definitive signs of an outbreak,’ said Jeffrey Mariner, an epidemiologist at ILRI. ‘This tool links early warning signs to control measures that can be implemented before animals or people begin falling ill. The new tool could reduce the impact of Rift Valley fever, and maybe even prevent some local outbreaks and has the potential to prevent the spread of Rift Valley fever through trade.’

‘The good news,’ says Bernard Bett, an epidemiologist at ILRI, ‘is that the impact of Rift Valley fever can be mitigated with early action during an outbreak, but veterinary officers and  decision-makers need to know what interventions to implement—and when—as the  stages of an epidemic  unfold.’

Rift Valley fever is best prevented through animal vaccination. But vaccines are expensive and few governments are willing to pay for expensive vaccines unless evidence indicates an epidemic is imminent. Regional cooperation is required to build consensus on managing the disease and to prevent trade disruptions.

Larry Meserve, USAID/EA’s regional mission director commented, ‘President Obama’s Feed the Future initiative aims to increase food security throughout Africa. To succeed, we must all help to improve the capacity of leadership in the Horn of Africa to anticipate potentially disastrous events like disease epidemics so that appropriate preventive or mitigating measures are taken before it is too late. Livestock is a vital staple crop in this part of the world, and both the private and public sectors have to do everything possible to prevent unnecessary disruptions in the trade of livestock and other commodities.’

Visit the official workshop blog site: http://rvfworkshop2011.wordpress.com

Assessing the full costs of livestock disease: The case of the 2007 outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya

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Bullish market

Livestock market in Garissa, in northeastern Kenya. Closure of the cattle market and disruption of cross-border cattle trade with Somalia due to outbreaks of livestock disease can worsen food insecurity among the pastoralists and agropastoralists on both sides of the border. (Photo credit: Tze-Yun Soh)

Rift Valley fever is a mosquito-transmitted zoonotic disease that harms both human health and livestock production. It can also induce large, often overlooked, economic losses among many other stakeholders in the livestock marketing chain.

A new paper published by ILRI scientists Karl Rich and Francis Wanyoike assesses and quantifies the multi-dimensional socio-economic impacts of a 2007 outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya. The study is based on a rapid assessment of livestock value chains in the northeast part of the country and a national macroeconomic analysis. As would be expected, the study results show losses among producers in food security and incomes. But the researchers also found significant losses occurred among other downstream actors in the value chain, including livestock traders, slaughterhouses, casual labourers, and butchers, as well as among those in non-agricultural sectors. To better inform policy and decision making during animal health emergencies, the authors argue that we should widen our focus to include analyses that address the multitude of economic losses resulting from an animal disease.

The authors write:

‘Rift Valley fever has had significant impacts on human and animal health alike in East Africa and the Middle East. Past outbreaks in South Africa (1951), Egypt (1977/78), Kenya (1997), and Saudi Arabia (1998–2000) resulted in the cumulative loss of thousands of human lives. The 2000 outbreak in Saudi Arabia led to the imposition of trade bans of live animals from the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya) that had devastating economic impacts: one study estimated that total economic value-added in the Somali region of Ethiopia fell by US$132 million because of these trade bans, a 42% reduction compared with normal years . . . .

‘In 2007, Rift Valley fever returned to East Africa, impacting both Kenya and Tanzania. Specifically hard hit by this latest outbreak were the pastoral communities of the northeastern part of Kenya. In this region, livestock serve an important livelihood function for pastoralists, with livestock trade representing over 90% of pastoral incomes . . . . Moreover, northeastern Kenya has the highest incidence of poverty within Kenya, with poverty rates of approximately 70% in 2004 . . . .

‘An overlooked component in the socio-economic analysis of animal diseases is the multiplicity of stakeholders that are affected. Rift Valley fever does not just affect producers, but also impacts a host of other service providers within the livestock supply chain and other parts of the larger economy. Cumulatively, these downstream impacts can often dwarf the impacts of the disease at the farm level, but public policy tends to concentrate primarily on losses accruing to producers. The failure to capture these diverse impacts may have important implications on the evolution and control of disease that may accentuate its impact.

‘The 2007 Rift Valley fever outbreak in Kenya had wide-ranging impacts on the livestock sector and other segments of the economy that are often overlooked in the analysis of animal disease. These impacts included production impacts, employment losses (particularly for casual labor), and a reduction in operating capital among slaughterhouses and butchers that slowed the recovery of the livestock sector once the disease had abated. On a macroeconomic basis, we estimated that Rift Valley fever induced losses of over Ksh 2.1 billion (US$32 million) on the Kenyan economy, based on its negative impacts on agriculture and other sectors (transport, services, etc.) alike.’

Read more: An Assessment of the Regional and National Socio-Economic Impacts of the 2007 Rift Valley Fever Outbreak in Kenya, by Karl Rich and Francis Wanyoike. Rich is on joint appointment with ILRI and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, in Oslo. ILRI researcher Wanyoike is based in Nairobi. Their paper is published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 83(Suppl 2), 2010, pp. 52–57.