Ethiopia has the largest number of livestock more than any other country in Africa, according to the latest livestock census statistics conducted on the African continent
Ethiopia leads with a staggering 60.39 million cattle while Tanzania in the second position has an estimated total of 33.9million cattle.
Tanzania’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report on Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Census for 2019/2020 said on Tuesday that the east African vast country was host to 24.5 million goats herded by small scale farmers while 33.3million goats were being herded by large scale farmers.
“In the survey conducted, peasants were found with 8.5mllion sheep while large-scale farmers have 24.2million sheep. Again the peasants were found with 3.2million pigs while large scale farmers are rearing 5.1million pigs,” Dr Albina Chuwa the Director General of NBS said.
According to this survey, it was also found that Tanzania had a total of 87.7million chicken out of which 75.1 million were processed by small holder farmers while, 12.6million were being reared by large scale farmers.
For Rwanda which suffered Genocide against Tutsi in 1994, an estimated 80 percent of the cattle were decimated. Cattle population that numbered 600,000 before 1994 was reduced sharply to 172,000.
Last year, Geraldine Mukeshimana, Minister of Agriculture said that government interventions such as the cattle stocking program “one cow per family” the cattle population has risen to 1.3 million.
According to data from Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB 2018), Rwanda has a total of 5.44 million chickens, 1.33 million pigs, 2.73 million goats, 1.26 million rabbits, and over 600,000 sheep,
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Agricultural censuses collect information on agricultural activities, such as agricultural land use, employment and production, and provide basic structural data and sampling frames for agricultural surveys. It is recommended that agricultural censuses be conducted at least every 10 years.
In other neighbouring countries within the East African economic bloc, Burundi has never conducted a census of agriculture but says is planning to conduct its first ever census tentatively in 2022. Burundi plans to follow the modular approach and include the Core Agriculture Module in its population and housing census (PHC).
Kenya carried out a partial Census of Agriculture by inserting an agricultural module in the Kenya Population and Housing Census in August 2019. The census was 100% CAPI and results have been released. The results provided data for the household sector only.
In February 2020, Kenya initiated the process of census of large, commercial farms; institutional farms; greenhouses and special farms in the non-household sector. All the preparations including training of enumerators, CAPI development and testing and initiation of data collection started by March 10th.
However, by 20th March 2020, the entire exercise was postponed due to Covid-19 regulations. Data collection was resumed in August and ended the third week of September.
Uganda using the Modular approach, the country carried out census activities but was slowed down. The end of the financial year was in June 2020 while the country was still under lockdown. The country decided to postpone the census enumeration.
Original article on Taarifa Rwanda
