Fiji loses 6400 cattle to TB, brucellosis

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Cattles on a farm in Tailevu. Picture: FILE

ABOUT 6400 cattle carrying bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis have been culled over the past six years, says Agriculture Minister Dr Mahendra Reddy.

He made the comment in response to questions from National Federation Party parliamentarian Pio Tikoduadua and FijiFirst member Sanjay Kirpal in Parliament this week.

Dr Reddy said 121 cows were killed in 2014, 1531 in 2015, 1024 in 2016, 874 in 2017, 1681 in 2018 and 351 up to March this year.

“Honourable Tikoduadua also talked about what support we are giving to these farmers in terms of assisting them with the existing cattle that they have, so that they could beef up their yields in terms of pasture,” Dr Reddy said.

“As I said we are assisting them in both cut and carry pasture as well as normal field pasture.

“We are assisting them in providing them with the seeds for the pasture.

“For cut and carry pasture, we have got this new project where we put medium and large pounds, we are providing them with the seed stock with a high yield, high protein pasture and we are assisting them to plant half an acre in their fields and then they can expand it themselves.

“These are some of the strategies that we have got to assist the farmers to recover from the loss of cattle, but it will take time.

“At the end of the day, we will have to free up our cattle sector from these two diseases which are having a major impact.

“For Australia, it took them fourteen years to eradicate TB and brucellosis from their cattle, so it is not an easy task.

“They spent millions of dollars. “We have started and we will have to do this to ensure that we are able to sustain our dairy and pig industry.”

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