Worthing Animal Clinic
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Clinic vet Anneliese Tranter has kindly given over for the time being her slot on the website to Guy Freeland, committee Chairman and himself a vet, who writes: I have recently returned from a month long mission in Sudan, reviewing progress in a large EC funded project aimed at strengthening the Veterinary Service’s capacity to monitor and control the major epidemic diseases that periodically devastate the livestock populations of Africa.
The most feared of these diseases is Rinderpest (Cattle Plague) which, historically, has caused devastation and famine throughout the world for many hundreds of years, and its disastrous effects in Europe were well recorded even in Roman times. Fortunately we eradicated it from Western Europe between 1870 and 1920, but outbreaks occurred in Turkey as recently as the 1980s.
When first introduced into Africa – from Europe – in the 1890s, the disease swept from Egypt right across to the west of the continent, and down to the Cape of Good Hope, in less than 4 years, killing up to 90% of the cattle in the continent and huge numbers of buffalo and antelope also. Since then it has caused periodic epidemics in Africa: the last great one, beginning in 1981 and peaking in 1983-1985, killed many millions of cattle and destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands people in the process – many of them irrevocably.
Fortunately, thanks to a massive programme led by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and largely funded by the European Development Fund, this disease has been almost completely eliminated form Africa now, and it is expected that it will be globally extinct by 2012. This programme started in 1986 and has involved 30 countries across the northern half of sub-Saharan Africa – in a broad band stretching from Mauritania to Ethiopia and Somalia, down to Tanzania, and back across to Nigeria, Guinea and Senegal. It was the Sudanese component of this project that I was asked to assess on this occasion.
Straddling the Tropic of Cancer, Sudan is the largest country in Africa. Approximately 1 million square miles in area, it is about 10 times the size of Great Britain, and one quarter the size of the United States of America: yet it supports a population of barely 40 million people, and 40% of these live below the poverty line – i.e. on less than the equivalent of £1 per day.
A welcome tea break - not just a British tradition!
Sudan, in general, suffers from very low and irregular rainfall and, although it has a few massive irrigation schemes fed by the waters of the Blue and White Niles, less than 7% of the country is suitable for cultivating crops. The rest of the country is mainly flat, empty, sandy desert and semi-desert: although, in the South, it does become rocky and hillier and, because the rainfall there is a bit more dependable, somewhat greener and more wooded. Even so, not too much of this southern land is really suitable for cultivation either, although the development of irrigation schemes could help to expand this.
Ferry on the Blue Nile, some way north of Wad Medani
It is not surprising, therefore, that livestock form the single most important component of the country’s economy. There are about 38 million cattle, 42 million goats, 48 million sheep and 3½million camels in Sudan, and 40% of the human population are entirely dependent upon animal husbandry for their livelihoods, with a another 40% being significantly dependent upon them – by comparison, less than 5% of Britain’s population depends upon agriculture for its living.
The vast majority of these livestock are kept under nomadic or transhumant systems of management, with the herds and all the families travelling several hundred (up to 1,500) miles in their annual cycle to follow the rains for the grazing and water that will keep them all (animals and humans) alive and well. Obviously, such populations are extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of drought and disease. There is little we can do to prevent the former, although ingenious coping strategies have been developed by the Nomads to mitigate their effects, but, by strengthening their veterinary services and the systems of delivering animal health care, we can help to reduce the more serious consequences of disease upon their herds and their fragile livelihoods.
Camels awaiting export to Saudi Arabia
I am pleased to say that Sudan has responded well to the assistance and opportunities offered through this veterinary services project, but there is still a long way to go yet. Hopefully, with its 20 year civil war now over and a mutually satisfactory peace agreement signed by the leaders of both the North and the South, Sudan will, once more, be able to address more of its attention and its own resources towards development of its people and its economy, rather than having to divert so much of them to the very bitter conduct of internal warfare.
My enduring memories of Sudan will be the intense heat (over 110ºF every day for the first fortnight I was there); my continued amazement and admiration that people can survive in such dry, flat, featureless and inhospitable desert country; the festoons of plastic bags which, when caught on the wind, blow for miles until a barbed-wire fence or a thorn thicket catches them; the enormous size of the livestock markets; and the general warmth, courtesy and kindness of all the people I met, in each of the seven states of the country that I visited.
Guy Freeland spent most of his veterinary career in the Department for International Development and its predecessor Ministry of Overseas Development, and is now a freelance veterinary consultant, often involving significant periods overseas on animal husbandry projects. He was also heavily involved in measures to deal with the recent UK foot and mouth epidemic.