No vet in sight?
What, if anything, can be done to improve livestock veterinary services to the rural poor? Peri-urban livestock owners usually have access to reasonable services at a reasonable cost and, because they tend to be more commercially minded, they can exert some influence on service providers who must, therefore, make efforts to meet their customers' expectations. Poor, rural livestock owners, faced with higher charges from liberalized veterinary services, have no choice but to cut back on the amount of professional veterinary care that they buy for their animals. Should the donor community be revising the way it offers help and how should it go about doing so?
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| credit: Andy Catley |
There is plenty of evidence to show that past efforts have, in many instances, been at best ineffective and, at worst, counter-productive. Despite the willing efforts of some individuals, the difficulties of improving vet services seem insurmountable in countries where laboratories are in disrepair and inadequately staffed, where rural roads are often impassable, and where farmers are not paid promptly for what they produce. When farmers are in debt, preventative health care, such as vaccination and dipping, tends to be abandoned. In such circumstances, not only are farmers suffering losses because their animals are not treated effectively, but the livestock industry as a whole suffers because disease outbreaks are more likely to occur and there is a greater risk that they are diagnosed neither quickly nor accurately.
In recent years, as privatization has progressed, donor efforts to improve livestock veterinary services have necessarily shifted towards the private sector. However the rural poor are, by definition, unable to pay much for the health care of their animals, and professional veterinarians are unlikely to establish themselves in areas where a lucrative practice would be out of the question. In an attempt to reach poor, rural livestock owners, the policy of IFAD, among others, has therefore been to focus more on community provision of basic veterinary care, for example by training community animal health workers as paravets and supporting the establishment of revolving funds to purchase drugs.
When training community paravets, the first consideration must be: whom
to train? Sustainability is more certain if the community has participated
in the initial selection of trainees, and refresher training and access
to professional support and veterinary drugs after the project ends, also
help to ensure that those selected continue working. Efforts to bring
more women into training programmes have not always been as successful
as donors may have wished. The usual procedure adopted in IFAD-supported
projects is that community animal health workers are given a basic veterinary
kit. This may be of a specific value or of specific content, such as vaccines,
dressings, castration equipment etc. From the sale of vaccines and other
treatments, the animal health worker is expected to finance the purchase
of further stocks. Nevertheless, drop out rates may be high where the
livestock-owing community is too small, too scattered or too poor to sustain
a reasonable livelihood for the paravet.
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Advice where it's needed |
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Farmers seek more than veterinary drugs from their local agricultural stores, pharmacy, corner kiosk or 'duka', they ask for advice on application and treatment. But how good is the advice? Are the commercial instincts of the supplier governing the dosage rates suggested? And, if the 'default' advice is, 'Read the instructions on the packet', how helpful is this in practice? Studies by the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, show that farmers rely heavily on the 'point of sale' advice and yet those delivering it are, by and large, not trained in any way. Even if the shop owner has some form of animal health qualification, this is unlikely also to apply to the counter staff. The way forward may be to train staff to deal with simple, appropriate and locally specific animal health problems - and to know when to advise their customers to ask for professional advice. |
Attempts to improve access to veterinary drugs have taken various forms: supplying credit for the establishment of companies importing drugs, or for private pharmacies; providing village veterinary pharmacies run by local committees to farmers' associations under a matching grant scheme; supporting small private pharmacies by providing training in vaccine use and business management. (See box)
Under IFAD schemes, the most common means of improving the supply of veterinary medicines and vaccines has been by means of revolving drug funds specifically to improve supply to government veterinary departments. A fund is established for the bulk purchase of drugs which are then sold to farmers at a little above cost price. The effectiveness of such schemes varies but, where they become potentially sustainable, there is no reason why they should not be privatized.
Privatized services are expected to be more accountable and therefore more efficient but private service providers lose economies of scale and are not always the best choice for activities which have an element of public good, for example vaccination campaigns or quality control. Cost recovery may be a major disadvantage for poor people who cannot expect to recoup the cost, even supposing they can afford the services in the first place but, counter-intuitively, in some circumstances this is not the case. Full cost recovery can sometimes have the effect of improving the availability of veterinary drugs to the rural poor.
Much has been learnt over the years about why schemes to improve livestock services have largely failed. That knowledge should be shared and future efforts should be based upon greater collaboration and, not least, a better understanding of what livestock owners need.
For further information www.ifad.org
