According to the World Bank, more than 1.3 billion people globally rely on small scale livestock production for their livelihoods and nutrition. In Botswana, a landlocked country in southern Africa where cattle production comprises 80 per cent of agricultural gross domestic product, foot and mouth disease (FMD) has negatively impacted the livestock and wildlife sectors since the late 1950s, when beef exports were expanded in the days of colonial rule.
Foot and mouth disease is a viral disease that affects cattle, goats and other cloven-hoofed animals. The virus does does not normally infect people, but in animals it can cause blisters on the gums, tongue and feet that may eventually lead to lameness and an inability to eat, and a loss of meat and milk production.
Outbreaks of foot and mouth disease have occurred around the world, and have resulted in the culling of millions of animals to contain outbreaks and protect livestock industries in Europe and elsewhere. The African buffalo is the natural reservoir host for the virus, and currently there is no practical way to eradicate FMD from areas where buffalos live.
In Botswana and neighboring countries that together comprise the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA— Botswana, Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe), the balance between maintaining livestock-oriented livelihoods and conserving wildlife runs a thin line— a fence to be exact. Over 10,000 kilometers of veterinary fences have been erected in southern Africa since the 1950s in order to separate wild and domesticated animals to reduce the risk of disease transmission.
While the fences were initially effective in reducing such transmission, they created problems for wildlife by interrupting ancient migration routes wild populations have relied upon to access grazing and water sources across the seasons. Many species of wildlife have also been entangled in fences, where they eventually die from dehydration, starvation or poaching. The most common type of fence has multiple wire strands as well as a steel cable just high enough to keep a baby elephant from crossing or for a giraffe to get fatally tangled in. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of wild animals have died due to the veterinary fences since their construction.
Furthermore, over time the fences have not always kept the virus at bay, despite the original intent. Elephants and other wildlife damage fences, vaccine programs are not always adequate, and people move cattle into areas they are not supposed to— noting that cattle can also spread the virus themselves. The virus has thus been able to continue to cause intermittent outbreaks in KAZA, limiting farmers’ access to international beef markets as it has done for decades.
More specifically, Botswana has been locked in a land-use conundrum for more than seventy years. Wildlife conservationists want the fences to be removed as soon as possible so migrations can be restored. Farmers want to protect their cattle from FMD so they can sell their beef. In a country where ecotourism and beef production both contribute to local livelihoods and the gross domestic product, an innovative, integrative solution has been sorely needed.
“Communities have come to me and said it is just impossible to choose between wildlife and livestock, because they are both deeply embedded in their lives,” says Nidhi Ramsden, a representative of Animal & Human Health for the Environment And Development (AHEAD) and Cornell University, a UNAI member institution, aimed at addressing this long-standing conflict.
Dr. Steve Osofsky, now the Director of the Cornell Wildlife Health Center and Cornell’s Jay Hyman Professor of Wildlife Health and Health Policy first came to Botswana in 1991, to serve as the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks’ first Wildlife Veterinary Officer. Dr. Osofsky was the one who launched AHEAD in 2003 at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa. After bringing together some of Southern and East Africa’s top experts on livestock, wildlife, economics, and veterinary medicine, a path forward was established for developing innovative ways to resolve conflicts at the wildlife - livestock interface in the interest of advancing transfrontier conservation and sustainable economic development.
Sometimes ‘old science’ comes in handy in new applications. Meat scientists have long known that by deboning and removing the lymph nodes of a carcass, and aging the beef appropriately, there was actually a way to produce beef safe from FMD without needing fences to separate livestock from wildlife.
Years of science-based advocacy by the AHEAD team and partners focused on a safe beef value chain, the idea that beef can be produced with minimal FMD-related risk if processed correctly. The effort reached a critical juncture on 27 May 2015, when the 180 member countries of the World Organization for Animal Health, the official global authority on animal health, voted unanimously to make it possible for African countries to be able to trade beef based on how it was processed— without requiring the physical separation of wildlife and livestock.
“For the first time in 70 years, this policy change offered the unprecedented possibility of access to new beef markets for southern African farmers and pastoralists as well as unlocked the potential for restoring migratory movements of wildlife” noted Dr. Osofsky.
Since then, Dr. Osofsky and his AHEAD team have worked with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to formalize guidelines for implementing what is now known as commodity based trade of beef (CBT), and with the government of Botswana to provide technical assistance regarding implementation, which has now been successfully underway for several years. Within this new policy enabling environment, built upon years of cross-sectoral collaboration, key government officials in Botswana have recently agreed to collaborate on disease risk assessments for the fences inflicting the most damage on vital wildlife migrations. This next phase of work will finally be able to answer the key question— whether some of the fences put up decades ago are no longer serving their originally intended purpose, especially with the advent of CBT?
The work to date has been focused on cattle and wildlife, but Dr. Osofsky makes it clear that “all of this really ties back to poverty alleviation, to system resilience. Neither the livestock nor wildlife sectors should seek to dominate the other. Instead, it is time to make land-use decisions that will be socially, ecologically and economically sustainable for generations to come.”