 |
|
|
|
 |
| USAID Information:
External Links:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Yemen Stories
U.S. Helps Yemen Fight Livestock Disease
Trader Yehiya Yehiya Al Bashiri, center, had just sold about 100 cows at the market in Sanaa.
|
SANAA, Yemen - The vibrant and noisy livestock market Souk Nokom in the center of this capital city seems a great place to do business and to provide people with meat and other animal products.
The slow and heavy cows, the frisky goats, and bleating sheep are bought, sold and sometimes slaughtered right here.
But the brisk livestock trade is threatened by the discovery that animal disease such as Rift Fever was being imported among some of the thousands of goats, sheep, cows and camels ferried across the Red Sea from nearby Somalia and Ethiopia.
So U.S. agriculture experts began working with Yemeni authorities to set up a system of screening animals, treating or isolating those that are infected and hoping to get a clean bill of health for Yemen's livestock. 
In Yemen's capital Sanaa, sheep are brought to a stockyard for sale or slaughter. U.S. experts are helping improve animal regulation, sanitation and vaccination to eliminate disease and reopen lucrative exports to Saudi Arabia.
|
A few years ago about one million animals each year -- either imported from Africa or raised here - were shipped to high-paying markets in Saudi Arabia.
But the fear of livestock diseases has changed that and led to a Saudi ban since 2000 on much of the animal imports from Yemen. Some animals still make it across the largely desert and unpatrolled frontier - but most of the trade has been stopped.
U.S. aid officials are working to set up a quarantine system and health standards that would persuade the Saudis to resume the trade.
One trader Yehiya Yehiya Al Bashiri had just sold about 100 cows at the market - his brother is in Africa where he buys them there and sends them over to Yemen in small boats. "The ones I sold today are for local use in Sanaa," he said.
He is aware of the need to improve the health of the livestock in the country and said: "We traders would pay for testing if it would help move the animals" into wider markets such as Saudi Arabia.
"I could easily sell 100 to 150 cows a day to Saudi Arabia," he said.
Back to Top ^
|
