TEREKEKA, 5 October 2011 (IRIN) - “There were so many, and now there are so few… It makes me sad when the animals die,” said Sezerina Sake, a young Mundari woman, as she looked on to the community’s cattle camp in Terekeka, 80km north of South Sudan’s capital, Juba, where she has spent her entire life.
Generations here have missed out on schooling to tend to the cattle, milk the cows and burn their dung to use as mosquito repellant.
While Sezerina does not know her age, she is all too aware that she needs to attract a 50-cow dowry if her parents are to allow her to marry when the time comes. She hopes vaccinating the community’s remaining 800 cows will make this more likely.
The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), estimates that with 11 million cows and 19 million goats and sheep, South Sudan has the fourth-largest herd of livestock in Africa. In the world’s newest nation, the livelihoods of more than 80 percent of the population are based on livestock.
According to a recent report on the economic impact of east coast fever in South Sudan’s Eastern Equatoria state, published in the International Research Journal of Agricultural Science and Soil Science, “livestock... are primary investment resources which generate food (meat, milk), cash income, fuel, clothing, employment and capital stock. They provide manure and draught power for crop production. They are stores of wealth which provide a sense of security, prestige, social status and cultural value. In addition, livestock convert crop waste and by-product as well as forages - otherwise useless to man - into useful products.”
The paper found that direct losses attributable to east coast fever outbreaks in just two cattle camps in Juba district in 2011 amounted to more than US$134,000.
Source: The Integrated Regional Information Networks (http://www.irinnews.org ) 
December 15, 2009, 08:22:29 AM