MP calls for dairy cooperatives
Member of Parliament for Thamaga Kumakwane, Palelo Motaosane urged government to introduce dairy cooperatives and allow individual farmers to sell milk and improve the national milk supply.
Commenting on the national budget, Motaosane highlighted that in attempts to diversify the economy, the dairy sector is an opportunity because it is currently not developed and there is high demand for milk, which the existing commercial dairy farmers are unable to meet.
“When talking about transforming the economy, there is an opportunity in the dairy sector. Government should resuscitate the cooperative strategy and let the individual farmers bring the milk to the centralised centre where the milk will be treated. There are lot of farmers who produce milk everyday from their individual farms.”
Currently there are 59 dairy farmers in Botswana who produce 8.1 million litres of milk annually which is only 12 percent of the national demand. Currently, the national demand for milk is 65 million litres per annum. However, in an attempt to address this challenge, government came up with a dairy sector strategy in 2013 but it has not yet been implemented.
He further stated that Government should not just concentrate on big commercial dairy projects but should adopt new strategies to solve the current shortage of milk. “We have seen Botswana Development Corporation (BDC) investing in the Milk Afric Project but the project has failed, We told them Milk Afric is not going to yield fruits when we were at the Agric workshop, they are now saying they want a private company to express interest in operating Milk Afric. Government should benchmark from other countries like Kenya where the dairy sector is doing very well and farmers are able to sell milk on individual basis to a centralised treatment plant,”said Motaosane.
Recently government announced that dairy farmers would be given interest free loans through the Industry Facility Support Fund to enable growth in the sector by at least 18 percent in the next 24 months.