The Nigerian Institute of Animal Science (NIAS) has said that it had deployed the use of technology to check quackery in the livestock subsector in the South-South zone 11 of Edo, Delta and Bayelsa States.
The Registrar of the Institute, Professor Eustace Iyayi, disclosed this during a one-day South-South Zone 11 stakeholders town hall meeting held at the weekend in Benin.
Iyayi said quackery in the animal husbandry value chain had taken a very worrisome dimension hence the introduction of new technology to shut out quacks.
“Quackery has affected businesses in the sector because people who are doing it right are losing money steadily.
“What we have resolved to do is to try as much as possible to eliminate quackery in the livestock sector with coding and tracking device.
“We have started it with the poultry value chain where we are now deploying technology to ensure that the day-old-chicks value chain is sanitised.
“We discovered that people just hatch eggs of low quality and put in cartoons of very well-known hatcheries and sell as products of those known hatchery.
“We have worked with a technological company to produce a tracking and coding device which has been launched.
“This device is going to be deployed to mark cartoons and we will be able to track and trace the hatcheries to know where they are coming from.
“The coded cartoons are not going to be made available to quacks. So we can easily differentiate between the original and fake hatcheries,” he said.
According to him, ‘the essence of this town hall meeting is for us to meet with stakeholders in the animal science practice, hear from them the challenges hindering the growth of the sector and get ideas on how to resolve those problems.
“NIAS is a regulatory agency for animal husbandry and animal science practice in Nigeria.
“We have several breakthroughs in the sense that we have been able to put regulations in place to sanitise the poultry value chain.
” The institute has put regulations in place to regulate the animal husbandry aspect of what we do in the abattoirs.
” We have also put regulations in place that are helping us to regulate our members. You must have an annual practising license to be able to practice as an animal scientist,” he added
The Registrar, also explained that the Institute had made it mandatory for farm owners to employ animal scientists as animal husbandry technical officers to manage their farms.
Iyayi, however, stated that the institute had built a strong collaboration with development partners to bring young animal scientists into a platform where they will be empowered as Agripreneurs.
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