We commend the recent concerted efforts by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Botswana Meat Commission to diversify the country’s beef market away from the European Union.
Although the government’s move is in our view belated, it is nonetheless a welcome development.
It is disappointing that for a long time government was lulled into a false sense of security by the lucrative European Union market so much so that it forgot or failed to explore alternative markets for Botswana’s beef in preparation for any eventuality.
Results and ramifications of a failure to diversify our beef markets came home recently when the European Union deregistered Botswana beef before we had fallen foul of some of their many stringent requirements.
It never made any good economic sense from the beginning for us to have simply relied on the EU market. Of course the European market offered very good prices, and the opening was exceptionally good while it lasted but a failure to have a fallback position has, in our opinion, been very irresponsible and terribly shortsighted.
The recent lock out from selling to the EU market should be a serious lesson for us and as a country we should try our very best to avoid such pitfalls in the future.
It should not have taken us a lock out and deregistering out of the EU market before we could wake up and start running helter-skelter in search of alternative markets as if those markets never existed in the past.
As a country we should have always been alive to the fact that over-reliance on a single market was dangerous, no matter how large or lucrative that market.
Given the importance of the beef market to our agricultural sector and indeed to the entire Botswana economy, we should always have other avenues.
We take this serious view because as a country we have overly depended on diamond exports as the biggest foreign revenue earner for far too long and when the world was hit by the 2008 global economic recession, we were badly exposed and forced to run huge budget deficits.
To date we are still struggling to balance our budget and get the economy on the right course as our recovery is fragile and on the back of external factors.
For far too long we have preached economic diversification but we have not been able to break any ground.
Therefore, government efforts in exploring alternative beef markets in our neighbouring countries, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and other parts of globe are a welcome development.
Without apportioning blame on the past ministers of agriculture and BMC chief executive officers, we are glad that at long last the relevant authorities are beginning to realize the importance of exploring alternative markets to cushion us against possible devastating eventualities.
In the same vein we are inclined to join government in imploring farmers, Members of Parliament and the general public to support the BMC Amendment Bill which seeks to abolish the current BMC monopoly and ultimately open up the market for competition when it is re-tabled in the current parliament session.
We are aware that the bill was deferred in the February Budget session as legislators requested for more time to consult their constituents and it is our ardent hope that they have done so.
It is only through competition that farmers can optimize profits from the sale of their cattle as opposed to the current situation in which market prices are determined by the BMC.
The amendment of the BMC Act is long overdue. Once passed, it will create a window of opportunity for new investments not to mention for farmers to negotiate better prices for their cattle in addition to exploring alternative potential markets without undue government restriction.
This is especially so because commercial cattle farmers spend a lot of money in breeding quality cattle whose value might far exceed the prices set by BMC prices.
