The fate of the dairy industry remains uncertain as the race to find an alternative source of imported cows has hit a major roadblock, Barbados TODAY has learnt.
Barbados Beef and Dairy Association president Annette Beckett reported that dairy farmers were having a hard time identifying another country to provide at least 200 pregnant heifers after veterinary officials here ruled out the United States after bird flu spread to cattle there.
While contact has been made with businesses operating in virus-free environments, finding a farm with hundreds of pregnant heifers ready for export was proving to be a mammoth task.
On May 27, Chief Veterinary Officer Dr Mark Trotman announced a temporary ban on the importation of live cattle from the US, derailing a government-backed $1.5 million import plan to save the dairy industry from collapse due to extreme heat conditions.
The first batch of 214 cows was to have arrived by air by this weekend, while the rest would be imported later in the year.
But over the past month, there has been a multistate outbreak of the bird flu strain H5N1 in US cattle.
The ban is in place until further notice.
Since then farmers have been scrambling to find an alternative source to get the cows.
“We are still checking around,” Beckett told Barbados TODAY. “There aren’t many areas where you can get cows from. We have to find areas that, in terms of transportation, would not cost more than the cows. So we checked places like Canada. Brazil is already ruled out because of the foot and mouth disease they are battling. We had a conversation with Costa Rica but they need more information and they have to get back to us. There isn’t a problem with the bird flu in Canada or Costa Rica so that is not a problem.
“But there aren’t a lot of places where you can source 200 cows from and that is the problem because they won’t be a lot of farms, even those that are selling, that would have 200 heifers that they can say, ‘good you can get the 200 heifers four or five months in calf (pregnant).’ So we don’t really have a lot of options and there is nowhere in the Caribbean that has those numbers that we can get dairy cows from.”
To date, only two people in the US – farm workers – have contracted bird flu after coming into contact with sick animals, in the first-ever reported case of cattle-to-human transmission of bird flu.
The reported signs and symptoms of bird flu infections in humans have ranged from no symptoms or mild illness such as eye redness, and mild flu-like upper respiratory symptoms to severe flu-like symptoms including high fevers, sore throat, runny/stuffy nose, muscle or body aches, headaches, fatigue shortness of breath or difficulty breathing.
sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb
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