Constraints To Beef Cattle Breeding

These can broadly be grouped into production and market constraints.

Production constraints.

• Government land policy: The policies governing landownership, especially in the beef production areas, need to be revised. Beef production in Kenya is an extensive enterprise requiring adequate areas of land. The fragmentation of land (and resultant reduction of grazing land area) in the ranges has led to a fall in beef production. Privatization and settlement of land by the pastoral communities has resulted in land degradation.
• Institutional framework: There is no formal body that governs beef production and there is thus no mechanism for directing the flow of information about production areas and marketing.
• Government policy on research: Currently only KARI is mandated to carry out agricultural research in the country. Consequently, other research organizations have to collaborate with KARI, a restriction which, for organizational and bureaucratic reasons, may have led to the slow generation of agricultural research technologies. Other national agricultural research systems (NARS) eg universities, with their well trained scientists, rarely receive direct funding for research from the Kenya government or from organizations (eg the World Bank, European Union) that fund KARI, for example.
•  Diseases: Tropical environments are characterized by high incidences of parasitic diseases. These diseases account for the recorded high mortality rates – about25% – resulting in reduced livestock productivity.