Review on Live Animal and Meat Value Chain in Ethiopia:Challenges, Opportunities and Intervention Strategies

Abstract

Livestock and meat products are among the fastest growing components of the global agriculture and foodindustry and one of a few agricultural commodities in Ethiopia from which the country earn foreign currency.Even though the country is ranked first in Africa and tenth in the world by livestock population, its share inglobal export market is quite small. This review paper is aimed to compile the existing literature on live animaland meat value chain; opportunities and challenges along the chain; and identify the leverage points and suggestupgrading strategies for live animal and meat value chain in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian meat and live animal valuechain is characterized by series of complex constituents involving various actors including input suppliers,producers, collectors, fatteners/feedlots, middlemen, cooperatives, traders, live animal exporters, abattoirs,butchers, hotels and individual consumers. The country has a number of opportunities for livestock and meatmarket due to its strategic location, sound climatic condition, huge livestock resources and increase in domesticand foreign demand. Despite the emerging opportunities, the existing livestock and livestock products valuechain are under developed due to different challenges. The main challenges faced by live animal and meat valuechain actors are shortage of feed, diseases, low technology uptake, weak policies, weak financing, pricefluctuation, non-market orientation, lack of weighing facilities, late payment in transactions, unreliability ofsupply and low quality of meat, illegal trade, lose across value chain and poor linkages between value chainactors. From this review it has been recommended that improving infrastructure specially opening secondarymarket at potential fattening areas, providing awareness for pastoralists on market-oriented production,supporting cooperatives, introducing a standard unit in livestock market, provision of reliable market informationfor pastoralists, strengthening market linkage, creation of regulatory mechanism for livestock brokers and illegaltrade, value addition, innovative product development, cost-effective marketing channels and improvingcompetitiveness of the products in export markets are important along Ethiopian live animal and meat value chains