GABORONE, July 17 (NNN-Xinhua) — Botswana, through its Economic Recovery and Transformation Plan, has set aside 700,000 U.S. dollars to purchase bucks and rams for farmers across the country for breeding, said President Mokgweetsi Masisi.
There is need to intensify efforts to increase the small stock population, which has declined over the years, said Masisi during his visit to the Impala Rural Training Center located in Francistown, Botswana’s second largest city.
“The initiative of distributing rams and bucks to farmers across the country is aimed at promoting the quality and quantity of small stock,” said Masisi, adding that his administration is committed to commercializing the country’s small stock sub-sector.
All these efforts are aimed at ensuring that Botswana gets a constant supply of quality and quantity to the external markets, he said.
Botswana’s national population of sheep and goats stands at 264,962 and was just over 1.2 million respectively in 2019, according to the parastatal statistical organization Statistics Botswana. — NNN-XINHUA