NAIROBI, 5 July (IRIN) - Livestock exports have resumed in earnest in Somalia, after a ban by the Gulf states brought the trade to a halt. The ban was imposed in September 2000 on the Horn of Africa after an outbreak of Rift Valley fever (RVF) in Saudi Arabia and Yemen - the first recorded epidemic outside Africa. Coming on the heels of a three-year regional drought, the ban hit pastoralist communities hard, particularly in areas of Ethiopia and northern Somalia.

Efforts by humanitarian agencies to tackle the ban - or mitigate its effects - recently proved fruitful when the United Arab Emirates decided to lift it in May. Animals are once again moving out of the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland, northeastern Somalia, and the independent state of Somaliland, northwestern Somalia, but the trade will continue to face an uncertain future until it has been regulated to meet international standards. Dr Paul Rossiter, regional livestock coordinator for the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), talked to IRIN about the RVF ban - and why it was justified.

Q: What is the status of the ban on livestock from the Horn of Africa?

A: With the exception of the United Arab Emirates all the other countries still have the ban in place, including Yemen, and in particular Saudi Arabia. As a result of a joint mission into Somalia to some abattoirs in February, involving three or four veterinarians from UAE, myself from FAO and support from UNDP, the UAE meat trade restarted from some export abattoirs, one in Galkayo [Puntland] and one in Mogadishu... Subsequent to that they also lifted the ban on livestock [in May]. It precipitated an absolutely mad exodus of livestock out of Bosaso [Puntland], going across to Dubai at a very hot time of the year in small dhows. I think a lot of the sheep had a very hard time of it, and they weren't in very good condition when they arrived. They were accepted, but unfortunately there has been such an oversupply, market prices crashed in Dubai and are now less than they are buying for in Somalia.

Q: How much difference does the lifting of the UAE ban have on the overall issue of the ban - is it significant?

A: Saudi is the big one. Saudi is several million animals a year, whereas the others are in hundreds of thousands, predominantly for the animals taken over for the Hajj [Islamic pilgrimage].

Q: And why has Saudi not been persuaded to lift the ban?

A: Saudi, you must bear in mind, has recently lost 200 people to Rift Valley fever - Yemen lost over a hundred people as well - whereas UAE and Oman haven't had any RVF, so they are able to look at it with a slightly more dispassionate eye, I think. The Saudi issue is complicated. They are the guardians, if you like, of the health of everyone who comes on the Hajj, so they want to be sure that whatever mechanism and processes are put in place now... is almost watertight, with a very, very low risk of causing any disease for Saudis nationals, residents, and people who go on the pilgrimage. In fact, now it is reported that the ministry of health would like to see a no-risk situation. They would like to see some kind of 100 percent guarantee - which is almost impossible to achieve. I should add that one of the things the expert committee feels is [that] it is absolutely justified to impose a ban on the livestock when a there is a big epidemic of RVF. The health of people is paramount, and RVF over the last few years has been shown to kill.

Q: When the ban was imposed, pastoralists in the Horn of Africa said: What Rift Valley Fever? We haven't seen it here.

A: Well, they are probably quite right, they probably never have seen Rift Valley Fever in their livestock. It's got an interesting epidemiology in that it is very widely spread throughout Africa, and has been shown to occur outside Africa - in Arabia. In many of the highland areas, some of the wetter areas, there is annual circulation of this virus at a level that, if people were looking for it, it could be detected. But in the arid and semi-arid areas, such as parts of the Ogaden to southern Somalia and northeastern Kenya, the amount of Rift Valley Fever that is seen is very low indeed, and it really only emerges every 20-30 years in a type of El Nino situation, which we saw in Kenya '63 and '77, and of course recently in '97-98.

Q: What has been done to try and help these countries, where livestock export is, in some places, critical to the economy?

A: We have been holding a series of meetings in a UNDP-supported project, the aim of which is to produce a scientific basis for managing the risk caused by RVF. The first meeting was an expert consultation in Rome, where people who really knew about RVF and understood its epidemiology came together to work out very simple procedures for reducing the risk when livestock are moved around. They came up with a number of options. We took those recommendations then to a technical meeting held in Nairobi two weeks ago, for chief veterinary officers, and senior epidemiologists from countries in the Horn of Africa. There were also some similarly senior veterinary staff from countries in the Arabian peninsula, also from Egypt, and a lot of interested people from international bodies and NGOs working in Somalia, as well as representatives from the various administrations in Somalia. We explained the thinking behind these recommendations, and we discussed them. People modified them in terms of what is practical in their part of Africa, and they also then produced a set of recommendations. These are now all being prepared in one document... which is, if you like, the scientific groundwork. We want to take it to the importing countries so they can think about it, and discuss it among themselves if necessary. Several of these countries would like to work in harmony with other importing countries... Our aim is to hold a meeting later in the year to bring both the importers and exporters together to decide on what can actually be implemented, and what would be acceptable to the importer. It is the importer who will drive all of this. The importer will say we want vaccinations, or we don't want vaccinations. If they don't want vaccinations, they will want some kind of early warning system to pick up the kind of meteorological signs that might suggest serious outbreaks of RVF.

Q: If the bans are going to be inevitable at times, is there anything a country like Somalia can do to mitigate the effects?

A: The best thing that could be done is to regulate the trade in livestock... The trade has been so unregulated because it benefits both parties in some ways, the sellers and the buyers. It's also been very vulnerable to a sudden cutoff - I wouldn't say at a "whim", but at any sign of disquiet from the point of view of the importer. And of course the importer also has a wide variety of other options for purchasing livestock, from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, other parts of the Middle East; there is a tremendous amount of meat and livestock available in the world today. Somalia must learn to compete in that market, by first improving the quality of its animals in terms of health and body condition, and also by putting in place a regulated trade. I've mentioned the UNDP project, but there are two other projects which will greatly help this trade. One... is an FAO mission supported by the government of Italy [who] have been in Ethiopia, the Ogaden, Djibouti, looking at aspects of the trade. They are in Nairobi at the moment, and they will be in Somalia for the next month. They are looking in particular at how to help with the marketing of these animals, to regulate it and put in place an internationally accepted certification. There is another project due to start soon, which is the Somali component of the Pan African campaign for the control of epizootics, which is run by the European Union. That aims to greatly strengthen disease surveillance in Somalia. I think if these projects are up and running, and [there is] improved surveillance... we can answer criticism that the disease might be present, and maybe refute with good data... Couple that with accepted certification, then I think Somalia will have gone a long way to put in place the kind of regulated trade system which will now be expected of it now anyway. The days of an unregulated trade, we would hope, might be in the past. There will be justified bans based on known epidemics that have been confirmed, but we would like to see a situation where those bans can be quickly raised as soon as the risk is over.