Interest in cattle

As an example of how these diverse approaches can throw light on policy challenges around cattle-keeping, we used our seminar to discuss recent debates around foot and mouth disease in Kenya, where a programme of vaccination became controversial. 

The campaign was announced by Kenya’s president, William Ruto, who promised that 22 million cattle (that is, every single head of cattle in Kenya) would be vaccinated against foot and mouth disease – the aim being to ensure that Kenyan beef and leather could be exported to global markets.

One might expect that to be a popular announcement – especially among cattle-keepers. But instead, the announcement met with some vigorous criticism. Some simply queried its practicability – how does a state vaccinate 22 million cattle every 6 months? Or how it would be paid for? Others suggested that the vaccinations were part of a sinister plot by international organizations or big tech and were actually intended to reduce methane emissions from Kenyan cattle.

The campaign went ahead, anyway – though after a few months it was reduced in ambition. Instead of vaccinating every head of cattle a targeted campaign, with funding from the World Bank to subsidise the cost of each jab, it aimed to make some areas free of foot and mouth disease. This created a digital identification system to classify and differentiate between vaccinated and unvaccinated animals. The public debate subsequently subsided.  

But that leaves questions. Why was the initial announcement so ambitious? And why was there such widespread popular suspicion of the ostensibly well-intentioned campaign? Some of the furore was clearly opportunistic, encouraged by Ruto’s political opponents. But, drawing on our different disciplinary perspectives, we suggest that the deeper answer to those questions lies in the history of colonial and postcolonial development policy and intervention around cattle, and in the differing ways in which government, cattle-keepers, and other stakeholders may value livestock.

Since the colonial period, governments in Kenya have aimed to develop cattle-keeping by encouraging cattle-keepers to calculate value in money terms. In that view, vaccination, or any other kind of care, should be understood as a way of increasing the cash value and commodification of animals – making more milk and beef and leather available for sale in more markets. Ruto’s plan was entirely in line with that – eliminating foot and mouth disease would allow beef and leather exports to Europe and the Gulf.

But small-scale cattle-keepers may make different calculations. For at least some of them, cattle provide milk for family consumption, not for the market. They have a value in themselves which is not simply equivalent to their potential sale price as a commodity. Cattle are lent out or given in social exchanges around marriage. They are kept, and multiply, as a store of wealth more tangible than money. A vaccination may not improve that value. The social circulation of cattle may be complicated by money – the cow that has had money spent on it or requires a constant flow of money to pay vet bills is less easily lent or given in a social exchange.

Foot and mouth vaccinations cost money. They must be given twice a year and are not always effective against a disease that has several different stereotypes. Kenya’s cattle-keepers have ample experience of vaccination programmes that have not really worked. They are also – like many Kenyans – suspicious of development interventions that seem to have been devised outside Kenya, with others in mind.

All of this suggests that questions of scientific literacy are very much in the background when it comes to understanding vaccine hesitation. Farmers here are making really complex decisions about the relative value and cost of vaccines in relation to the value of livestock, against historically informed experience and understandings of the best way to engage in a complex market for animal products.  It would be a mistake simply to see cattle-keepers’ attitudes as ‘irrational’. How different stakeholders approach and manage the health of their cattle is informed by a diversity of values and ‘rationalities’.

Our project is not solely about livestock disease or cattle health itself, and it certainly isn’t solely about foot and mouth disease. But these efforts to control a disease that affects cattle - but does not transmit to humans - and the contentions around them,  illuminates why we, and so many others - from farmers to pastoralists to trade ministers and multilateral organisations - have such an interest in cattle.

Interest in Cattle: value, risk and security in eastern and southern Africa 
Professor Hannah Brown, Dr Emily Webster and Professor Justin Willis