Story by Josephine Mugiyo, Diplomatic Correspondent

PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa says the meticulous implementation of the country’s livestock growth plan has resulted in an impressive performance of the livestock sub-sector.

With an economy, whose growth is to a large extent pinned on the performance of the agriculture sector, various policies have been implemented to facilitate the various agricultural sub-sectors to perform to their full capacity.

The livestock sector is among those that the government has put in place various strategies to ensure it thrives.

When President Mnangagwa officially opened the 113th edition of the Zimbabwe Agricultural Show in Harare this Friday, he noted the impressive performance of national beef and dairy herds.

“In the livestock sector, the meticulous implementation of the livestock growth plan led to an impressive performance of the livestock subsector. The January-disease-induced livestock mortalities decreased by over 47 percent, while the national beef herd has increased to 5.6 million between the 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 season, additionally, the dairy herd increased by 11.39 percent from 47 825 in 2021/2022 to 53 250in 2022,” he said.

President Mnangagwa noted that the growth across all the agriculture sub-sectors has a positive impact on other sectors of the economy.

With farmers now working on gathering inputs for the 2023 – 2024 summer cropping season, President Mnangagwa said his administration is scaling up the implementation of programmes for the season.

“We are scaling up implementation of programmes and this includes accelerated implementation of the rural development 8.0 model, which among other issues is establishing 35 000 village business units one in each ward, 9 500 school business units, one in each school and 460 irrigation schemes business units.”

The head of state underlined the importance for all key players in the agriculture sector to continue with their hard work ethic to ensure the country’s agriculture targets are met.