Small Scale Livestock Farmers’ Disincentives for Animal Disease Prevention and How Incentives Can be Improved: A Case of Uganda

Abstract

Small scale livestock farmers in Uganda are faced with animal disease as one of the major production constraints. There are low levels of disease prevention and this could be partially attributed to the fact that small scale producers do not have the right incentives to prevent animal disease. In this paper we use existing literature to highlight the disincentives that exist among small scale farmers to not prevent animal disease and solutions that could improve their incentives. Among others we note that farmers have low incentives to prevent animal diseases due to the nature of their production systems, keeping livestock as part of a diversi cation strategy, lack of nancial incentives and the weak institutional structures in place. As possible solutions, we suggest the use of the new tripartite cooperative model to implement incentives such as a quality based payment scheme and use social monitoring to ensure compliance, compartmentalization, product differentiation and certi cation aiming at local and regional markets.