Nigeria may suffer scarcity of cow meat soon – Agric Minister, Audu Ogbeh

Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh, who spoke yesterday ahead of the National Conference on Transformation of the Livestock scheduled to hold in Abuja from Tuesday, said Nigeria may suffer scarcity of cow meat in the very near future.


Audu Ogbeh, who said Nigeria faces an economic danger if the number of cows slaughtered and consumed as meat on a daily basis is not considered, further disclosed that the expected scarcity could be linked to the huge number of cows consumed daily without commensurate calving.

‘The way we are consuming cows, slaughtering them is quite alarming. Lagos alone consumes 6,000 cows a day, that’s the figure at abattoirs, not figure from birthday parties and burial ceremonies and so on. Imagine what Port Harcourt consumes; or Umuahia, Abuja, Kano, Kaduna and Maiduguri. If you add it up, we may be eating up to 80,000 to 90,000 cows a day and we are not calving as many. Which means a day will come, if the West Africans don’t come into Nigeria with their cows, we may find out we have no cattle. So, that’s an economic danger that faces us’, he said.