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

The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh says that Nigeria in the very near future may suffer scarcity of cow meat.

The Minister spoke yesterday ahead of the National Conference on Transformation of the Livestock scheduled to hold in Abuja from Tuesday.

According to him, the expected scarcity could be attributed to the huge number of cows consumed daily without commensurate calving.


He said, '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'.