N.Z. helping overcome Peru’s meat shortage

Press, 13 February 1979, Page 22

N.Z. helping overcome Peru’s meat shortage

PA Wellington A New Zealand livestock specialist, Mr Ross Moorhouse, a sheep and beef officer with the Ministry of Agriculture, has returned from Peru after completing a two-year assignment with a New Zealand livestock and pasture improvement project in the high plains of the Andes around Lake Titicaca.

Funded under a New Zealand bilateral aid programme in Peru, the project is based at Puno, on the shores of the lake. It reaches farm co-operatives in an area half the size of the South Island.

Introducing a group breeding scheme among the sheep farmers was a priority, according to Mr Moorhouse, because of Peru’s desperate shortage of red meat. “In Lima you cannot buy red meat on alternate fortnights under a Government policy aimed at retaining and building up livestock numbers,” he said.

Mr Moorhouse and his Peruvian counterparts in

Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food spent much of their time teaching farmers a very simple breeding system which applied mainly to Corrie-, dales.

“By the time I left we had 17 co-operatives involved in the scheme and it was starting to be applied to the alpaca herds,” he said. The alpaca, an Andean animal related to the llama, provides both meat and wool. Its wool commands about five times around the world average price for sheep wool; the fibre is similar to mohair. The Corriedale is the main sheep breed of Peru’s Altiplano, today’s stocks being descended from shipments imported from Australia and New Zealand (more than 7000 rams in 1973) and Argentina and Uruguay (6850 ewes in 1974).

Mr Moorhouse found the New Zealand Corriedale was well suited to the region -— treeless tussocklands averaging 3850 m above sea level an environment not unlike

the South Island’s Mackenzie Country.

The Altiplano, however, has a much longer dry season — eight months, and frosts occur at Any time of the year. At Puno Mr Moorhouse was part of a team of ? four New Zealand advisers — two pasture specialists, a scientist and livestock ‘ adviser.

He says the project is having a “noticeable im- ‘ pact,” especially in pasture improvement.

“There has been a good* deal of success With the lucerne species called Wairau, imported from New Zealand.

“Improved pasture has» been established on more than 200 sites in the project area, the biggest improved sites being about • 300 ha,” Mr Moorhouse said.

The co-operatives in the region had been “very receptive” to the advice of’ the New Zealanders, ’he said.

A new team of advisers, led by Mr B. M. Steven* . son, of Alexandra, has been posted to Puno for two years.