The Albanian Case Study launched with a fieldwork workshop in Tirana,Kukes,Shishtavec, Vranisht-Tobël -Has,Milot,Durres during 9th-16th June. This was led by Jean-Baptiste Hanon (VetoGreen) with support from Xhelil Koleci (University of Tirana). The objectives set out for the fieldwork were:

• Visit cattle and small ruminants farms of various types (traditional, semi-intensive) and various sizes and meet/discuss with farmers and field veterinarians to better understand the typology and challenges/constraints of cattle & small ruminants industry in Albania.
• Meet representatives of various stakeholders of the livestock sector to collect information and build networking:
  • Faculty of Veterinary Medicine
  • Ministry of Agriculture (Directorate of Veterinary Medicine)
  • Institute of Statistics & I&R system
  • Farmers associations
  • National NGOs and local service providers
  • Veterinary services (state and private)
  • Value chain representatives and infrastructures (dairy factory, livestock market)
• Organise a workshop to introduce GBADs and present results of Albanian Case study to stakeholders.

A successful trip with the main findings being:

• The field visits confirmed that cattle and small ruminant industry is an important sector in Albania, with a large proportion of small size, traditional farms (subsistence farming). However, it is obvious that the number of small farms is currently decreasing due to the massive migration of the young generation of people out of Albania, who shows little interest in taking over their parents’farm, due to lack of economic perspective.
• On the other hand, prices of livestock and animal product prices (milk) have much increased for the last 1.5 years, and are currently at a high level (e.g. 1 liter of milk is sold by producers between 0,5 to 1,2 €/liter; 1 piglet is sold 100 €) and this situation may boost the sector in the short and middle term provided that this trend continues, which is uncertain.
• Informal trade is widely practiced (milk, milk products, livestock) but formal trade and modern processing of dairy products is also present with some support from service providers and NGOs.
• Provision of veterinary services is mostly provided by state veterinarians, despite that there are a few successful experiences of private veterinarians
• The implementation of the I&R system of large and small ruminants (RUDA) is a challenge: according to the law all ruminant animals must be registered and correctly identified. Animals on commercial farms can benefit from the subsidies scheme from the government if correctly identified and therefore generally have ear tag. However, only part of animals from traditional/small farms are ear-tagged due to lack of motivation from farmers and follow-up by authorities. Trade of unidentified animals is officially forbidden but they are present in live animal market and in the field (lack of official control, lack of motivation from farmers). Efforts have been made recently to clean and update the I&R database and to improve it (e.g; through pilot projects) but currently it is not possible to request data from the system apart from total number and number of dairy animals which are communicated yearly by INSTAT. The RUDA system is also used to store epidemiological data about animal diseases, collected in the field by state veterinarians .

Thank you to Jean-Baptiste and Xhelil for their work on the Workshop and fieldwork and hope to have more updates soon. If you have any questions please feel free to contact gbads@liverpool.ac.uk