50,000 cattle dead due to flooding in Corrientes, Argentina

The northern province of Corrientes became – in the last 20 days – a dramatic scenario for livestock producers. According to their calculations, about 50 thousand animals died due to the inclemency of the floods.

 

The province has 2.5 million hectares flooded in 11 departments. The most affected part is the northern part of the province, where it rained 1,000 mm in the last 25 days, when the area usually falls 1,700 mm throughout the year. It is estimated that there are 1.5 million bovine heads throughout the affected region

 

Manuel Garcia Olano, Secretary of Agriculture of Corrientes, was able to fly over the area two weeks ago and told Clarín that “the situation is devastating. There is a lot of dead property,” he said, because animals do not have to eat for days and die. ” The highest percentage of mortality occurs in calves, but there are also sheep, pigs and birds.”

 

Some $ 350 million of loss is estimated. Although, according to Olano, “the biggest losses are productive: losses of weight in the hacienda, loss of current pregnancy and surely the next pregnancy too,” he says.

 

“The total mortality we will know when the water goes down, but it will be very high, ” he warned. “And in addition, we estimate that even when it stops raining, the situation will be worse because in Corrientes, the grass grows only in the spring, so that the animals that survive will not have pastures to eat .” The province has a rodeo of 5 million bovine heads. There are fields, especially those of small producers, who are 100% flooded .

 

According to Olano, this is a productive but also a social problem. “Because there are about 8,000 producers that have less than 200 heads, that is, they are small producers that today only have the option to sell.” However, many are reluctant to do so and are limited to receiving the balanced feed that the provincial government sends them in canoes to where they are isolated.

 

This weekend the situation worsened because a bridge was broken and the route between Corrientes and Misiones was directly closed.

Courtesy of clarin.com

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