Acting Njombe Regional Commissioner Anatory Choya made the call at the weekend when speaking during the launch of National Milk Week 2016, held at the national level in Njombe Region.
Choya who is also the Ludewa District Commissioner, said milk was rich in protein and calcium and if taken adequately it could solve many nutritional disorders in children.
“It is important for district, municipal and city councils to ensure that dairy farming projects are established in their respective areas of jurisdiction to ensure milk is available to school children,” the RC said.
He described milk as an important diet that could help children develop their full potential mentally and physically. “But it’s so sad that there are few people who drink milk on a regular basis.
In Njombe, only 52 per cent of the population drink milk,” he said, suggesting that if milk drinking programmes were introduced in schools children would take the culture as part of their lives.
He said Njombe was one of the leading regions in Tanzania in dairy farming, but its people did not drink milk.“Njombe Region has a total of 15,412 dairy cattle, which produce 8,696,440 litres of milk per day, meaning that every person in the region drinks an average of a quarter of a litre per day. This is a good start, but we need to increase milk production,” said RC Choya.
Principal livestock officer (PLO) from the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Abdallah Temba said that the government was set to distribute improved breeds of bulls to scale up milk production in the country.
Factors contributing to poor milk quality in Tanzania include the environment where the animals are kept and handling of the product.
Most of the daily cattle farmers are smallholders, hence even labourers who take care of the animals are not trained. But more seriously is the fact that the owners (farmers) don’t bother to make follow up on what is happening.
Sometime the hygiene is very poor but also most milk is adulterated with water. (SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN)
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