The minister rules out that this is affected by beef marketing

The market and export of beef should not be affected screwworm outbreak suffered by the country, assured the Minister of Agricultural Development (Mida), Augusto Valderrama.

The owner specified it Panama does not sell live animals abroad and the meat that comes out is cut.

“What the animal has is a wound and In the case of slaughterhouses, injured animals are not acceptedValderrama said.

With this, the minister made it clear that the outbreak did not stop the marketing chain. “We have inspected a lot of cattle and most of them are in good condition,” he said.

The beef exports decreased in the first quarter of this yearcompared to the same period in 2022, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC), which does not specify the factors that caused it to fall.

The main markets for Panamanian meat are China, Taiwan, El Salvador and Caribbean countries such as Cuba, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, according to reports from National Association of Cattle Breeders (Anagan).

There is currently an outbreak of carp infestation He did not reach the provinces of Chiriquí and Bocas del Toroand it is concentrated only in Veraguas, Herrera, Panamá Oeste and Colón, where the last cases were discovered.

“What we are doing is restricting the passage of sick cattle and Eliminate cases in Central Provinces and Western Panamaand then push them all towards Darién,” Valderrama explained.

Any affected area detected by continuous monitoring by Mida staff fails mitigation measures, which include more watering sterile flies in order to reduce the population of snails.

In this regard, Minister Mida reported that the production of modified sterile flies in a binational factory operating in Panama East it went back to 7000 per traysince it was reduced to 3500 flies.

Except, they worked on a fly with new qualities which spreads from the border with Colombia, from 10 kilometers inside the neighboring country to the Panama Canal, and now the outbreak has spread to western Panama and part of Coclé, Herrera and Veraguas.

Valderrama estimates that in three months the situation should normalizeafter taking measures to control the case.

“We will wait three months to assess the cases that have started to decrease. We endured the fly in the central provinces and that didn’t happen to Chiriquí and Bocas del Toro,” he said.

A week ago, the Ministry of Agricultural Development by decree extraordinary health condition of animals due to the discovery of an outbreak of tapeworm, which President Laurentino Cortizo accepted was caused by a lack of timely response to the increase in cases.