Улаанбаатар
Agricultural Minister receives Swiss Development Agency Director
Society
Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. Minister of Food, Agriculture and Light Industry Ch.Ulaan received Director of Cooperation and Consul General at Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) Gabriella Spirli today on February 20.
At the start of the meeting, Ms.Gabriella Spirli highlighted that the project, ‘Green Gold and Animal Health’, which is targeting 80,000 herder families in 18 aimags, aims to promote sustainable pasture management, protect animal health and help herders have a regular income.
She noted that research has been done on the state of the pasture twice and the results showed that animal husbandry should be run appropriately to the grazing capacity. Thus, in partnership with the local authorities, herder families and citizens, pasture guidelines and usage agreements were developed and implemented as well as the herders were put into groups. Herders in some soums have also initiated collection of fee for pasture usage to establish soum risk fund, which will be used to restore the deteriorated pasture.
However, as legal framework on appropriate pasture usage is still required, a working group consisting of the project members as well as representatives of government and non-government organizations, developed a draft for the law on pasture, and had it discussed numerous times in the capital as well as in the other parts of the country, receiving the people’s support. Ms.Gabriella Spirli then expressed her confidence in cooperation of the Ministry for approval of the bill by the parliament in the near future.
Minister Ch.Ulaan underlined that the efforts and participation of the SDC is crucial in further developing partnership between the two countries in the sector, and expressed his gratefulness for the agency at including agriculture, food security, vocational education in the strategic partnership plan with Mongolia for the next 3 years and initiating and implementing various works.
He highlighted that the bill on pasture should indeed be discussed in the spring session of the parliament, and noted that realizing policy on running animal husbandry appropriate to pasture capacity, developing intensive farming and putting livestock into circulation and keeping animal healthy will bring numerous positive results including make domestic processing factories have raw materials, improving production of herders and increasing product quality and price and export growth.
