The whole country of Bolivia was under quarantine from late March up to the end of May. Currently most of the country continues in such condition. The city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra is the one most affected by the pandemics and, therefore, its population is suffering major constraints to have acces to food in terms of quantity and quality, specially the poor ones. By middle May local authorities allowed food suppliers to have easier access to markets in certain areas as to have better health control of people, markets and products.
Santa Cruz is also the main supplier of meat for the country. A severe reduction of the demand by the closure of restaurants and the marketing constraints established by health authorities affected very much the production activities but, in a bigger degree, its processing and marketing. Authorizations to move cattle have to be obtained from local officers but managers can not move themselves either to their farms nor to the authorities offices because of the quarantine. Transporting trucks have the same impairements and auction centers , the same as other marketing places.
To overcome these limitations and facilite the operation of the beef meat chain the following solutions were adopted: (1) allow the free movement of cattle from farm to farm; (2) allow transporters and farm managers to request and obtain moving autorizations on line to take cattle out of the farms , to move them to the cities and to have acces to urban markets as well as to processing plants; (3) adopt a new auction metodology to sell and buy alive cattle in the major market of the city using media systems like facebook and whatsapp (In a week time the value of the transactionc recupered normal levels as they were before the pandemics). So far the chain is fully operational although the demand still remains constrained.
Jose Maguina, M. Sc., Instituto para el Desarrollo Rural de Sudamerica, IPDRS.
Г-н JOSE Maguiña Villón