UPDATE: 50,000 cattle dead due to drought in Colombia

While drought has 36 municipalities in seven departments in public calamity, Fedegan revealed that 50,000 animals have died in the last month and about 2 million hectares are affected.

Fedegan CEO, José Félix Lafaurie, made ​​a new call for the government to take urgent measures to mitigate the effects of drought and recalled that El Niño of 2009-2010 losses were 1.2 billion pesos, while the La Niña of 2010- 2011, losses reached 1.1 billion pesos.

38.000 million, loss of fertility in cows: 119.000 million and impairment of soils and pastures: 64,000 million, a decrease in milk production 53.000 million: “Ya losses to the livestock sector as reflected in weight loss of the animals are estimated pesos, “he said.

Lafaurie asked the Government that the measures are not only short term, but “the country must make an enormous effort of long term watershed recovery and environmental management, and more permanent solutions such as drilling deep wells and generation of irrigation infrastructure to be able to counteract these phenomena will become more frequent. “

So the plan progresses shock

To try to mitigate drought mainly on the coast, the National Risk Management Unit, UNGRD, announced that it has committed in recent weeks 28,500 million pesos for the construction of deep wells, mills, machinery, humanitarian assistance, tankers , animal feed supplement, operating expenses, pumps and water treatment plants.

“Given the conditions presented in La Guajira, the emergency plan is in place that will give priority to this area, which has active departmental room 24-hour crisis, where constant monitoring is done to actions to this department, “said Carlos Ivan Marquez, director of UNGRD.

Among the measures that have been taken to this region, is the delivery of a well 300 meters deep which gives 5 liters of water per second and has the capacity to serve 200,000 people.

In addition, the housing minister, Luis Felipe Henao said in order to continue to provide solutions more than 20 wells will be drilled groundwater in the middle and upper Guajira

“Let’s create a squad for prioritizing and viable and know what the most important for the Caribbean region are aqueducts.’s The first mission to be conducted with representatives of the Departmental Water Plans, PDA” said the minister.

He recalled that before 2010 through the PDA had been made viable 11,000 million pesos to La Guajira and then gave free reign projects 130,000 million pesos and 29,000 are outstanding resources for the respective procedures. Also are drilling wells in some municipalities the Coffee said.