Dairy Development Forum—Quo Vadis?

Irish Ai

Re-framing the climate change debate in the livestock sector: mitigation and adaptation options

Livestock play a key role in the climate change debate. As with crop-based agriculture, the sector is both a net greenhouse gas emitter and vulnerable to climate change. At the same time, it is an essential food source for millions of people worldwide, with other functions apart from food security such as savings and insurance. By comparison with crop-based agriculture, the interactions of livestock and climate change have been much less studied. The debate around livestock is confusing due to the coexistence of multiple livestock farming systems with differing functions for humans, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission profiles and different characteristics and boundary issues in their measurement, which are often pooled together. Consequently, the diversity of livestock farming systems and their functions to human systems are poorly represented and the role of the livestock sector in the climate change debate has not been adequately addressed. In this article, building upon the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC 5AR) findings, we review recent literature on livestock and climate change so as better to include this diversity in the adaptation and mitigation debate around livestock systems. For comparative purposes we use the same categories of managerial, technical, behavioral and policy-related action to organize both mitigation and adaptation options. We conclude that different livestock systems provide different functions to different human systems and require different strategies, so they cannot readily be pooled together. We also observe that, for the different livestock systems, several win-win strategies exist that effectively tackle both mitigation and adaptation options as well as food security

Livestock production: recent trends, future prospects

The livestock sector globally is highly dynamic. In developing countries, it is evolving in response to rapidly increasing demand for livestock products. In developed countries, demand for livestock products is stagnating, while many production systems are increasing their efficiency and environmental sustainability. Historical changes in the demand for livestock products have been largely driven by human population growth, income growth and urbanization and the production response in different livestock systems has been associated with science and technology as well as increases in animal numbers. In the future, production will increasingly be affected by competition for natural resources, particularly land and water, competition between food and feed and by the need to operate in a carbon-constrained economy. Developments in breeding, nutrition and animal health will continue to contribute to increasing potential production and further efficiency and genetic gains. Livestock production is likely to be increasingly affected by carbon constraints and environmental and animal welfare legislation. Demand for livestock products in the future could be heavily moderated by socio-economic factors such as human health concerns and changing socio-cultural values. There is considerable uncertainty as to how these factors will play out in different regions of the world in the coming decades

Indigenous techniques for assessing and monitoring range resources in East Africa

Local knowledge, which refers to a social activity that has been set up primarily as a result of local initiative, or techniques that are endogenously generated, enforced and maintained has not been mainstreamed in rangeland development programmes in the region. This paradigm unfortunately overlooks the fact that local knowledge and experiences form the basis for local-level decision making in natural resource management. Recently there has been increasing interest and understanding of traditional knowledge systems in the fields of ethno-veterinary medicine but not so in natural resource management. Consequently, the ecological integrity of the rangelands is deteriorated because of increasing population growth, cultivation, overstocking, felling of trees, and other unsustainable resource utilization methods. In recognition of the role of traditional knowledge in natural resource management and sustainable development, case studies were conducted to document the traditional methods used to assess and monitor the condition and trend of grazing lands in East Africa by the Pokot and Il Chamus of Kenya, the Barabaig and Maasai of Tanzania, and the Bahima and Ateso of Uganda. The results of this study support the theory of the existence of complementary relationships between traditional techniques and modern scientific knowledge

Status and drivers of village poultry production and its efficiency in Ethiopia

In many developing countries like Ethiopia village poultry makes up a large part of the national poultry meat and egg production and plays important roles economically, nutritionally, and socio-culturally. Households in Ethiopia have not fully benefitted from the potential of village poultry as little attention is given to the sub-sector from research and development efforts. The little research and development efforts tend to explore improvements largely via technical approaches by overlooking the socio-economic and institutional context under which the producers operate. This study aims to identify the technical, household, infrastructural and institutional drivers or barriers that influence village poultry production and its productivity in Ethiopia. Across sectional survey of 5004 households was undertaken in the four highland regions of Ethiopia. Descriptive statistics and econometric tools such as probit and Heckman’s two stage models and their marginal effects were used to analyze the status and driving factors of village poultry production and productivity. Distance to all weather roads decreased flock size and the probability of poultry ownership. Contact with development agents and participation in training increased flock size and the probability of purchasing inputs and adopting commercial breeds. Flock size and ownership of commercial breeds raised households’ likelihood of purchasing poultry input. Our results indicate that research and development efforts have to improve not only production performance through better use of inputs and technologies but also have to equally emphasize increasing the benefits for smallholder producers by providing infrastructural and institutional support to proper target households