Rural pig production systems and breeding preferences of pig farmers in northern Ghana

A questionnaire was administered to 74 purposively selected respondents in order to describe the farming system under which pigs are kept in eight randomly selected communities from the IITA/ Africa RISING intervention communities in the three regions of northern Ghana and to document their peculiar farming systems and constraints with an aim of helping the farmers find sustainable solutions to these challenges. The study also sought to help farmers identify and prioritise breeding objectives using a participatory approach. Generally, two to three pigs were kept as part of a mixed subsistence farming system with little scientific knowledge on pig husbandry since a vast majority of them are not literate and have never received any training on pig husbandry. The constraints faced by most of the pig farmers included diseases, inadequate feed and poor housing facilities. Besides, the farmers have no set breeding objectives as mating is mostly uncontrolled and haphazardly done. It will be useful if the farmers are educated and encouraged to form interest groups to enable them elicit assistance from both governmental and non-governmental organisations to help address some of their production challenges, access better markets and to enhance their bargaining power

Genetic diversity of some Ghanaian pigs based on microsatellite markers

A knowledge of the level of genetic diversity is very important in ensuring the sustainable utilisation of animal genetic resources. To this end, the genetic diversity of some local pigswas assessed by genotyping 86 unrelated pigs in four regions of Ghana namely Northern (Tingoli = 9), Upper West (Papu = 31 and Babile = 32) and Upper East (Gia = 14) using 12 microsatellite markers.The number of alleles (Na), number of effective alleles (Ne), observed heterozygosity (Ho), expected heterozygosity (He) and inbreeding coefficient (FIS) were used to assess the level of genetic differentiation among the five populations in this study. All loci studied were polymorphic and the mean number of alleles ranged from 4.58 (Yorkshire) to 10.58 (Papu) with an overall average of 7.65 alleles. At all the 12 loci studied, inbreeding coefficient (FIS) deviated significantly from zero with a mean of 0.32. When the Nei’s standard genetic distance based on the proportions of shared alleles was used to construct a neighbour joining tree, pigs from the different communities sampled in the Upper West region emerged with the highest bootstrap value of 90%. Generally, the sampled pigs represent distinct populations with a moderate amount (12%) of genetic differentiation but considerable amount of inbreeding (29%) has taken place within these populations over the years. This is the first report of the genetic diversity of Ghanaian local pigs using microsatellite markers