Partners in a project in India and Mozambique to raise rural incomes through goat rearing have produced a manual to help paraveterinary workers and farmers, especially women and other marginalized groups, transform their goat raising from an informal activity to a viable commercially oriented enterprise.

The project, known as imGoats, or ‘Small ruminant value chains to reduce poverty and increase food security in India and Mozambique’; was conducted from 2011 to 2013 by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), India’s BAIF Development Research Foundation and Care International (Mozambique). It was funded by the European Commission through the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Titled Goat Production and Commercialization, the manual takes the form of a flip chart, with visual aids, illustrations and simple explanatory texts on major topics related to goat rearing, including feeding and health, reproduction and commercialization. Information in the manual was produced by BAIF and Care International from experiences with the imGoats project in the two countries. It is available in both Hindi and Portuguese.

Saskia Hendrickx, ILRI project manager for imGoats, says the manual should be of use to paraveterinary workers, who serve rural villages in these and other developing countries, and farmers wanting to step up their goat production.

In India, Hendrickx says, copies of the book have been shared with BAIF, central and state animal husbandry departments and research institutes. In Mozambique, those using the manual include ministry of agriculture officials, researchers at the Institute for Agricultural Research of Mozambique and livestock service officials in Inhambane Province, where the imGoats project was implemented.

Download the manual in English here.

Download the manual in Hindi here.

Download the manual in Portuguese here.

Find out more about the ‘Small ruminant value chains to reduce poverty and increase food security in India and Mozambique’ (imGoats) project:

Watch a 3-minute film about imGoats in India.

Watch a 4-minute film about imGoats in Mozambique.

Though less common in the United States than in developing countries, ILRI has long viewed farms that mix crop growing with livestock keeping as essential to overcoming challenges to global food security; here is a typical mixed farming scene in Sidama, in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region of Ethiopia (photo credit: ILRI/Kettema Yilma).

By Matthew Davis

The new National Climate Assessment released recently by President Obama’s Global Change Research Program contains dour predictions about the impact of climate change on livestock production in the United States. The report warns that abrupt increases in temperature and more frequent encounters with extreme weather could cause ‘catastrophic deaths in domestic livestock and losses of productivity in surviving animals’.

How can the country’s livestock sector, which accounts for about half of the US$330 billion generated by US agribusiness each year, adapt to these changes? One strategy suggested in the report will be familiar to experts at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). It involves raising livestock and crops together and taking advantage of the synergies between the two.

The climate assessment asserts that ‘transformative adaptive strategies, such as conversion to integrated crop-livestock farming [emphasis added], may reduce environmental impacts, improve profitability and sustainability, and enhance ecological resilience to climate change in US livestock production systems.’

Actually, most food consumed around the world today comes from this type of farm. And ILRI experts have long argued that intensifying the so-called ‘mixed’ approach to food production holds the key to boosting food security in the developing world, particularly as climate change brings new challenges. The fact that it also is being considered as an adaptation strategy in the US illustrates how in American agriculture crops and livestock have largely have gone their separate ways.

In the US today, most livestock products come from large operations that focus exclusively on animals while most crops are raised on farms devoid of livestock. Now it appears the stresses of climate change may prompt efforts to bring them back together. And if US agriculture officials want to go back to the future and embrace the crop-livestock approach, they should consult researchers at ILRI and their colleagues within the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish. Much of their work over the last few years has focused on how to sustainably boost food production in the developing world by capitalizing on the connections between crops and livestock.

ILRI scientists believe intensifying food production on mixed farms could be a very efficient way to make use of limited resources. That’s because what’s being cultivated in the field can help support what’s being raised in the barnyard and vice-versa. For example, ILRI research has revealed that in the developing world, 70 per cent of the diet for cows, sheep, and goats comes from crop ‘residues’, the leaves and stalks leftover from harvested crops. Among the benefits of using crop residues as livestock feed is that it helps conserve water. The same water used to produce food from crops also helps produce food from animals. Separate livestock from crops and much more water is required to produce the same amount of food.

Another benefit of mixing crops with livestock is that livestock can be an important source of fertilizer. Some 23 per cent of the nitrogen used in crop production today comes from livestock manure. For many poor farmers, manure is their only source of fertilizer.

The challenge, say ILRI scientists, is figuring out how to leverage these complementary relationships so that food production can be ramped up in a sustainable fashion. For example, in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, researchers are looking for the best varieties of ‘dual-purpose’ maize, that is, a crop that is superior both in its capacity to produce food for humans and to provide nutritious residues for animals. Typically, maize breeders have focused only on improving grain production and not on improving the quality or quantity of the leaves and stalks.

Researchers also are analyzing the trade-off between letting crop residues stay in the field to serve as mulch and help replenish soil health versus gathering them up for livestock feed. The benefits for each can vary from farm to farm depending on a number of factors, such as the quality of the soil and the availability of either fertilizers for crops or alternate feed sources for animals. But to realize the resource conservation potential of the crop-livestock mix, farmers need a way to determine the proper balance.

Other work has explored the fact that not all manure is created equally: how it is stored and applied can affect the nutrients it provides. There is also research probing ways to reduce livestock’s carbon footprint by improving feed quality. Sometimes what looks efficient from a resource perspective might not be the best thing from a climate perspective. Cows, sheep and goats may produce more greenhouse gases when their diet mainly consists of crop residues compared to other feed sources, such as grain or high quality pasture grasses.

The issues can become complicated, which is why it would be a welcome development for the US, with its vast network of agriculture researchers, to become more invested, literally and figuratively, in how to improve food production on farms that mix crops with livestock.

Matthew Davis is a Washington DC-based science writer and policy analyst; he also serves as a senior consulting writer for Burness Communications.

Image background by Mark Rothko, No 301, 1959 (via Daily Rothko Tumblr Blog).

‘On a hot morning in Nairobi in 2014, Andrew Mude, Team Leader for the Index-Based Livestock Insurance program (IBLI hereafter), looked out of his office window at cows grazing on Ngong Hills’ green pastures, but his mind was elsewhere.

‘In a few hours, he had to attend an executive management meeting where he was expected to recommend IBLI’s next 
steps. But Mude was still undecided: should he recommend that the IBLI team focus exclusively on its current sites in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, and work to develop IBLI into a large-scale, proven and sustainable program in
these regions? Or should he go along with demands to expand quickly to multiple sites worldwide? It was necessary
 for IBLI to grow, but Mude was not yet sure of the direction and trajectory of its growth.

‘IBLI, developed by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in collaboration with Cornell University, and
 the BASIS Research Program at the University of California at Davis, was the first index-based insurance product that 
protected poor pastoralists in drought-stricken areas in Africa from losing their primary asset—livestock. Studies by
 Janzen et al. (2013) had shown that IBLI coverage had a significant impact on these pastoralists’ assets, investments
 and consumption capacity. . . .

‘The goal was clear: to grow IBLI. But when and how should this growth take place? If IBLI stayed in Kenya, how
 could it keep donors happy and build a sustainable program? If they moved to new countries, how could they use
 their insights to be successful elsewhere, while ensuring that the Kenyan and Ethiopian programs were not adversely 
affected? Could they do it all, or would they have to choose? Being either overzealous or overcautious could harm 
IBLI. As ILRI’s senior management team gathered together to plan its 2015–2017 cycle, it was time for Mude to 
present a clearer, better direction for IBLI. . . .’

About this case study
‘Made popular by their extensive use at Harvard Business School, case studies are an effective and popular teaching
 tool employed by business schools worldwide. Management case studies present a real-world management or business 
decision faced by an organization, and are used by instructors to teach students how to think critically through such
 problems.

‘Case studies use a mix of data, interviews and exhibits to give some background and context about a range of 
complex challenges faced by an organization’s stakeholders. While case studies use a real-life situation as a tool for
 discussion, they are not necessarily representative of all the facts, nor do they aim to delineate the right course of 
action. Cases may present alternate trajectories or options, but are generally devoid of any conclusions. They do not
 disclose the eventual decisions made by the case protagonist or the outcomes achieved. Instead, students are asked to
 use the facts and explanations within the case to discuss possible solutions and arrive at their own recommendations
 or decisions. This benefits students by putting them in the place of the real stakeholders and simulating a real-world 
decision making environment. Cases are thus designed to illustrate a complex problem fully, and to facilitate learning 
by encouraging students to develop their own solutions.

‘While case studies are mostly based on realistic scenarios and information, some creative license may be employed for
 teaching purposes. Cases are often accompanied by comprehensive teaching notes, accessible only to the instructors
 of the case, who may also choose to teach the case with the help of supplementary readings and lectures.

Iddo Dror says: ‘This case asks students to focus on growth strategy for a specialized insurance product for the poor. It focuses on the challenges and opportunities of establishing index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) in locations with large populations of poor pastoralists.

‘Students will consider various pressures from the market, governments, donors and partners faced by a nonprofit organization running a socially beneficial program. They will also explore when and how an insurance product serving the poor and vulnerable should be expected to become commercially sustainable and the consideration of donor interests when determining the future direction of non profit projects.’

Iddo Dror prepared this case study with case writer Shreya Maheshwari and IBLI team leader Andrew Mude as the
 basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.
 This case was prepared in collaboration with the IBLI team and benefited from useful insights by a range of partners 
and collaborators of the IBLI program.

Read the whole case study: Using satellite data to insure camels, cows, sheep and goats: IBLI and the development of the world’s first insurance for African pastoralists, by Iddo Dror, Shreya Maheshwari and Andrew Mude.

Roy Lichtenstein, Hey You, 1973, (via WikiArt).

Here is some useful advice for those of in development work on what developing-country decision-makers tend to listen to and what they tend to ignore. These excerpts are from a blog post of 12 May 2015 by Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB and author of Oxfam’s blog and book titled From Poverty to Power (follow him on Twitter at @fp2p).

The new report Green quotes from identified:

• 5 overall trends in external assessment influence
• 12 attributes of more and less influential assessments
• 6 factors that make countries more or less likely to draw upon external sources of analysis and advice
• 12 intended and unintended assessment effects

Note: The numbering below is added for clarity; all the text numbered and set in red is excerpted from the original report, The Marketplace of Ideas for Policy Change, April 2015.

Green introduces the report

A ‘new report, The Marketplace of Ideas for Policy Change summarizes a survey of 6,750 policymakers and practitioners in 126 low- and middle-income countries to find out which of the innumerable bits of advice and analysis churned out by aid agencies, international organizations and NGOs actually influence their work.

‘What’s most alarming is how original this is – I am still looking for a similar exercise on the MDGs, which might have made the whole post-2015 process less of a donor-driven gabfest. Right now the SDG wallahs should be reading this paper and asking – what kind of reporting structure might actually influence government behaviour?

1 The family and gender policy domain is one characterized by relatively high levels of external assessment influence, relatively low levels of (net) domestic opposition to reform, and reasonably good odds of success in reform implementation.

This finding suggests that external efforts to encourage and support family and gender reforms may be particularly fruitful.

Anti-corruption stands apart as the policy domain with highest level of (net) domestic opposition to reform and the worst track record of reform implementation.

Green comments: ‘Advocating on family/gender policy has the best chances of success, anti-corruption the worst.’

2 The democracy and decentralization policy domains appear to be least susceptible to external influence at the agenda-setting stage.

3 External assessment influence is strongest at the agenda-setting stage of the policymaking process.

Green comments: ‘– i.e. get in early in the policy funnel, help define problems etc.’

4 Paying attention to ‘nuts and bolts of government’ may result in greater assessment influence.

Green comments: ‘Please note, all campaigners – think about advocating on boring but important stuff like data collection, staff training, info management.’

5 Country-specific diagnostics generally exert greater influence than cross-country benchmarking exercises.

6 External assessments that rely on host government data are more influential.

Green comments: ‘Use government data, rather than your own, or some international body’s, and you are half way to getting buy in.’

7 The longer an assessment’s track record of publication, the more influential it becomes vis-à-vis others.

Green comments: ‘International organizations tend to have much more staying power than INGOs, producing annual reports on this or that, which slowly accumulate brand awareness and impact. By hopping from issue to issue, INGOs may keep the media interested, but they sacrifice impact.’

8 Neither incentives nor penalties seem to easily explain assessment influence.

9 Prescriptive assessments appear to be slightly more influential than descriptive assessments, and decision-makers in the developing world seem to want more, not less, specific policy guidance.

Green comments: ‘OK, that’s definitely a challenge to all the complexity wallahs and Doing Development Differently crowd who say that outsiders should focus on highlighting problems, not suggesting solutions (which need to be designed by local actors).’

10 Assessments were influential because they promoted reforms that aligned with the priorities of national leadership.

Green comments: ‘A “working with the grain” argument that it’s best to try and influence ongoing processes rather than start new ones.’

11 Senior government leaders and their deputies engage with external assessments in different ways. One potential interpretation of this finding is that leaders, mindful of their domestic audiences, project strength in the face of external pressure, while their deputies work behind the scenes to secure material rewards from donor agencies and international organizations.

Green then highlights some important findings on the limits of external influence

12 The picture that emerges is not one of governments being cajoled or coerced into pursuing reforms that align with donor priorities, but rather that governments pick and choose assessments based on whether they advance domestic priorities.

13 External sources of analysis and advice rarely help to neutralize opposition to reform or build coalitions in support of policy change.

And he highlights the study’s findings on the range of country types

14 Some of the most successful reformers ‘go-it-alone’ and shield the domestic policy formulation and execution from external pressure (e.g., Rwanda and Ethiopia), while others rely more heavily on external sources of analysis and advice (e.g., Liberia and Georgia).

Finally, Green highlights what he sees as three main weaknesses of the report

‘It’s just a survey – so no in depth interviews, focus groups etc to dig deeper, which I am sure would have produced further insight.

‘Massive blind spot on critical junctures – policy makers everywhere ignore advice until they need it, which is often after a scandal, crisis or obvious failure in previous policy. Building detailed timelines with decision makers would have revealed much more about how they take up policy advice and analysis at such moments.

‘Also nothing on the role of people and institutions outside government in persuading the state to adopt particular pieces of analysis – coalitions, insider-outsider alliances etc. This is a world where civil servants and pols read or don’t read/listen to reports – in real life, things are a bit more complicated than that.

Ending with the good news

‘The good news is that the AidData lab that conducted the survey plans to repeat it (and so accumulate influence, presumably). Now can someone apply this approach to the SDGs, please?’

Read the new report in full: The Marketplace of Ideas for Policy Change Who do developing world leaders listen to and why?, April 2015 Executive Summary, AidData, http://www.aiddata.org

Note: AidData is a research and innovation lab that seeks to improve development outcomes by making development finance data more accessible and actionable.

Read Duncan’s Green’s article on his From Poverty to Power blog: Which bits of advice do developing country decision makers actually listen to? Great new research, 12 May 2015

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eyes and Eggs, 1983 (via WikiArt).

The inestimable Tara Garnett, of the Food Climate Research Network, offers much new food for thought on ‘the meat question’ in a discussion paper on What is a sustainable healthy diet? and a new think piece, Gut feelings and possible tomorrows: (where) does animal farming fit?  

Discussion paper

Garnett’s discussion paper, which focuses largely on developed-country contexts, describes the challenge of reconciling all the trade-offs in the many goals we have for our food systems:

About half the global population is inadequately or inappropriately nourished, once the combined burdens of hunger, micronutrient deficiencies and obesity are taken into account. . . .  Can health, environmental sustainability, and all the other goals we have for our food system really be reconciled, or will there be trade offs? . . .

First there is a need to address power imbalances in the food system: throwing more food at the problem may not solve problems of affordability and access. . . .

Second we need to reduce the amount of food that is lost or wasted along the whole supply chain – one estimate puts the figure at between 30-50% of all food produced . . . .

Third, diets will also need to change. What, and how much we eat directly affects what, and how much is produced.

Like the popular American food systems reformer Michael Pollan, the UK’s Tara Garnett comes down to some simple sensible home truths about diets that are both healthy and sustainable, designed for people who have the means to make choices. Pollan memorably got his advice into a declarative bullet appended by two easy-to-remember, if hard-to-follow, qualifiers:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Here is Garnett’s sensible version: 

• Eat a wide variety of foods

• Maintain an energy balance

• Base your diet around tubers and whole grains (but not rice), legumes, fruits and vegetables — particularly those field grown and robust

• Eat dairy products or fortified plant-substitutes and other calcium-containing foods in moderation

• Eat meat eaten sparingly — and consume all animal parts

• Include unsalted seeds and nuts in your diet

• Eat some fish and aquatic products sourced from certified fisheries (although less frequently than advised by the Eatwell Plate)

• Limit your consumption of sugary and fatty sweets, chocolates, snacks and beverages

• Drink tap water in preference to other beverages

Think piece

And here is Garnett in her Think piece describing how our food narratives drive our food solutions:

‘The “future of food” problem is an industry in its own right. It is its very own subsector of the new green economy, spawning innumerable high level conferences, power dinners, “ground breaking” reports, multiply-referenced analyses, think tanks, dedicated academic journals and a proliferation of NGO campaigns and food industry roundtables – all seeking to “address” the variously termed twin challenges, wicked problems and perfect storms that the food system engenders. . . .

‘The difficulty is that there is less unanimity as to what causes the problem, on what or who is to blame and why. This matters because our views about what drives a problem shape our assessment of what constitutes a solution. . . .

While the stories we tell ourselves about how and why things are, . . . the risk is that facts are squeezed and edited and shaved to fit the desired or assumed narrative. And those with most power tend to determine which narrative dominates.

One particular issue exemplifies both the complexities of the food problem, and the different and contested narratives that interest groups (stakeholders), present. This is the “meat question” . . . .’

Garnet goes on to list today’s three main food narratives:

1 Story One: Not enough food. ‘The grand challenge is thus to deliver more food – and more of the foods we want – in ways that generate fewer environmental problems.’

2 Story Two: Too much greed. ‘Our consumption patterns are catastrophically resource intensive and they make us fat and sick. We must change them.’

3 Story Three: Too much inequality. ‘Hunger is not a problem of insufficient supply but of insufficient access.’

Which story dominates your thinking will decide, Garnett says, which solution you support. She goes on to describe what sustainable food systems might look like, and the roles of livestock in them, by painting four future scenarios:

• Calibrated carnivory

• Architected flesh

• Livestock on leftovers

• Fruits of the earth

Of course, as Garnett is well aware, for some one billion people today, Story One is the only story. These people live in severe material poverty (under $1.25 a day). They consume too few calories to maintain optimum bodyweight, energy and health. They have little to no choice about the food they or their children consume—this will be the cheapest starch available. Vegetables will come in a single form (such as cabbage) every single day, if they are lucky. Meat will not be on the menu. Dying early due to consuming too much cholesterol will not be an option.

Read the discussion paper: What is a sustainable healthy diet? by Tara Garnett, published by FCRN, Apr 2014. Garnett notes that ‘this is very much a discussion paper and work in progress. As such we would very much welcome comments and suggestions. We’d particularly welcome input from members in low income and emerging economies, where the sustainability and health issues play out very differently. Do send through your comments in the following ways: by posting a comment on the website using the Add new comment link below (you will need to be logged into do so – contact us if you have forgotten them) or by contacting the FCRN’s Tara Garnett directly: taragarnett@fcrn.org.uk

Read the think piece: Gut feelings and possible tomorrows: (where) does animal farming fit?​ by Tara Garnett, published by FCRN, May 2015.

Visit the website of the Food Climate Research Network to view these documents and much more. (Note that the FCRN home page offers six portals into the FCRN’s huge research library, ‘containing summaries of 10 years’ worth of research and information on food systems, climate and sustainability issues’ and ‘over 3,500 summarised journal articles, reports and other resources.’)

Join the FCRN mailing list here and follow them on Twitter: @FCRNNetwork.

ILRI graduate fellow Taishi Kayano, from Rakuno Gakuen University, collects milk samples from a Kenya dairy farmer as part of a scoping survey of aflatoxins in the feed-dairy chain in Kenya (photo credit: ILRI/Taishi Kayano).

A new paper describes and assesses the strength of a theory of change for how adoption of farm-level technologies and practices for aflatoxin mitigation can help reduce aflatoxin exposure among consumers.

‘Aflatoxins, naturally occurring fungal toxins that contaminate maize and groundnuts and other crops, pose both acute and chronic risks to human health. Aflatoxins are odourless and colourless and impossible to detect accurately without appropriate testing technologies. Both humans and animals are affected, and there is an additional risk of aflatoxin transmission through animal-source foods, especially milk, from animals fed contaminated feed.

‘Consumption of very high levels of aflatoxins can result in acute illness and death. Chronic exposure, which causes the greater human health burden, is a problem in low-income populations in the tropics that consume relatively large quantities of staple crops prone to aflatoxin contamination. The best-documented health impact of chronic exposure to aflatoxins is liver cancer; up to 172,000 cases per year are attributable to aflatoxin exposure. Other health effects, such as immune suppression and child stunting, have also been associated with aflatoxin exposure.

‘While the health impacts of aflatoxin in humans have been widely studied, the correlations between dietary consumption, serum aflatoxin levels, and morbidity and mortality outcomes have not been clearly described or documented. More evidence on these relationships is needed in order to assess the disease burden from aflatoxin exposure relative to other public health problems, and to estimate the cost-effectiveness of alternative mitigation options in developing-country contexts.

‘In addition to the health consequences, the presence of aflatoxins can reduce agricultural productivity and limit the growth of commercial markets and trade. In developed countries, strict standards are enforced to minimize aflatoxins on crops consumed by humans or animals. These standards have implications for market access and exports from Africa and other regions where aflatoxin contamination is common and where standards are not currently in place or enforced. Where aflatoxins are widespread and the costs of mitigation and testing are high, meeting standards remains challenging. Quality differentiation based on either market rewards or public standards is still unusual in most developing countries. Innovative approaches that combine technological and institutional change with increased education and consumer awareness are likely to be required to address this challenge in the near term. Within agriculture, research has focused on developing farm-level technologies and practices that mitigate aflatoxins at their source, in farmers’ fields.

‘Pre- and post-harvest technologies have been shown to be effective in terms of inhibiting aflatoxin contamination, in many cases to within international standards. Application of proven and existing “good agricultural practices” in production and post-harvest (for example, drying and storage) can also reduce aflatoxin contamination. However, studies have found that knowledge and awareness about aflatoxins is generally low, as is use of risk-reducing practices, among smallholder farmers and other stakeholders, particularly along the maize, groundnut, and milk value chains.

‘More work is needed on developing, adapting, and promoting risk-mitigating technologies and strategies and on understanding the incentives for and barriers to their widespread adoption. Because of the complex, multifaceted nature of the aflatoxin challenge, it is important to look at specific solutions such as agricultural technologies in the broader context of how they are expected to contribute not just to reducing on-farm aflatoxin contamination but also to achievement of the ultimate goals of food and nutrition security, economic development, and public health. To date, little attention has been paid to how adoption of these technologies would influence health outcomes. A win-win situation is often assumed; however, the link between agricultural technology adoption and public health outcomes is complex, especially where markets are important for producers and consumers, and the risk of unintended negative consequences may be significant.

‘Developing a theory of change that articulates how the adoption of these technologies is expected to contribute to better health outcomes is a useful way to make explicit and examine causal models, build a shared understanding of the potential for impact, and plan and monitor progress. While typically used in the context of specific projects or interventions, a theory of change is also useful in research for development, to synthesize existing information and experience regarding how the pathways work in specific contexts and identify gaps and priority areas for future research or related activities. . . .’

Read the whole theory of change analysis—IFPRI Discussion Paper 01452, July 2015: The potential of farm-level technologies and practices to contribute to reducing consumer exposure to aflatoxins: A theory of change analysis, by Nancy Johnson, of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); Christine Atherstone, ILRI consultant; and Delia Grace, leader of the agriculture-associated diseases flagship of A4NH and of ILRI’s Food Safety and Zoonosis program.

More CGIAR information on aflatoxins

View an ILRI infographic: Aflatoxin: A fungal toxin affecting the food chain

View an ILRI poster: Levels of aflatoxins in the Kenyan dairy value chain: How can we assess the economic impact?, Oct 2013

Read previous articles about this event:
Aflatoxins in Kenya’s food chain: Overview of what researchers are doing to combat the threat to public health, 6 May 2014
‘Bio-control’=effective control of aflatoxins poisoning Kenya’s staple food crops, 13 Feb 2014
Dairy feed project to reduce aflatoxin contamination in Kenya’s milk, 11 Feb 2014
Australia-funded research fights aflatoxin contamination in East African foods, 6 Feb 2014

Read an ILRI News Blog article introducing a 6-minute film interview of five panelists at the media roundtable on aflatoxins in Kenya: Reducing aflatoxins in Kenya’s food chains: Filmed highlights from an ILRI media briefing, 19 Dec 2013

Read an ILRI News blog article introducing a 6-minute ILRI film interview of John McDermott (IFPRI) and Delia Grace (ILRI), who lead research on aflatoxins for A4NH: Fighting aflatoxins: CGIAR scientists Delia Grace and John McDermott describe the disease threats and options for better control, 8 Nov 2013

Read more about the 19 IFPRI aflatoxin briefs released in Nov 2013: http://www.ifpri.org/publication/aflatoxins-finding-solutions-improved-food-safety

Read the whole publication: Aflatoxins: Finding solutions for improved food safety, edited by Laurian Unnevehr and Delia Grace

Download Table of Contents and Introduction
1. Tackling Aflatoxins: An Overview of Challenges and Solutions by Laurian Unnevehr and Delia Grace
2. Aflatoxicosis: Evidence from Kenya by Abigael Obura
3. Aflatoxin Exposure and Chronic Human Diseases: Estimates of Burden of Disease by Felicia Wu
4. Child Stunting and Aflatoxins by Jef L Leroy
5. Animals and Aflatoxins by Delia Grace
6. Managing Mycotoxin Risks in the Food Industry: The Global Food Security Link by David Crean
7. Farmer Perceptions of Aflatoxins: Implications for Intervention in Kenya by Sophie Walker and Bryn Davies
8. Market-led Aflatoxin Interventions: Smallholder Groundnut Value Chains in Malawi by Andrew Emmott
9. Aflatoxin Management in the World Food Programme through P4P Local Procurement by Stéphane Méaux, Eleni Pantiora and Sheryl Schneider
10. Reducing Aflatoxins in Africa’s Crops: Experiences from the Aflacontrol Project by Clare Narrod
11. Cost-Effectiveness of Interventions to Reduce Aflatoxin Risk by Felicia Wu
12. Trade Impacts of Aflatoxin Standards by Devesh Roy
13. Codex Standards: A Global Tool for Aflatoxin Management by Renata Clarke and Vittorio Fattori
14. The Role of Risk Assessment in Guiding Aflatoxin Policy by Delia Grace and Laurian Unnevehr
15. Mobilizing Political Support: Partnership for Aflatoxin Control in Africa by Amare Ayalew, Wezi Chunga and Winta Sintayehu
16. Biological Controls for Aflatoxin Reduction by Ranajit Bandyopadhyay and Peter J Cotty
17. Managing Aflatoxin Contamination of Maize: Developing Host Resistance by George Mahuku, Marilyn L Warburton, Dan Makumbi and Felix San Vicente
18. Reducing Aflatoxins in Groundnuts through Integrated Management and Biocontrol by Farid Waliyar, Moses Osiru, Hari Kishan Sudini and Samuel Njoroge
19. Improving Diagnostics for Aflatoxin Detection by Jagger Harvey, Benoit Gnonlonfin, Mary Fletcher, Glen Fox, Stephen Trowell, Amalia Berna, Rebecca Nelson and Ross Darnell

Transporting fresh milk by motorcycle in Tanzania (photo credit: ILRI/Ben Lukuyu).

‘. . . Researchers from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and partners have developed and piloted an institutional innovation—a training, certification and branding scheme for informal value chain actors—with good potential to improve the safety of animal-source foods sold in informal markets.

‘Past development policy often focused on formal markets, which at best meant neglect of informal markets and often resulted in harassment and penalties for informal agents.

While in the long term markets are likely to formalize, in the short term, interventions that seek to suppress informal markets can be both ineffective and antipoor.

‘Recent evidence suggests that a more constructive, incentive-based approach to informal markets could improve their contribution to economic development as well as increase compliance with standards in areas such as the environment, public health, and labor.

‘There is a growing recognition of the importance of food safety in developing countries. Forthcoming work by the World Health Organization Foodborne Diseases Burden Epidemiology Reference Group estimates that around 25 per cent of all diarrhea is food borne. As diarrhea is usually among the top three infectious diseases in developing countries, this represents an enormous health burden.

Most food-borne disease is associated with animal-source foods and produce.

‘. . . [I]n developing countries government systems to support food safety are often still emerging, and consumers’ choices may be limited by income and information, which means that the most important incentives to safe production—private demand and effective private or public regulation—are lacking. New approaches to food safety that support and are supported by a range of incentives—social, market, or regulatory based—need to be developed to encourage farmers and other value chain actors to produce quality and safe products.

‘Because of the high level of involvement of the poor and women in producing for, and selling in, informal markets, agricultural research and development interventions that aim to improve their livelihoods have engaged with these informal markets. But in comparison to either smallholder producers or formal-sector food chains, informal markets have received little attention in programs or policy.

This paper looks at the potential of one type of institutional innovation—a training, certification and branding scheme for traders—to contribute to improved food safety outcomes in informal markets for animal-source foods.

‘Evidence from risk analyses and other studies of livestock value chains have found that actors whose roles include aggregating product from many producers—for example, traders, processors, chilling plants, slaughterhouses—play a key role in maintaining and improving the quality of food, and they also may be easier to reach since there are fewer of them compared to either producers or consumers. The intervention, which emerged from research on smallholder dairy production and marketing in Kenya, has been adapted for milk traders in India and Tanzania and butchers in Nigeria.

It is based on the hypothesis that professionalizing rather than criminalizing informal-market actors improves food safety outcomes while at the same time improving nutrition and protecting and enhancing important sources of income and employment for the poor. The approach also may be applicable to formal-sector actors who are currently unable to ensure food safety.

‘Building on the experiences of the pilot studies, this paper develops the theory of change that explains how the intervention is expected to work and identifies the assumptions that underlie its successful implementation. . . . It complements work using theory-based approaches to evaluate value chain interventions, in particular in terms of spelling out the linkages between agricultural interventions and improvements in health and nutrition outcomes. . . .’

More information
Read the whole theory of change analysis—IFPRI Discussion Paper 01451, July 2015: How will training traders contribute to improved food safety in informal markets for meat and milk? A theory of change analysis, by Nancy Johnson, of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); John Mayne, independent advisor on public-sector performance; Delia Grace, leader of the agriculture-associated diseases flagship of A4NH and of ILRI’s Food Safety and Zoonosis program; and Amanda Wyatt, of A4NH.

Read more on ILRI’s AgHealth site.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) marked its 40-year anniversary last year, 2014. One of the publications commissioned to celebrate that milestone is this new research report, Towards a Healthier Planet, written by Brian Perry, a distinguished former ILRI staff member who in 1987 initiated the Epidemiological and Socioeconomics Program at ILRI, or, to be precise, at ILRI’s predecessor, the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases (ILRAD). Perry is now a visiting professor at the University of Oxford and honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh.

For almost thirty years, the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases (ILRAD) then ILRI benefited from a strong research program in the epidemiological sciences. Over time, it progressively broadened its coverage in disease, disciplinary and geographic terms. The results of this work have now been assembled in this impact narrative, which carefully documents the wide range of issues addressed by the teams of researchers, and presents them in an illustrated and highly readable format.

For those starting out in epidemiology studies or careers, and for all those contemplating pursuing epidemiological and socioeconomic studies within a ‘hard’ biological sciences environment, this will be instructive reading. For the many ‘soft’ scientists who have given ILRAD, ILCA (the International Livestock Centre for Africa) and ILRI and its partners part or much of their professional lives over the years, it will provoke memories and, one hopes, smiles of recognition. ILRI today is indebted to you all.

The following excerpts are taken from the executive summary and introduction.

‘Veterinary epidemiology was introduced into ILRAD in 1987 to provide more substantive justification for the investments being made into fundamental research on vaccine development for the two African vector-borne diseases—theileriosis (East Coast fever, ECF) and trypanosomiasis—on which ILRAD focused. Under the Epidemiology and Socio-economics Program a small multidisciplinary team set up a series of institutional collaborations to undertake impact assessments of these two diseases in different regions of Africa. The term epidemiology was not completely new to ILRAD, but it had been used in the context of parasite strain variations, not in the context of understanding disease dynamics in different livestock production systems, and the impacts on people who derived their livelihoods from them. For the next seven years, until the merger of ILRAD and the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA ) in 1995 and the establishment of ILRI, the program focused almost exclusively on the dynamics and impacts of tick and tsetse-borne pathogens of livestock in Africa.

‘In the new institutional environment following the merger, the geographic focus, disease focus, disciplinary makeup and range of tools used by the group broadened substantially, tackling multiple diseases in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and building capacity in epidemiological and economic impact assessment techniques. For a period of 15 years (1987–2002) ILRAD/ILRI’s epidemiology and socio-economic impact assessment capacity was assembled in one team based at what became known as the ‘Epicentre’, serving a range of institutional and externally commissioned needs; it became increasingly recognized internationally for its focus on animal health issues affecting economic development and poverty reduction. . . . [E]pidemiological capacity at ILRI over the last decade has become scattered throughout the institute and regions, the emphasis on quantitative epidemiology has decreased, and the focus has moved to new areas such as food safety, zoonoses and emerging diseases. . . .

‘ILRI and its predecessor ILRAD have played an important international role in exploiting epidemiological tools for the investigation and resolution of animal health constraints to livestock production and poverty reduction in many regions of the developing world. Furthermore, ILRI has been a leader in exploring new epidemiological approaches and in widening the disciplinary spectrum of epidemiological investigations. But arguably most important of all, ILRI has played a facilitating role in collaborating with countries, institutions and organizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America to respond to requests for both short-and long-term partnership and support at international, regional, national and local levels, and in extensive building capacity in epidemiological tools, techniques and approaches.’

The narrative that follows is decidedly lively, and at times honest to a fault. Here is how Perry describes the beginning of long struggles 1) to get his animal health laboratory colleagues (the ‘disease moleculars’) to understand and appreciate the quantitative and social sides of livestock disease in poor countries and 2) to get his hands on the datasets his team needed to start building a useful and credible body of work.

‘. . . While seen to be an important and long overdue investment by CGIAR donors and governors, the arrival of the new small team was viewed internally as rather inconsequential. It was labelled the ‘soft science’ group, the mandate and context of which was seen by many ILRAD bench scientists as irrelevant to the ‘real’ science being undertaken in the laboratories. The group rapidly laid out a plan for its work, which hinged upon establishing databases on the rapidly evolving livestock production systems in Africa at risk to the two diseases, and on methodologies for determining the impacts they were having. The donors were seeking numbers and monetary values, which needed data on where the diseases were, how much of them there was, and what effects they had on livestock and people.

‘This challenge rapidly opened up the realization that disease incidence and prevalence data in Africa were extremely scarce, and what little was available was often unreliable, let alone data on the denominators, such as the size, structure, composition and ownership of the populations at risk. And so the need for structured quantitative epidemiology capacity emerged, which led to a sustained program of data assembly, digital data documentation and synthesis, the development of modelling techniques, and of course the gathering of field data. . . .

‘Veterinary epidemiological and economic impact sciences at ILRAD and ILRI have left a valuable legacy of publications in peer-reviewed journals, strategic reports and policy documents, as well as methodologies and approaches which have been applied in virtually all corners of the world. The products of these sciences have also contributed to disease control policies and strategies in different ways, and a vast cadre of epidemiologists trained at ILRAD and ILRI is now serving different institutional needs in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America. . . .’

Reade the whole report: Towards a healthier planet: Veterinary epidemiology research at the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases (ILRAD) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), 1987–2014, 66 pages, by Brian Perry, ILRI, Research Report 38, Jul 2015.

Boy feeding his goats in Ethiopia (photo credit: ILRI/Bruno Gerard).

Cet article a été publié originellement en anglais sur ce site; traduit par Ewen Le Borgne.

Il est loin le temps où le discours sur le développement se résumait à l’assistance humanitaire. Certains pays en voie de développement rapide essaient d’assurer que les bénéfices de cette croissance se réalisent pour les ménages les plus pauvres. En Ethiopie, pays où 70% de la population rurale possède du bétail, l’élevage est officiellement au cœur de ce débat.

Depuis 20 ans, le gouvernement éthiopien compte sur une réelle transformation du secteur agricole, mais l’absence d’un plan directeur en a retardé la mise en œuvre. Cependant un nouveau projet de recherche interdisciplinaire, que Barry Shapiro – chercheur à l’Institut International pour la Recherche sur l’Elevage (ILRI)—a présenté au Ministère de l’Agriculture (MdA) à Addis Abeba, révèle les bénéfices potentiels d’un Plan Directeur pour l’Elevage (PDE, LMP en anglais) en Ethiopie.

La somme relativement modeste de 400 millions de dollars US échelonnée sur cinq ans devrait suffire pour que le plan conjoint du MdA et de l’ILRI réduise la situation de pauvreté de 2,36 millions de ménages s’occupant d’animaux d’élevage, et offre aux fermes familiales un avenir commercialement viable. Au-delà de l’impact direct sur les foyers ruraux, le PDE compte étendre ses vertus aux consommateurs urbains en réduisant les prix des produits alimentaires et en assurant la sécurité alimentaire et nutritionnelle au niveau des ménages, du secteur de l’élevage et du pays dans son ensemble.

La réunion qui s’est tenue en juillet 2015 était organisée par le groupe de travail sectoriel sur le développement économique rural et la sécurite alimentaire (un groupe constitué d’agences des Nations Unies, organisations non-gouvernementales et bailleurs de fonds, entre autres) en vue de discuter l’établissement éventuel d’un programme de travail sur l’élevage. Les arguments en faveur d’une attention renouvelée pour l’élevage sont convaincants, alors que le PDE semble bien positionné pour atteindre la plupart des objectifs du Plan de Croissance et de Transformation (GTP dans son sigle anglophone) du gouvernement éthiopien.

Le développement du secteur à long terme repose sur les contributions de trois piliers de l’élevage : races, fourrage, et santé. Ces trois piliers sont analysés à l’aune des filières clé du secteur de l’élevage : aviaire, vaches à lait hybrides, et viande rouge/lait). Le PDE suggère qu’un investissement dans le développement des vaches à lait hybrides entrainerait un surplus de 47% de la production laitière (au-delà de la demande domestique). Ceci offrirait des opportunités pour améliorer la sécurité nutritionnelle, les produits industriels (e.g. dans la boulangerie) et les revenus de l’export. De larges gains assez similaires peuvent être dégagés pour la production de viande rouge/lait dans les exploitations familiales et au sein des populations pastorales et agro-pastorales.

La transformation du secteur aviaire est essentielle, car elle permettrait de pallier le différentiel national entre production et consommation. Par ailleurs, si l’on substituait le poulet à la viande rouge issue de ruminants émettant davantage, on pourrait atteindre l’objective de résilience au climat consistant à augmenter la part de la volaille de 5% à 27% de la viande consommée d’ici 2030.

Shapiro émet cependant quelques réserves : Les bénéfices du PDE ne peuvent être réalisés que si l’on adapte les préférences des consommateurs en défaveur de la viande rouge et en faveur des poulets hybrides. Par ailleurs d’importants investissements devront être faits en matière de : sélection génétique, insémination artificielle, réhabilitation des pâturages, fourniture de services vétérinaires, régulation et normes qualité et en matière de santé, ainsi que l’adoption de mesures en faveur de l’investissement privé.

Pour la mission de l’ILRI, passer ces leçons à l’échelle est tout aussi important. Le montage de ce plan directeur a réuni de nombreux experts intéressés à traiter un objectif ambitieux: promouvoir le développement durable et améliorer la résilience climatique et la sécurité alimentaire et nutritionnelle, tout en contribuant aux objectifs de l’ILRI d’influencer les autres acteurs et de promouvoir le renforcement des capacités. La mise en œuvre de ce plan poserait de nombreux jalons en ce sens.

Le processus de développement du PDE a été financé par la Fondation Bill & Melinda Gates et supervisé par un comité technique de haut calibre, comprenant les directeurs des départements et instituts idoines du Ministère d’Etat pour l’Elevage du MdA éthiopien, ainsi que des représentants de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour l’Alimentation et l’Agriculture (FAO), l’Autorité Intergouvernementale pour le Développement (IGAD), L’Agence éthiopienne de Transformation de l’Agriculture (ATA), et les présidents des associations professionnelles de l’élevage (la Société Ethiopienne pour la Production Animale et la Société Vétérinaire Ethiopienne).

Cette activité a en outre été soutenue par le groupe Alive (African Partnership for Livestock Development) du Bureau Africain des Ressources Animales de l’Union Africaine (AU-IBAR) ainsi que du Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD) et de la Banque Mondiale.

Les principales conclusions du bulletin politique du PDE sont disponibles ici (en anglais). Le document intégral sera disponible sous peu.

Livestock are central to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and directly relevant to most of them. The growing demand for livestock products in developing countries, driven by population growth, higher incomes and urbanization, represents a huge opportunity for hundreds of millions of poor smallholder livestock farmers, processors and marketers, many of whom are women, to meet that market demand and rise out of poverty. Livestock products (meat, milk, eggs) provide essential nutrients that contribute to food and nutritional security. Even small amounts of animal-sourced foods in the diets of children improve not only their physical development but also their cognitive and learning abilities. Improving the efficiency of livestock production in developing countries, especially the productivity per animal, can double livestock productivity while halving its adverse environmental impacts, including reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, in those countries.

Some key livestock facts

• Four of the five highest value agricultural products are livestock products
  (milk, pig meat, beef, chicken meat)

• 1.3 billion people (one in five of the world population)
  depend on livestock for their livelihoods

• Livestock account for 40% of agricultural GDP
  in developing countries and the share is growing

• Demand for milk and meat will triple in Africa by 2050

• In many developing countries,
  up to 80% of the population is employed in agriculture

• While livestock emit greenhouse gases that cause global warming,
  opportunities to greatly reduce such emissions in developing countries
  through better feeds and other more efficient livestock production practices
  are huge and as yet largely unexploited

CGIAR livestock scientists are working actively to help the world meet the SDGs. We are intentionally tailoring our livestock-related knowledge products, technologies, institutional arrangements and policy support to provide new options for meeting specific SDGs by addressing developing world livestock problems and opportunities. While our research is relevant to many of the SDGs, it impinges directly on the nine listed below.

Support to the development of targets and indicators
CGIAR livestock scientists contribute to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, especially as part of the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Thematic Network. This network identified the role that livestock play within agricultural and food systems development and highlighted specific examples in its report on Solutions for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. It also proposed specific indicators that could be used to track the contributions of the livestock sector to achieving the SDGs.

Research solutions
CGIAR scientists are developing research solutions to some of the biggest and most intractable livestock problems of the tropics and sub-tropics. They are generating biological options to improve livestock feeds, breeds and health raised under harsh conditions and a changing climate. They are targeting women, youth and other disempowered groups to ensure economic as well as food and nutritional security. And they are employing smart ‘whole systems’ approaches to development challenges to safeguard and sustain the planet’s natural resources and ecosystem services.

The following are a few examples of specific ways CGIAR livestock research is helping the world achieve the SGDs. ILRI’s grouping of the SDGs into four clusters mirrors that by the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock (GASL) and the Livestock Global Alliance (LGA).

Livestock and
inclusive and sustainable
economic growth

Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere

• Connecting poor farmers to markets – e.g. developing new business models for 10 million poor dairy farmers in East Africa
• Doubling the productivity of poor smallholders’ livestock through better feeding, veterinary care and breeding.

Goal 8. Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth,
employment and decent work for all

• Developing national ‘Livestock Master Plans’ to support effective investment planning to optimize livestock’s contribution to economic growth
• Developing a new vaccine for East Coast fever, which costs African cattle producers $300M per year in cattle deaths and lost production

Livestock and
equitable livelihoods

Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

• Applying gender-transformative approaches that give women in livestock raising, processing and trading greater access to, and control over, livestock resources
• Developing labour-saving technologies for livestock feeding

Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries

• Insuring never-before-insured pastoralists against catastrophic drought and loss of livestock in remote drylands of the Horn of Africa
• Developing options to reduce barriers to safe and sustainable domestic and regional trade in livestock products

Livestock and
food security and
safe and healthy balanced diets,
including animal-sourced foods

Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition
and promote sustainable agriculture

• Doubling the supply of animal-sourced foods through better feeding, breeding and health
• Reducing antimicrobial resistance through judicious use of antimicrobial drugs in livestock

Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

• Reducing the burden of zoonotic diseases through better animal health and promotion of ‘one health’ approaches that integrate veterinary, medical and environmental understanding
• Improving food safety in informal markets (where most animal-sourced foods are traded in developing countries); 6.5 million consumers in Kenya and Assam, India, are already benefiting from safer milk

Livestock and
sustainable ecosystems

Goal 6. Ensure access to water and sanitation for all

• Making more efficient use of water resources by improving forage varieties and livestock feeding regimes

Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

• Improving grazing practices on rangelands, which have potential to sequester 8.6 million tonnes of carbon per year
• Measuring (for the first time) and significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions from small-scale livestock systems in developing regions

Goal 15. Sustainably manage forests, combat desertification,
halt and reverse land degradation, stem biodiversity losses

• Reducing and reversing land degradation through better rangeland management

Download a PDF version

See also this slide presentation by ILRI Assistant Director General Shirley Tarawali: The role of livestock in achieving the SDGs, Nov 2015.

Editor’s note of 1 Mar 2016:
An incorrect figure was reported in this article and has now been corrected (above and below).

1.3 billion people (one in five of the world population)
depend on livestock for their livelihoods

Milk cans in Karnal, India (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Note: This is the third in a series of articles on
‘Curds and goats, lives and livelihoods—
A dozen stories from northern and eastern India’.

PART 3: Culture of the cow: Curds in the city—
Better living through smallholder dairying in northern India

By Susan MacMillan and Jules Mateo,
of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

A journey to India by staff of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)
in March 2016 started in the city of Karnal, in the prosperous northern state of Haryana.

Dairy shop owner Balinder Kumar (right) with customer (ILRI/Jules Mateo).

Meet Balinder Kumar, proprietor of the Surta Dairy Shop, one of hundreds if not thousands of such small shops in the city of Karnal, in India’s northern state of Haryana. Every street in this city of nearly 300,000 people is reported to have at least 3 to 4 dairy shops. Here, in India’s most famous dairy city, where the famed National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI) is based, milk-based foods are the foundation of every meal.

Six months ago, Mr Kumar was a farmer trying to make a living off the milk he sold from his dozen buffalo cows and 15 dairy cows. It was hard to make a profit selling milk, so he opened a dairy shop in the city to sell fresh milk, curd, butter, cheese, milk sweets and other dairy products. His wife and mechanical engineer brother are his partners, his wife tending the animals kept in a nearby village farm and his brother helping him upgrade and maintain his farm and shop equipment.

Curds (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

With the help of staff at NDRI, Mr Kumar got training in milk product processing and purchased a multi-purpose dairy machine, costing 55,000 Indian rupees (about 950 US dollars), with which he now makes a variety of products in the back of his shop.

He opens his shop daily at 7am and does a brisk business all day selling fresh milk, curds (dahi, made by adding an acidic component such as lime juice or vinegar to curdle the milk and then filtering the solids from the whey), paneer (after draining the curds in muslin or cheesecloth and pressing out the excess water, the resulting paneer is dipped in chilled water for 2–3 hours to improve its texture and appearance), yoghurt (produced by bacterial fermentation of milk), lassi (a sweet or savoury blend of yogurt, water, spices and sometimes, fruit), ice cream, butter (made by churning fresh or fermented cream or milk, to separate the butterfat from the buttermilk), ghee (a form of clarified butter prepared by simmering butter churned from cream and removing the liquid residue), and more.

Mr Kumar’s multi-purpose milk processing machine (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Like most dairy products in India today, Mr Kumar’s products are unbranded. Reputations here are still made (and unmade) by word of mouth. And until recent years, most of these products were still made in the home, and mostly by women. But as India modernizes, and more and more people move to the cities and find employment, there is more and more demand for lightly processed milk-based foods supplied by neighbourhood shops like Mr Kumar’s.

More and more people are too busy to make curds and other dairy products themselves, so they come to my shop and others like it every day to buy their milk foods.
—Balinder Kumar

As milk is the basis of the diets of most people here, that means good business for Mr Kumar. And as the country’s population and appetite for dairy grows, so will his business.

Surta Dairy Shop in Karnal, Haryana, India (ILRI/Jules Mateo).

It’s obvious on our visit to his shop, called Surta Dairy (named after Mr Kumar’s father, Surta Singh), that Mr Kumar’s reputation is as solid as his new business. Asked if he is happy that he made the large investment in his multi-purpose dairy machine, Mr Kumar nods emphatically. While he was making little profit selling his surplus milk to middle men along the dairy value chain in his peri-urban village, he said, the added-value products he’s now selling in his urban dairy shop are generating a relatively large, and growing, profit for him and his extended family.

Surta Dairy Shop collage (ILRI/Jules Mateo and Susan MacMillan).

With many thanks to our guide for the morning, Ajay Kumar Yadev, of the Dairy Technology Department of the National Dairy Research Institute, in Karnal.

Read previous parts in this blog series
‘Curds and goats, lives and livelihoods—A dozen stories from northern and eastern India’

Part 1, Colourful convocation: Jimmy Smith addresses graduates of India’s prestigious National Dairy Research Institute, 30 Mar 2016.

Part 2: Elite buffaloes and other exemplars of advanced Indian dairy science at the National Dairy Research Institute, 31 Mar 2016.

Read more about ILRI work in India and work in India conducted by the ILRI-led multi-institutional CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish, which works to improve the livelihoods of India’s smallholder dairy farmers by increasing participation of poor producers, processors and sellers in the country’s dairy value chains, improving access to markets by poor dairy producers and training small-scale dairy producers in more efficient production methods.

Milk cans and children stand in the doorway of a dairy cooperative outside Karnal, Haryana, India (photo credit: ILRI/Jules Mateo).

Note: This is the fourth in a series of articles on
‘Curds and goats, lives and livelihoods—
A dozen stories from northern and eastern India’.

PART 4: Building better brands and lives through
peri-urban dairying and smart crop-dairy farming

By Susan MacMillan and Jules Mateo,
of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

A journey to India by staff of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)
in March 2016 started in the city of Karnal, in the prosperous northern state of Haryana.

On the way

On our way to visit a village on the outskirts of Karnal, in Haryana, India, we passed several sights that told their own story. A kind of pious family food production, it appeared, constituted the very fabric of this place.

Poultry units outside Karnal, Haryana, India (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

First we passed a large poultry unit, not surprising in this state, which is known as the ‘poultry capital of India’.

This unit was raising 2,400 Kuroiler chickens (2000 females and 400 males), a popular hybrid dual-purpose meat and eggs breed developed in India in the 1990s. Compared to India’s native chickens, these multi-coloured birds, which live on a diet of kitchen and agricultural waste, grow bigger (3.5kg vs 1kg for males and 2.5kg vs 0.9kg for females) and lay more eggs (150 versus 40 per year). Kuroiler eggs fetch 20 Indian rupees versus just 5 rupees for eggs of unimproved native breeds.

(Top) A dairy farm family transports rice straw to their dairy animals; (bottom) a man transports milk to a collection point (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Then we passed a family transporting rice straw and green fodder by bullock cart from their farm plot to their house in the village, one kilometre away, where they keep their dairy animals. This family told us that the three-year-old bullock pulling the cart cost them 5,000 rupees (about 75 US dollars). Coming in the other direction was a man on a motorcycle transporting morning milk he had collected from several farms and was taking to the local village collection point. All of them kindly stopped so that we could take their pictures.

Hindu devotees carry decorated floats on an annual pilgrimmage to a Maha Shivaratri festival to honour Lord Shiva (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Finally, we passed several colourful processions of groups walking along the road carrying elaborately decorated floats on their way to a Lord Shiva festival.

The Mahashivaratri Festival (‘The Night of Shiva’) falls on the moonless 14th night of the Hindu month of Phalgun (Feb or Mar in the English calendar), marking, one legend goes, the wedding day of Lord Shiva and Parvati, when Lord Shiva performed the ‘Tandava’, the dance of primal creation, preservation and destruction.

Devotees observe a strict 24-hour fast, wake early to take a ritual bath in the Ganga or other source of holy water and put on fresh new clothes. Then they walk in groups to the nearest Shiva temple carrying pots of the holy water with which to bathe the Shiva ‘lingam’ every three hours along with the five sacred offerings of a cow, called the ‘panchagavya’—milk, sour milk, urine, butter and dung. The five foods of immortality—milk, ghee, curd, honey and sugar—are placed before the lingam along with flowers and incense. Amidst chanting and ringing of temple bells, large numbers will keep a sleepless vigil throughout the night, telling stories, meditating and singing hymns in praise of Lord Shiva. On the following morning, they will break their fast by partaking of prasad offered to the deity.

Those who fast on this night and offer prayers to Lord Shiva, it’s believed, bring good luck into their lives.

In the village

About a half an hour’s drive from the National Dairy Research Institute, we arrive at the village of Nagla Roran. With its immaculately clean, paved streets, tidy homes, electricity and other infrastructure, including farm machinery strewn casually about the place, it more resembles a farm town than farm village.

Sanjiv (above) and his signboard in his dairy agribusiness centre office in Nagla Roran (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

We first visit the office of an enterprising youngish man called Sanjiv, who runs a cooperative providing improved forage seed and cattle feed to 230 village dairy producers. Rice, maize, wheat, barley, gram, mustard, cotton and sugarcane are some of the major crops cultivated here, alongside the raising of dairy and other animals.

Two deluxe agricultural models on display in the village (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Sanjiv represents the third generation of his family to run a dairy business and provide agribusiness services. Dairy enterprises, he says, are great ‘value-added’ opportunities for small-scale farmers and are helping to close the gap between urban and rural livelihoods.

Sanjiv, his daughter Mishti, and the Mishti products his dairy enterprise is producing (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

In the home

Sanjiv’s mother, with one of her cows (ILRI/Jules Mateo).

Next Sanjiv takes us to his home in the village, where his mother keeps her dairy animals.

Dairy businesses have raised living standards in the village, Sanjiv says. (All the adults now have cell phones, he points out, and most households have more than one television set.)

Scenes of Sanjiv’s household (ILRI/Susan MacMillan and Jules Mateo).

Three years ago, at the birth of his daughter Mishti, Sanjiv considered starting a non-dairy business but his mother refused to stop keeping her herd of milk cows and buffaloes, and so he undertook training at the Business Planning & Development Unit of the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), in nearby Karnal, and began building up businesses that add value to the milk his mother’s cows produce.

Sanjiv and his three-year-old daughter Mishti, after whom he named his dairy products (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Sanjiv has branded his products ‘Mishti’ in honour of his (admittedly adorable) daughter.

On the farm

But that’s not all. Not satisfied with just processing dairy products and serving his community with various dairy agribusinesses, Sanjiv has started a new venture: highly integrated, conservation-friendly livestock-mushroom farming. He proudly shows us how it all works, how every natural resource is used, how absolutely nothing is wasted. He is obviously proud of how all his knowledge, and that of so many ‘best practices’ in mixed farming and agribusiness, are coming together under his direction here.

So, not a small village, or small ambitions, after all. Sanjiv and his family and his village are moving forward and moving fast. I leave them just hoping that our advanced agricultural research can mange to keep up with them.

Sanjiv’s closely integrated livestock-mushroom farming operations (ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

With many thanks to our guide for the morning, Ajay Kumar Yadev, of the National Dairy Research Institute, in Karnal.

Read previous parts in this blog series
‘Curds and goats, lives and livelihoods—A dozen stories from northern and eastern India’

Part 1, Colourful convocation: Jimmy Smith addresses graduates of India’s prestigious National Dairy Research Institute, 30 Mar 2016.

Part 2: Elite buffaloes and other exemplars of advanced Indian dairy science at the National Dairy Research Institute, 31 Mar 2016.

Part 3: Culture of the cow: Curds in the city—Better living through smallholder dairying in northern India, 5 Apr 2016.

Read more about ILRI work in India and work in India conducted by the ILRI-led multi-institutional CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish, which works to improve the livelihoods of India’s smallholder dairy farmers by increasing participation of poor producers, processors and sellers in the country’s dairy value chains, improving access to markets by poor dairy producers and training small-scale dairy producers in more efficient production methods.

The four members of the organizing committee of the One Health for the Real World Symposium and key players in the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium: (left to right), James Wood, University of Cambridge; Andrew Cunningham, Zoological Society of London; Ian Scoones, Institute of Development Studies; and Melissa Leach, Institute of Development Studies (this and all photos on this page except the ILRI photo directly below of Annie Cook are via Flickr/ Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium).

This post is written by Annie Cook, post-doctoral scientist, ILRI

One Health can be defined as the collaborative effort of several disciplines
to attain optimal health for people, animals and our environment. 

The 27 speakers at a recent One Health for the Real World Symposium: Zoonoses, Ecosystems and Wellbeing make up a (very) respectable ‘who’s who’ in the world of One Health, which includes all those working to unite the knowledge, practices and approaches of medical, veterinary and environmental sciences for the healthy wellbeing of all three.

The symposium was held at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) 17–18 Mar 2016 and organized by ZSL and a three-year project called the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium (DDDAC). The symposium marked the culmination, and ending, of the consortium.

Twenty organizations, including the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), made up the Dynamic Drivers consortium, which from 2012 to 2015 coordinated research exploring the relations among African ecosystems and zoonotic diseases—those transmitted between animals and people—that impinge on ecosystem, human and animal wellbeing.

The ‘real world’ in the symposium’s title reflected the ambition of the consortium members to share their three years of research results not only with each other but also with the policymakers and practitioners who could make a real difference in advancing the One Health agenda.

Indeed, Melissa Leach, chair of the DDDAC and director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, stressed in her welcome address the importance of linking science and research to policy and practice. ‘Politics is key to moving forward on difficult One Health issues’, she said.

Leach was followed by Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar, whose keynote presentation raised the bar even higher: ‘If we make the right choices, make the right connections, we can change the course of history’, Farrar argued. He also stressed that tackling today’s growing global health threats called not only for strong leadership but also for exceptional trust in such sensitive areas as disease surveillance and response, governance and data sharing.

One of the ‘right choices’ and ‘right connections’ that Farrar mentioned must be greater public understanding of, investment in, and policy focus on the transmission to humans of diseases originating in wild and domesticated animals. A remarkable 61% of all human pathogens, and 75% of new human pathogens such as those causing bird flu and HIV/AIDS, originate in animals. This ‘zoonotic’ thread (and threat), while often overlooked and under-appreciated in similar fora, happily was apparent in each of the following five major themes raised in the symposium’s subsequent keynotes and discussions.

View Farrar’s slide presentation: The real world: One Health—Zoonoses, ecosystems and wellbeing

1 Anthropogenic drivers of disease, including changes in land-use and human behaviour

Bernard Bett, a veterinary epidemiologist at ILRI, presented a case study of the DDDAC program that investigated the effects of irrigation on levels of the virus causing Rift Valley fever in human blood serum. Rift Valley fever is an acute, fever-causing viral disease of domesticated animals, such as cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, and camels, with ability to infect and cause illness, sometimes fatal, in humans. Bett’s study found that those living in irrigated areas had higher levels of antibodies to the pathogen than those in pastoralist areas. Preliminary results indicate sheep and goats from irrigated and riverine areas had higher rates of exposure to the Rift Valley fever virus than those from pastoral areas.  But because the results were statistically not significant, further research is required to determine the role of irrigation in acute human and animal infections with Rift Valley fever.

View Bett’s slide presentations: Irrigation and the risk of Rift Valley fever transmission—A case study from Kenya and A mathematical model for Rift Valley fever transmission dynamics

View Bett’s media interview: The hidden dangers of irrigation, SciDevNet, 22 Mar 2016

View Bett’s impact case stories: One Health working brings widespread Rift Valley fever out of the shadows and Protecting livestock and securing livelihoods during threats of epidemic

2 The need for an interdisciplinary approach to One Health research

Jakob Zinsstag, of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, emphasized the added value of integrating human and animal health approaches rather than allowing them to work in isolation. The knock-on effects of considering One Health problems in isolation was also stressed by David Waltner-Toews, of Veterinarians without Borders-Canada, who stated that ‘emerging infectious diseases are symptoms of related wicked problems embedded in complex social-ecological feedbacks’. A novel approach to considering One Health was raised by Jan Slingenbergh, a consulting animal health specialist formerly with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, who proposed a ‘global risk analysis framework’ similar to that developed to address global warming.

View Zinsstag’s slide presentation: Understanding zoonotic impacts: the added value from One Health approaches

3 The relationship between One Health and poverty

The keynote address for this theme was given by ILRI veterinary epidemiologist and food safety specialist Delia Grace, who presented an in-depth review of the relationships among ecosystems, poverty and zoonoses. ‘Human sickness is a major cause of falling into and remaining in poverty and much of this is related to agriculture’, she said. This was further emphasized by Jo Sharp, of the University of Glasgow, in her presentation highlighting the catastrophic effects of ill health. Grace reported that misdiagnosis and underreporting were two big challenges in tackling emerging infectious diseases. She warned that ‘hurried responses to zoonoses are often anti-poor, causing more harm’. And she underlined how effective control can be: ‘Every dollar invested in brucellosis control returns six dollars in reduced burden’.

View Grace’s slide presentation: The economics of One Health

4 Should One Health research focus on emerging or endemic diseases?

Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, highlighted drivers of emerging disease, such as land conversion, intensification of livestock production and wildlife trade, and the costs of controlling pandemic threats. He noted a false dichotomy between neglected tropical diseases and emerging diseases: ‘Emerging diseases become endemic diseases’, he said. Sarah Cleaveland, of the University of Glasgow, stressed the complementarities and gains ‘from adopting shared approaches to emerging and endemic diseases’. Endemic zoonoses and emerging zoonoses often have similar drivers, she said, but emerging zoonoses get more publicity. ‘Effective health systems for neglected endemic zoonoses will also help control emerging diseases.’

View Daszak’s slide presentation: Pre-empting the emergence of zoonoses by understanding their socio-ecology

5 The need to incorporate different perspectives into One Health research

Bassirou Bonfoh, director general of the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Côte d’Ivoire, stressed the need to incorporate ‘different viewpoints, knowledge and expertise’ when designing health systems. Several presentations reiterated the need to incorporate the voices of different people; a commonly repeated phrase at the symposium was ‘whose knowledge counts?’ Hayley Macgregor, of the Institute of Development Studies, highlighted a danger in research: ‘People’s cultural logics or social practices are readily cast in negative terms’.

View Bonfoh’s slide presentation: Motivation, culture and health in a socio-ecological system in Africa

In the final keynote, Charlotte Watts, chief scientific advisor at the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), argued that One Health approaches can be very effective for decision-makers facing a crisis. As an example, she listed the diverse options available for controlling the ongoing Zika outbreak using ecosystem, medical and veterinary scientific knowledge and technologies.

The final panel discussion, with representatives from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), summarized the themes of the symposium’s discussions and introduced further relevant issues concerning biodiversity, conservation and animal welfare.

A highlight of the symposium were lively one-minute ‘flash talks’ by poster presenters. The 28 posters presented covered diverse topics, including many with a livestock focus, such as the following.
Kathryn Berger, of the University of Cambridge, presented a ‘Global atlas of animal influenza’ that can be used for surveillance and control programs.
Birungi Doreen, of Makerere University, pointed out that research on possible Ebola virus disease in pigs in Uganda had some negative impacts on the pork value chain in that country and required sensitizing stakeholders to reduce any harm such research could cause.
Natascha Meunier, of the Royal Veterinary College, showed that diseases transmitted from wildlife to cattle most likely occurred via indirect routes, particularly vector-borne disease transmissions.
Robin Wiess, of the University College London, reminded us that zoonosis is a two-ways street: Humans can be a source of infectious disease in animals. ‘Don’t forget the “anthroponoses!”’.

The symposium also included the launch of a book, One Health—Science, Politics and Zoonotic Disease in Africa, edited by Kevin Bardosh, which offers ‘a much-needed political economy analysis of zoonoses research and policy’.

The closing statement Melissa Leach stressed that One Health is not always comfortable integration. ‘As a social scientist, I see that One Health is about solving puzzles, dispelling bullshit, learning new things and making the future different’. Indeed, a recurring theme throughout the symposium was the need for a new generation of ‘multidisciplinary professionals’.

And there was a final plea from Ian Scoones, of the STEPS Centre and the Future Agricultures Consortium: ‘Let’s not make a new One Health discipline—yet another silo!’

The symposium was organized by the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium (DDDAC) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) with support from the Royal Society. The DDDAC is multidisciplinary research consortium funded by the UK’s Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) program, which works to ensure that developing-country ecosystems are sustainably managed to alleviate poverty alleviation as well as to support inclusive and sustainable growth.

Go here to find out more about ILRI research on zoonotic diseases and here for past ILRI news stories on One Health.

About the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium
The Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium was an international, multidisciplinary research programme. From 2012 to 2016 it explored the relationships between ecosystems, zoonoses, health and wellbeing, focusing on four emerging or re-emerging zoonotic diseases in four diverse African ecosystems: henipavirus infection in Ghana, Rift Valley fever in Kenya, Lassa fever in Sierra Leone, and trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Its innovative, holistic approach married the natural and social sciences to build an evidence base which is now informing global and national policy seeking effective, integrated One Health approaches to control and check disease outbreaks.

A High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) is the science-policy interface of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), which is, at the global level, the foremost inclusive and evidence-based international and intergovernmental platform for food security and nutrition.

HLPE reports serve as a common, comprehensive, evidence-based starting point for intergovernmental and international multistakeholder policy debates in CFS. The HLPE draws its studies based on existing research and knowledge and organizes a scientific dialogue, built upon the diversity of disciplines, backgrounds, knowledge systems, diversity of its Steering Committee and Project Teams, and upon open electronic consultations.

HLPE reports are widely used as reference documents within and beyond CFS and the UN system, by the scientific community as well as by political decision-makers and stakeholders, at international, regional and national levels.

In October 2014, the CFS requested the HLPE to prepare a report on sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock. An important planning meeting was held at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

Delia Grace, a veterinary epidemiologist and food safety expert at ILRI, served as one of ten members of the HLPE livestock project team members.

What follows are excerpts from the report, which was launched at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on 1 Jul 2016, in Rome. ILRI Director General Jimmy Smith, who the day before gave a keynote presentation at a Partnerships Forum on Livestock at the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), attended the FAO launch of the report on the role of livestock in sustainable agricultural development.

This report focuses on the livestock sector because it is:

• a powerful engine for the development of the agriculture and food sector

• a driver of major economic, social and environmental changes in food systems worldwide

• a uniquely powerful entry point for understanding the issues around sustainable agricultural development as a whole

Livestock production is central to food systems’ development and is a particularly dynamic and complex agricultural subsector, with implications for animal-feed demand, for market concentration in agricultural supply chains, for the intensification of production at the farm level, for farm income, land use, and for nutrition and health. Livestock has often set the speed of change in agriculture in recent decades.

Livestock is strongly linked to the feed crop sector, generates co-products including manure and draught power, and in many countries acts as a store of wealth and a safety net. It is integral to the traditional practices, values and landscapes of many communities across the world. Livestock has significant effects on the environment, both positive and negative, particularly when indirect land-use changes and feed crop production effects are taken into account. . . .

The report offers policy-makers and other stakeholders a framework to design and implement feasible options of sustainability pathways for agricultural development. It will hopefully contribute to sustainable food systems and to food security and nutrition for all, and more broadly to the 2030 Agenda, now and in the future. . . .

As reflected in its title, this report is focused on livestock because of the importance and complexity of its roles and contribution to sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition. . . .

‘Livestock has often set the speed of change in agriculture in recent decades. Livestock is the largest user of land resources; permanent meadows and pastures represent 26 percent of global land area and feed crops account for one-third of global arable land. Livestock is strongly linked to the feed crop sector, generates co-products including manure and draught power, and in many economies acts as a store of wealth and a safety net. It is integral to the cultural identity, traditional practices, values and landscapes of many communities across the world. Livestock has profound effects on the environment, particularly when indirect land-use changes and feed crop production effects are taken into account.

‘Livestock production takes place in a wide range of farming systems: extensive (e.g. grazing in the case of ruminant livestock or foraging in the case of poultry and pigs); intensive (in which thousands of animals are fed with concentrated feed rations in confined facilities); and in the many intermediate systems that exist between the two. . . . [T]o value and address this diversity of farming systems and their distinct challenges, the report considers four broad classes of livestock rearing: smallholder mixed farming; pastoral; commercial grazing; and intensive livestock systems. . . .

‘While food security concerns historically focused on total calorie intake, today they encompass the so-called “triple burden” of malnutrition: hunger (deficiencies in dietary energy intake), estimated by FAO to affect some 792 million people worldwide; micronutrient deficiencies (such as iron, vitamin A, iodine and zinc), which, according WHO, affect some two billion people; and increasing overnutrition that now affects more people than hunger does. In 2014, WHO estimated more than 1.9 billion (39 percent) adults, aged 18 years and over, were overweight, of which over 600 million (13 percent) were obese. The relationships between food systems and nutrition will be explored in depth in a forthcoming HLPE report (2017).

‘In a context of increasing resource scarcity, and with the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to climate change, numerous studies have identified livestock as a key area for action. Resource efficiency in livestock production will have to be improved in order to: maintain production systems within critical planetary limits; preserve the ecosystem services on which agricultural production relies; and reduce land degradation, biodiversity loss and pressure on water use and quality.

‘As a driver of deforestation, demand for feed, and transportation and processing infrastructure, the livestock sector is directly and indirectly responsible for 14.5 percent of GHG emissions. At the same time, some livestock systems are among the most vulnerable to climate change (particularly those in dry areas) and to new environment-related emerging diseases. These challenges are huge but the livestock sector also has huge potential for improvement, if the best existing practices in a given system and region can be shared and learned from more widely.

‘Livestock plays a crucial economic role in many food systems: providing income, wealth and employment; buffering price shocks; adding value to feedstuffs; providing a source of fertilizer and draught power. Agricultural markets face three challenges: (i) imperfect competition, due to lack of information, barriers to market entry, infrastructure constraints; (ii) externalities that create significant costs not borne by producers; and (iii) market distortions arising from poor public policies, including subsidies and taxes that reward unsustainable practices.

‘More specifically, agricultural markets are subject to unpredictable forces, such as the weather, and to time lags averse unless they are supported by safety nets. International trade has introduced opportunities but also new challenges, including an increased potential for diseases to spread. International trade has also been accompanied by a growing role for multinational private actors in making investment decisions in agricultural systems. Concentrated corporate control of agriculture has also increased in the face of uneven access to market information and technologies, undermining competition.

‘Different livestock systems face different economic risks and opportunities in this more general context. Determining factors include: the degree of integration into international markets and urban distribution systems; the level of dependence on external inputs (such as feed); and the degree of concentration in the markets upstream and downstream from livestock producers. . . .

‘[G]lobal challenges concern the different livestock systems to various degrees. Each system is also confronted with specific challenges.

1. Smallholder mixed farming systems face limited access to resources, markets and services, variable resource efficiency and big yield gaps, and have little capacity to adapt to deep and rapid structural transformation in the agriculture sector and in the wider economy.
2. Pastoral systems: in addition to the challenges they share with smallholders, pastoral systems must cope with conflicts for land and water, economic and political exclusion, social (including gender) inequity, poor animal health and high risks of zoonotic diseases.
3. Commercial grazing systems face the degradation of the natural grasslands they depend upon, conflicts with other sectors over land and resource use, poor conditions for workers and, in some cases, technical inefficiencies.
4. Intensive livestock systems face environmental challenges resulting from intensification (land and water use; water, soil and air pollution); the harm to human and animal health created by antimicrobial resistance, the emergence of new diseases; the social consequences of intensification (rural abandonment, poor working conditions, low wages, vulnerability of migrant labour, occupational hazards); and economic risks in the form of dependence on external inputs, including feed and energy, market concentration, price volatility, inequitable distribution of value added, as well as the difficulty of internalizing externalities in price signals. . . .

‘[T]hree interlinked principles help shape those pathways towards sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition:

‘Improve resource efficiency. Considerable potential exists to improve resource efficiency through the transfer and adoption of best available practices and technologies in a given context and through the adoption of diverse approaches (including “sustainable intensification”, “save and grow”, “ecological intensification”, and “agro-ecology”), all with a growing emphasis on ecosystem services. This would make it possible to simultaneously increase productivity, to preserve and make better use of limited resources, and to reduce GHG emissions. Resource efficiency can be improved through different technical means including: improving livestock management, careful breeding, health and feed efficiency; closing the nutrient cycle; and reducing food losses and waste.

‘Strengthen resilience. To address changing risks and shocks, whether environmental, economic, financial, or related to human and animal health, requires building resilience in livestock systems. The diversification of production and integration of crops and livestock at all levels – from farm to landscape, community, territory and region – will contribute to strengthen resilience and improve resource efficiency.

‘Improve social equity/responsibility outcomes. The failure to protect social equity and cultural integrity raises some of the most wide-ranging and politically sensitive challenges for sustainability. The norms, practices and priorities of social equity/responsibility, the property rights and land tenure laws and customs, all differ across countries and communities and change over time. Working conditions need to be improved at all levels of food value chains. In line with the SDGs, national SAD strategies will have to prioritize the needs and interests of the most vulnerable populations (which typically include women, children, migrants, and indigenous peoples). . . .

In addition to these more general principles, orientations and actions, each category of livestock system has some priority areas of intervention that better take into account its specificities.

For smallholder mixed farming systems, the priorities include: ensure better access to markets and more choice of markets; secure tenure rights and equitable access to land; design feasible growth pathways taking into consideration available resources; recognize, empower and enable the role of women; improve animal health management; encourage the use of local, more resistant, breeds; implement appropriate, tailored and participatory programmes that respond to farmers’ needs; facilitate smallholders’ participation in political processes; provide good quality training programmes and information; and redirect development policies and tax incentives towards the design of diversified and resilient farming and food systems.

For pastoral systems, the priorities include: improve governance and security by involving pastoral societies in participatory governance mechanisms; improve connections to markets and market choices; provide and protect access to public services, including for animal and human health, and access to pastoral resources (water and land); implement a fairer taxation system to enhance value-added activities through the processing and marketing of pastoral products; better target emergency assistance; and devise development strategies that take into account the specific needs of pastoral systems, including mobility.

For commercial grazing systems the priorities include: the maintenance and improvement of grassland management practices to improve resource efficiency and contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation; the development of integrated crop–livestock–forestry systems that enable several kinds of production on the same land and allow synergies between those productions; and the protection of native forests from deforestation.

For intensive livestock systems, the priorities include: investment in R&D along the complete food chain to strike a balance between increasing production and reducing environmental harm, including food losses and waste; the expansion of precision livestock farming; action to reduce the prophylactic use of antibiotics in animal care and to improve animal welfare; policies to reduce the environmental impact of intensive systems including systems that promote more recycling of animal waste to promote efficiency and reduce the harm caused by unbalanced nutrient cycles (too much depletion where the feed crops are grown and too much addition where livestock are raised and fed); and increase the sustainable production of feed while improving the ratio of feed to animal conversion. . . .

Recommendations
The following recommendations have been elaborated building upon the main findings of the report on Sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition: what roles for livestock? They aim to strengthen the contributions of the livestock sector to sustainable agricultural development (SAD) for food security and nutrition (FSN). They are directed at different categories of stakeholders as appropriate: states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), the private sector and civil society organizations, and other stakeholders. They should:

• Elaborate context-specific pathways to sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition
• Strengthen integration of livestock in national sustainable agricultural development strategies
• Foster coherence between sectoral policies and programs
• Develop gender-sensitive livestock policies and interventions
• Better integrate sustainable agricultural development issues for food security and nutrition in trade policies
• Limit and manage excess price volatility
• Protect, preserve and facilitate the sharing of livestock genetic resources
• Improve surveillance and control of livestock diseases
• Promote research and development
• Review and improve indicators and methodology and identify data gaps

Recommendations related to specific livestock systems:

• Recognize the importance of smallholder mixed farming systems for food security and nutrition and support them
• Recognize and support the unique role of pastoral systems
• Promote the sustainability of commercial grazing systems
• Address the specific challenges of intensive livestock systems

Read the whole report:
HLPE. 2016. Sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition: What roles for livestock? A report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security, Rome, 139 pp.

Read the report’s Summary and Recommendations, 12 pp.

Read related recent news:
Balancing the plate: Jimmy Smith opens ‘Private Sector Mechanism Partnerships Forum on Livestock’, ILRI News blog, 6 Jul 2016.

Jimmy Smith’s address to UK parliamentary group on the potential of livestock for development, ILRI News blog, 4 Jul 2016.

Tanzanian boy with large jug of fresh milk (photo credit: East African Dairy Development project).

A useful summary of the future plans of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based in Washington, DC, has been published. Two of the five flagships of this multi-institutional research program are led or co-led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), based in Nairobi, Kenya. Future work of these two flagships is described below.

‘Beginning in 2012, the CGIAR Research Program (CRP) on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) has provided an innovative perspective on the relationships between agriculture, nutrition, and health through research that strengthens the knowledge base and through new partnerships that lead to outcomes. . . . Led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based in Washington, D.C., A4NH’s research activities are carried out through five flagship research programs and three cross-cutting units based across the globe working with partners on projects in at least 30 countries. This brief provides A4NH stakeholders with a summary of the full proposal we submitted in March 2016 to the Consortium Board for the next generation of the CRPs. . . .’

A4NH FLAGSHIP 3
‘Food safety is moving rapidly up the development agenda as major new studies reveal its severely under-estimated importance. Solutions that are effective in developed countries and export systems have not translated well to informal or formalizing markets. There is an urgent need for technical and institutional solutions to food safety challenges, and broader policy and regulatory approaches to manage food safety risks in dynamic, developing markets.

‘Food Safety (Flagship 3) addresses these challenges through targeted research on technological and institutional solutions and appropriate policy and regulatory options that align public health goals with country priorities to ensure that food is both safe and equitable for the poor. Primarily, this flagship focuses on mitigating aflatoxin contamination in key staples and on managing risks in informal markets for nutrient-rich perishables like meat, milk, fish, and vegetables. In close collaboration with value chain research in other CRPs and with partners, this flagship will reach tens of millions of consumers, millions of farmers, and thousands of market agents working in priority countries in Africa and Asia.

The Flagship 3 topics are consolidated into three main clusters of activities
‘1) Evidence that Counts generates evidence on questions at the interface of agriculture and foodborne diseases so that key food safety evidence users (donors, academics, INGOs, national policymakers, civil society, and industry) are aware of and use evidence in the support, formulation and/or implementation of pro-poor and risk-based food safety approaches.

‘2) Safe Fresh Foods conducts research on how an institutional innovation known as training & certification (T&C) can improve the quality and safety of fresh foods (initially limited to dairy and meat), in order that market-based food safety innovations, like T&C, are delivered at scale in key countries along with understanding of their impact and appropriate use.

‘3) Aflatoxin Mitigation looks at how use of farm-level mitigation technologies and practices, like good agricultural practices, resistant varieties, and/or biocontrol (aflasafe™), could reduce aflatoxin exposure among consumers with the goal of seeing biocontrol and good agricultural practices delivered at scale in key countries along with understanding of their impact and appropriate use. . . .

A4NH FLAGSHIP 5
‘Research that bridges disciplinary divisions and enhances links between agriculture and health provides a largely untapped opportunity to improve the health and livelihoods of poor people, especially in rural areas where ill health may be the most critical pathway for staying or becoming poor, and undermines the benefits of agricultural development. Improving Human Health (Flagship 5) is an innovative collaboration between public health and agriculture researchers aimed at mitigating health risks and optimizing benefits in agricultural systems.

‘This flagship is led by a joint partnership arrangement co-convened by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), thus bridging agriculture and public health research to deliver high-quality scientific outputs and to identify new key opportunities for integrated actions that improve human health. Flagship 5 will also host a Platform for Public Health and Agriculture Research Collaboration, convened by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which will serve as a resource for other CRPs looking to collaborate on agriculture and health.

Priorities for cross-sectoral research fall into three clusters of activities
‘1) Diseases in Agricultural Landscapes concentrates on understanding the health effects of agricultural intensification, including changes in water use, so that agricultural research initiatives, including those in farming communities, are more aware of how and why it is important to measure health risks and benefits.

‘2) Emerging and Neglected Zoonotic Diseases studies shared human and animal disease risks and explores the impacts of co-locating and aligning health and agricultural interventions for effective management so that agricultural and public health policymakers and implementers deliver coordinated and effective solutions to cysticercosis, in particular, and other zoonotic threats; and public and private sector policymakers.

‘3) Global Challenges on Agriculture and Health coordinates research on tackling emerging, common problems for health and agriculture, such as antimicrobial resistance and pesticide resistance, in order for public and private sector policymakers to implement measures to reduce health risks from antimicrobial resistance in hotspot livestock systems. . . .’

Read the whole brief: A4NH—Plans for phase II (2017–2022), IFPRI, 2016.

For more information, contact Delia Grace, the ILRI scientist who leads this A4NH work, at d.grace [at] cgiar.org, or Tezira Lore, the ILRI communications officer covering this work, at t.lore [at] cgiar.org. Lore manages a blogsite for this work at: AgHealth. And you’ll find all of this CRP’s five flagships covered at the A4NH website.

Rachael Njeri has started growing forage strips on her farm in the Kenya’s Tana River watershed. The forage plants help prevent soil erosion and provide feed for her cattle (photo credit: CIAT/Georgina Smith).

The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in Oct 2016 endorsed recommendations on Sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition: What roles for livestock?

The following policy recommendations build on the main findings of the CFS High Level Panel of Expert’s Jul 2016 report #10, on Sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition: What roles for livestock?

The sustainable development of agriculture, including livestock, is essential for poverty reduction and the achievement of food security and nutrition.

The recommendations aim to strengthen the contribution of the livestock sector to sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition and contribute to the progressive realization of the right to adequate food, in the overall context of achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, recognizing the essential role of smallholders in achieving food security and nutrition.

These recommendations draw upon the pathways towards sustainable livestock development identified by the HLPE report which are based on the three principles of improving resource efficiency, strengthening resilience and improving social equity/responsibility outcomes.

The Recommendations are primarily addressed to governments for public policies, but are also addressed to all stakeholders with a role in achieving food security and nutrition. The recommendations are voluntary and non-binding.

The recommendations aim to complement and not re-state recommendations and related guidance previously provided in other CFS products.

Recommendations

The recommendations listed below under ‘Part I:  Sustainable Agricultural Development’ apply to all agricultural systems including livestock systems; specific references to livestock are coloured in burgundy. The specific recommendations listed under ‘Part II: Livestock Production Systems’ address particular challenges for the livestock sector. In the list below, both the burgundy highlights and the headings in ALL CAPS have been added to the original list of policy recommendations, found here.

Part I: Sustainable Agricultural Development

I. Foster policy coherence for food security and nutrition

a. INTEGRATED FOOD/AGRICULTURE/LIVESTOCK POLICIES

Promote integration of food security and nutrition into related policies to maximize the positive role that sustainable agricultural development and particularly livestock have in improving the economic, social and environmental sustainability of food systems, and strengthen coherence between sectoral policies and programmes.

b. GUIDANCE/AGREEMENTS/MULTI-STAKEHOLDERS

Build on guidance from relevant international and regional intergovernmental organizations and agreements, and take into account, as appropriate, the work of multi-stakeholder platforms and partnerships, which are dedicated to sustainable agricultural development and livestock specific issues.

c. FAIR AGRICULTURAL TRADE

Promote a fair and market-oriented world agricultural trading system in accordance with multilateral trade rules, in acknowledgment of the role of trade as an important element in support of sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition.

II. Address nutrition, food safety, working conditions and services

a. ANIMAL SOURCED FOOD FOR HEALTHY DIETS/NUTRITION

Encourage the appropriate intake of animal sourced foods, that is culturally acceptable, for healthy diets and improved nutrition, including through awareness-raising and education in the context of promoting sustainable agriculture and livestock production in accordance with SDG 12.

b. ANIMAL SOURCED FOOD FOR CHILDREN/WOMEN

Recognize the important role that animal sourced food, including dairy products, can play for children, pregnant and lactating women, and elderly people.

c. FOOD SAFETY/QUALITY

Develop capacity to meet national and international food safety and quality standards, frameworks, and schemes, ensuring that they are appropriate for different scales, contexts and modes of production and marketing, in particular CODEX Alimentarius standards.

d. WORKING/LIVING CONDITIONS

Ensure that the working and living conditions of all workers at all stages of production, transformation and distribution comply with ILO conventions, and are protected by domestic laws, and provide adequate living wages.

e. MARKET/CREDIT ACCESS

Develop and implement policies and tools to facilitate farmers’ access to markets and credit to help improve their livelihoods.

f. AGRICULTURAL INVESTMENT

Encourage responsible public and private investment, including foreign direct investment consistent with national regulations, and provide other forms of adequate financing, including official development assistance, that supports implementation of sustainable agricultural development, including livestock, particularly for smallholders, including those that are family farmers, and pastoralists.

g. AGRICULTURAL SERVICES

Facilitate inclusive access to quality social services, safety nets, extension, and breeding and veterinary services, particularly for smallholders, including those that are family farmers, and pastoralists.

III. Foster gender equality and women’s empowerment

a. RIGHTS OF WOMEN

Respect, protect and fulfil the rights of women working in agriculture, including the livestock sector.

b. WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT

Promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, ensuring equal access to livestock productive resources, capacity building and education for women and foster women’s equal participation in decision-making.

IV. Foster empowerment of youth

a. YOUTH INITIATIVES

Promote youth initiatives, including education, training, rural advisory services and inclusive finance, to develop their capacity and facilitate access to land and resources, in order to enable them to be drivers of improvement in sustainable agriculture development, and involved in all levels of food systems.

V. Protect the environment and promote sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources

a. AGRICULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY

Promote sustainability and improvement of all systems of production, including organic approaches, agro-ecological approaches, and sustainable intensification, so as to preserve biodiversity and ecosystems, minimize environmental degradation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product.

b. INTEGRATED AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS

Promote integrated agricultural systems making better use of natural resources, halting deforestation, restoring degraded lands, improving soil quality, and fostering the sustainable management of water resources.

c. LIVESTOCK GENETIC RESOURCES

Strengthen the development, conservation, sustainable use and management of livestock genetic resources in line with the Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources, stressing the importance of the Domestic Animal Diversity Information System (DAD-IS), and promote  access and benefit-sharing for animal genetic resources for food and agriculture, in line with relevant internationally agreed treaties.

d. TRADITIONAL/PASTORAL SYSTEMS

Recognize, respect and protect those traditional production systems, including pastoral systems and their mobility strategies, that use ecosystems sustainably and contribute significantly to the food security and nutrition of their communities and associated ways of life.

e. FOOD SYSTEM EFFICIENCIES

Identify options for improving efficiency throughout food systems, while minimizing negative environmental impacts and optimize the efficient use of energy, water, nitrogen and other natural resources.

f. FOOD LOSS/WASTE

Reduce food loss and waste including by supporting the improvement of infrastructure and cold chain development, through consumer education, the dissemination of best practices, information, capacity development, and the transfer of technology as mutually agreed, including for smallholders and pastoralists, considering the most appropriate local technologies.

VI. Enhance resilience against risks and variability

a. TENURE RIGHTS

Strengthen the security of tenure rights in line with the CFS Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security, including in all cases of conflict.

b. CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION/MITIGATION

Facilitate the adaptation to and mitigation of climate change in agricultural systems in line with the Paris Agreement, and with particular support for smallholders and pastoralists, and women’s role in food systems.

c. RISK MANAGEMENT

Develop policies and tools, and improve capacity, to assess, mitigate, and manage risks, and reduce excessive price volatility, and their impacts on the most vulnerable.

d. LIVESTOCK INSURANCE

Enhance access to livestock insurance for all systems, including index-based insurance.

e. DISEASE CONTROL

Improve disease prevention, control, and surveillance, including through cross border cooperation on transboundary diseases, in order to foster early-warning and early action on disease control, spread and eradication, with emphasis on the Peste des Petits Ruminants Global Eradication Programme.

VII. Promote cooperation and collaboration in innovation, research and development and address data needs

a. INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

Enhance North-South, South-South and Triangular and international cooperation particularly for capacity building, transfer of technology as mutually agreed, sharing of knowledge, and to leverage additional financial resources.

b. RELEVANT/DISAGGREGATED DATA

Promote global collaboration for collection and dissemination of relevant and disaggregated data, especially by sex.

c. LIVESTOCK INNOVATIONS

Develop and foster innovation that addresses challenges in achieving sustainable agricultural development in livestock systems, including through collaborative and participatory research, transfer of knowledge and capacity building.

d. TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE

Support the protection and strengthening of traditional knowledge systems which promote sustainability and the use of experiential knowledge in research and development.

e. DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

Promote access to and the use of digital technologies, including for precision agriculture, and foster their appropriate application for sustainable agricultural development.

Part II: Livestock Production Systems

All Systems

VIII. Improve animal health and welfare

a. VETERINARY SERVICES

Enable access to veterinary and extension services, vaccinations, medications, including antimicrobials, adapted to the specific livestock production systems.

b. ANIMAL HEALTH

Improve animal health management including biosafety and biosecurity, particularly focusing on infectious diseases, zoonosis, and reducing exposure to environmental hazards, by following OIE (World Organization for Animal Health) standards, and the One Health approach.

c. ANTIMICROBIAL USE

In accordance with the UN General Assembly Political Declaration on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) (September/2016), the WHO7 Global Action Plan on AMR, FAO Resolution 4/2015, and OIE, CODEX Alimentarius and WHO guidelines and standards, in respect of the One Health approach and in the spirit of FAO, OIE, WHO collaboration, promote the prudent and responsible use of antimicrobials in agriculture and prevent their unnecessary use, including the phasing out of use of antibiotics for animal growth promotion in the absence of risk analysis.

d. ANIMAL WELFARE

Improve animal welfare delivering on the five freedoms and related OIE standards and principles, including through capacity building programmes, and supporting voluntary actions in the livestock sector to improve animal welfare.

e. ANIMAL FEED

Promote access to good quality feed, and facilitate training on sustainable feeding practices.

Specific Systems

IX. Recognize, protect and support pastoral systems for livelihoods and sustainable resource management

a. PASTORAL SYSTEMS

Enhance the effectiveness, sustainability, and resilience of pastoral systems for food security and nutrition.

b. PASTORAL MOBILITY/GOVERNANCE

Enable pastoralists’ mobility, including transboundary passage as appropriate; securing access to land, water, markets and services, adaptive land management, and facilitate responsible governance of common resources, in accordance with national and international laws.

c. PASTORAL ORGANIZATIONS/POLICIES/INVESTMENTS

Enhance the role of pastoralist organizations and strengthen public policies and investments for the provision of services adapted to the needs and ways of life of pastoralists and their mobility, including promoting gender equality and addressing the specific needs and roles of women within pastoralist communities.

X. Promote and support sustainable grazing systems

a. ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

Enhance the role of grazing systems in the provision of ecosystem services, including carbon storage, by improving the sustainable management of biodiversity, soil and water.

b. GRAZING MANAGEMENT

Restore degraded land and reduce deforestation by promoting sustainable grazing management, such as agro-silvopastoral systems, aiming at improved soil quality, carbon storage, pasture productivity, and conservation and storage of forages.

XI. Promote and support mixed systems

a. CROP-LIVESTOCK INTEGRATION

Strengthen integration of livestock with crops, including by more integration of legumes in crop rotation and inter-cropping, and forests-agro-silvopastoral systems—at different scales, including on farm, across watersheds and ecosystems, and provide benefits in terms of addressing input and energy needs in a sustainable manner, including through the use of draught power and the use of manure as fertilizer.

b. SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOODS

Leverage the potential of livestock as a means for sustainable livelihoods for smallholders, through enabling collective organizations and actions, investing in infrastructure, facilitating access to markets, and implementing measures to manage risks and address challenges.

c. MANURE/WASTE MANAGEMENT

Promote manure management and the use of by-products and re-use and recycling of waste, as appropriate, while protecting water and air quality, and improving soil health.

XII. Promote the sustainability of intensive systems

a. FEED PRODUCTION/USE
Reduce pressure on resources by promoting the efficiency of feed crop production and feed use and the sustainable use of appropriate by-products for feed.

b. PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY/ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

Improve production efficiency and protect the environment, including by improving the management of waste and the use of by-products, and through the use and sharing of innovative and appropriate technologies and practices.

c. WORKING/LIVING CONDITIONS

Ensure that working and living conditions meet national and internationally agreed labour standards and reduce occupational hazards and other harmful effects on workers across the value chain.

d. ANIMAL WELFARE

Promote a physical environment and genetic selection that ensures compliance with the OIE welfare standards, including the Five Freedoms.

About the Committee on World Food Security (CFS)
CFS is the foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for all stakeholders to work together in a coordinated way to ensure food security and nutrition for all. CFS endorses policy recommendations on a wide range of food security and nutrition topics.

CFS is the foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for all stakeholders to work together to ensure food security and nutrition for all. The Committee reports to the UN General Assembly through the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and to FAO Conference.

Using a multi-stakeholder, inclusive approach, CFS develops and endorses policy recommendations and guidance on a wide range of food security and nutrition topics.  These are developed starting from scientific and evidence-based reports produced by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) and/or through work supported technically by The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), World Food Programme (WFP) and representatives of theCFS Advisory Group. CFS holds an annual Plenary session every October in FAO, Rome.

About the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE)
The High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) was established in 2010 as the science-policy interface of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The HLPE aims to improve the robustness of policy making by providing independent, evidence-based analysis and advice at the request of CFS.

About ILRI’s involvement in the CFS report on livestock
The ten HPLE project team members who prepared the CFS Report #10 on sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock, which was presented at the 43rd CFS Plenary Session in Oct 2016, was led by Wilfred Legg (UK), an agricultural economist, and included among its team members Delia Grace (Ireland), a veterinary epidemiologist and zoonotic disease and food safety expert leading a research program at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and two flagships of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In addition to Grace, the other team members included Khaled Abbas (Algeria), Daniela Alfaro (Uruguay), Botir Dosov (Uzbekistan), Neil Fraser (New Zealand) Robert Habib (France), Claudia Job Schmitt (Brazil), Langa Simela (Zimbabwe) and Funing Zhong (China).

Faustina Akyoo is a dairy farmer in Tanga, Tanzania. Her five dairy cows are an important livelihood asset for her family (photo credit: ILRI/Paul Karaimu).

International humanitarian assistance has long since slipped down in the agenda of African officials. With rapid economic growth forecast in much of the continent, government development priorities largely focus on increasing productivity and investment. And in Tanzania, where approximately 37% of the rural households possess cattle, chicken, goats, pigs and sheep, this puts livestock at the centre of the development debate.

Despite accounting for 11% of the African cattle population, livestock-related activities contribute only 7.4% to Tanzania’s GDP and growth of the livestock sector at 2.6% is low. In recent years, the government of Tanzania has prioritized the transformation of the agricultural sector, yet the absence of a livestock roadmap has hindered progress. However, detailed inter-disciplinary research by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries (MALF) reveals the potential benefits of a comprehensive livestock master plan in Tanzania.

With relatively small levels of investment in the livestock sector, USD621 million over five years, the joint MALF/ILRI plan aims to create 1.8 million full-time jobs—80% going to farm family members and another 20% to hired employees. Beyond the direct benefits to the livelihoods of rural people, transformation of the country’s livestock sector has the potential to lower foods prices, benefitting urban consumers, and to generate foreign exchange earnings through increased exports. Implementation of the livestock master plan is also seen as critical to achieving food and nutritional security at household and national levels.

The Tanzania plan assesses contributions by three traditional pillars of livestock development—breeds, feeds, health—as well as by institutional policies on key livestock value chains (crossbred dairying, and red meat, pig and poultry production) for the long-run development of the sector. The plan provides evidence that investment in the development of crossbred dairy cows could lead to a 35% surplus of milk production over domestic demand, enhancing nutritional security, industrial output (e.g. in the baking industry) and export earnings.

The story is less positive in the red meat subsector where limited access to land for grazing and feed production will constrain growth in the beef sector. Without a substitution away from beef consumption, Tanzania is still likely to face a 17% red meat deficit by 2022. Since small ruminant meat accounts for less than 20% of red meat production, it is unlike to significantly help close this projected deficit. With a rising population, this is likely to put upward pressure on red meat prices.

Successful interventions—largely in the areas of breed selection, disease control and feed production—could significantly expand the share of poultry in the economy by 182%, to USD323 million within five years. Interventions in the pig sector—leading to more sustainable and climate-smart operations and ensuring high-quality and safe pig meat/pork—could significantly reduce poverty by increasing household incomes, food and nutritional security. The contribution of pork to Tanzania’s GDP would be expected to rise by 83%, to USD36 million by 2022.

Perhaps most importantly, the growth of the poultry and pig subsectors would enable Tanzania to close the projected ‘all meat’ deficit, increasing the share of white meat to total meat consumption from the current 9% to 41% by 2032. There are, however, some caveats. The benefits that can accrue from implementing the livestock master plan will require investment in changing tastes away from red meat.

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, development of the Tanzania livestock master plan was overseen by a high-level technical advisory committee convened by the MALF livestock permanent secretary, Maria Mashingo, and chaired by Catherine Dangat, ministry’s director for policy and planning. The committee comprised directors of key MALF livestock-related departments and other government agencies, and representatives from the private sector, civil society organizations and development partner agencies.

Data collection and quantitative diagnostics were supported by ongoing involvement of national livestock experts and in consultation with a wide range of key stakeholders. The quantitative sector analysis was undertaken using a Livestock Sector Investment and Policy Toolkit developed by the World Bank, the Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations working under the auspices of the African Union Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources.

Read the key findings of the Tanzania livestock master plan in this ILRI brief. Separate briefs on the development of key value chains, breeding, health, feed and policies can be found here.

The full document will be available shortly.

The Feed the Future Mali Livestock Technology Scaling Program is a three-year initiative (2016–2019) promoting inclusive growth of all the actors involved in adding value to the production and marketing of ruminant livestock in this large, and largely livestock-dependent, West African country. The program aims to increase the incomes and food and nutritional security of 266,000 people who keep cattle, sheep and goats, as well as  other actors in this value chain in three regions of southern and central Mali: Sikasso, Mopti and Timbuktu. Supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of the US government’s Feed the Future initiative, this livestock program is helping to close productivity gaps in Mali’s ruminant production systems, enhancing both the volume and the value of these animals when marketed in the country.

The program’s most recent report describes some successes and swift progress made in recent months towards achieving these goals as well as some new challenges the program is facing.

The first half of 2017 saw the completion of a series of training courses on:

• Current livestock vaccination campaigns, which offered suggestions on more participatory approaches to take
• Livestock fodder production and use
• Training trainers on growing Brachiaria fodder grass
• Training trainers on use of integrated packages to manage livestock fattening operations, raise small ruminants, maintain and manage work oxen and feed lactating cows
• Training data collectors on techniques to use in collecting information on livestock markets
• Techniques used to establish feed grinding units and to produce multi-nutrient blocks using the feed grinders

In addition:

• Workshop participants helped to finalize the design of a monitoring and evaluation framework for the program
• The program delivered three batches of a thermostable vaccine against peste des petits ruminants, an infectious disease commonly known as goat plague, for a total of nearly one million doses
• A total of 80.000 cattle, sheep and goats were vaccinated against peste des petits ruminants, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia and pasteurellosis
• Two program partners—Catholic Relief Services and Association Malienne d’éveil au Développement Durable—identified potential producers of seed for growing dual-purpose sorghum, cowpea and groundnut crops that will feed ruminants as well as people, and for growing Brachiaria fodder grass
• Jointly with Finance for Food Security and Women Entrepreneurs, the program organized a June workshop to enhance links between livestock producers and decentralized financial systems and banks attended by more than 200 livestock producers, representatives of livestock producer organizations, non-governmental partner organizations, decentralized financial systems and banks from communities in Bamako, Sikasso, Koutiala, Bougouni and Yanfolila
• Innovation platforms were established to bring together fodder producers, livestock keepers, livestock fatteners, butchers, livestock traders and veterinary service providers

The program also proceeded with the recruitment of a communication officer and a field officer.

Radio marketing
A main partner in this program, the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (Comité permanent inter-États pour la lutte contre la sécheresse au Sahel [CILSS]), has been developing a new data collection method that will enable additional market indicators to be monitored, such as the number of animals sold, the number exported, animal weight, how accessible are inputs for the livestock producers, supplies and prices of milk, prices of meat, and the prices and quantities of hides and skins sold.

Animal prices are being disseminated through radios stations, with market enumerators and community radio producers and broadcasters working together to disseminate livestock market information every week. In just the past three months, some 160 announcements have been broadcast in local languages on private or community radio stations to livestock producers and livestock market agents.

From the end users
The Feed the Future progress report on the Mali livestock program features three stories from three of the program’s participants.

Efad Mohamedoun is a 55-year-old chief of Assana, a Tuareg camp 30 km from Timbuktu on the Timbuktu-Goundam-Bamako road. He also serves as president of the Tamzizayat association, which has been supported by this program to promote production of native bourgou grass (Echinochloa stagnina), an essential food for livestock in the Niger River’s inland delta region. This year, the Tamzizayat association has stored 3,000 bourgou bundles and sold 2,000 bundles at FCFA200 (USD0.35) per unit. This generated an income of FCFA400,000 (USD715), which was used to purchase 20 bags of feed concentrates to secure supplemental livestock feeding during the dry season. The balance of the money was used to care for family members and to pay school fees for three children, including two girls, in Timbuktu.

Oumou Dicko is a Fulani producer from the ‘circle’ of Djenné in Femaye commune, in Koumaga village, in the Mopti region of central Mali. She is a dairy farmer and sheep fattener. To increase her production and diversify her sources of income, she engaged in 2016 in fodder production. When fed the sweet sorghum fodder and grains harvested on farm, her cows produced twice their daily milk yield during the dry season (3–4 litres/day instead of 1–1.5 litres/day). The additional milk ensured that her children were not underfed/malnourished in the dry season. This better feeding also improved the reproductive performance of her cows and prevented deaths of her animals due to feed shortages in the dry season.

Fatié Sanogo is a small ruminant fattener from the village of Farakala, in the Sikasso region of southern Mali. In 2016 and 2017, he benefited from forage seeds and practical advice provided by this Feed the Future livestock program. During the 2017 campaign, he fattened and sold 60 cattle in 3 rotations between January and June. After two months of fattening, he made an average profit (per animal) of FCFA50,000 (USD90), which represents a third of his costs, for a total profit of FCFA3,000,000 (USD5,375). The income he generated from this activity allowed him to meet the needs of his family, improve his production capacities and obtain a CFA2,500,000 (USD4,475) loan from a micro-finance institute in June to expand his production capacity.

Challenges ahead
Despite the encouraging progress and successes described above, new challenges have also emerged this year that require the close attention of the program in the coming months.

The fragile security situation in the areas of intervention is a major obstacle in reaching out to some target communes.

The lack of resources for meeting support costs means that innovation platforms and farmer field schools find it difficult to finance their action plans and to mobilize their members. Program team meetings were organized with the innovation platforms to find ways to generate resources through the platforms and to source funding for platform and farmer field school meetings. Some power struggles also emerged among innovation platforms and the leaders of communes and cooperatives. Consultative meetings clarified the expected roles and responsibilities of each partner and agreements were reached on ways to manage innovation platforms.

Attempts to link cattle fatteners with Laham Slaughterhouses are facing various problems: disagreement on the price of 1,000/kg of liveweight, use of liveweight as a basis for sales, payment procedures (on the spot or otherwise) and general rejection by traditional livestock keepers of the new system to ensure their own broker operations are sustained. Consultations are under way to reach consensus on these issues.

Finally, although ensuring gender equity is stated to be an important element of this livestock program, to date the gender focus seems to be restricted to ensuring that a number of women participate in the program’s training courses, innovation platforms and other activities, with little regard for promoting women’s decision-making and other aspects of women’s empowerment. A gender strategy is in the making and should help address this issue in future.

Read a brochure about the Feed the Future Mali Livestock Technology Scaling Program.
Read the latest quarterly progress report (Apr–Jun 2017) on this program.
Read more from the Feed the Future Mali Livestock Technology Scaling Program.

For more information, contact Abdou Fall, program manager, ILRI, a.fall@cgiar.org

A woman milks one of her goats in Mali (photo credit: ILRI/Valentin Bognan Koné).

The Feed the Future Mali Livestock Technology Scaling Program is a three-year initiative (2016–2019) promoting inclusive growth of all actors adding value to the production and marketing of ruminant livestock in this large, and largely livestock-dependent, West African country. The program, led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) aims to increase the incomes and food and nutritional security of 266,000 people who keep cattle, sheep and goats, as well as  other actors in this value chain in three regions of southern and central Mali: Sikasso, Mopti and Timbuktu. Supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of the US government’s Feed the Future initiative, this livestock program is helping to close productivity gaps in Mali’s ruminant production systems, enhancing both the volume and the value of these animals when marketed in the country.

Open day 

The Feed the Future Mali Livestock Technology Scaling Program team hosted an open day on 13 Feb 2018 in Mali’s southern city of Sikasso to increase the program’s visibility, share some successes of the project to date and ask for recommendations to improve the project.
More than one hundred people attended the open day including livestock producers (fatteners, forage producers, cooperative members, livestock traders) and representatives of USAID and network organizations of USAID-funded projects,  local authorities, national directorates and their local branches, decentralized communities, non-governmental organization partners, and print and broadcast media. After opening discussion, the participants visited Farakala, 40 km from Sikasso, where they were

invited to assess the level of technical expertise gained by agro-pastoralists.

They did so through interviews with promoters of facilities to store livestock forage crops (Brachiaria), fattening workshops, a pastoral farm and a cattle feed factory unit managed by women.

The day ended with a knowledge fair on the central themes of the program.

Recommendations
Among other recommendations, participants stressed the need to expand the program beyond its current funding lifetime, to strengthen links between farmers and financial institutions to make credit more accessible for farmers and other livestock value chain actors, to employ media to increase awareness of animal health issues, to support establishment of a sustainable Brachiaria seed system and avail feed grinders to women’s groups, and to support women’s groups’ promoting small-scale feed factory units supply multi-nutrient livestock feed blocs and compound feeds.

Progress on program interventions
It was reported that Mali’s Laboratoire central vétérinaire (LCV) had completed testing of the thermo-stability of three batches of vaccines against peste des petits ruminants (commonly known as ‘sheep and goat plague’). Results of analyses from the Pan African Veterinary Vaccine Centre of the African Union (PANVAC), in Ethiopia, indicated that two vaccines, produced according to the Xerovac protocol and the ILRI protocol, meet the latest thermo-tolerant requirements. ILRI, LCV and national partners will deploy the new livestock thermo-tolerant vaccines in the field in the coming weeks.

The program team also vaccinated 69,323 cattle against contagious bovine pleuro-pneumonea; 29,557 cattle and 8,143 small ruminants against a bacterial infection called pasteurellosis; and 39,435 small ruminants against peste des petits ruminants.

Jay Angerer, from Texas A&M University, visited Mali’s capital of Bamako 12–22 Feb 2018 to provide technical support for a Livestock Market Information System (LMIS). During his visit, Angerer upgraded LMIS software, established protocols for back up and data management, and trained local stakeholders on the use of LMIS and database maintenance. Together with ILRI staff, he joined a meeting to explore integrating LMIS data into an interactive voice response platform developed by Viamo, a social enterprise company for data collection and public service information via mobile.

Other activities reported in the last update continued, with various field visits by controllers to ensure regular market monitoring and data reliability, further dissemination of livestock market information on community radio and ongoing enumerator training.

More information
Read a brochure about the Feed the Future Mali Livestock Technology Scaling Program.
Read the latest quarterly progress report (Apr–Jun 2017) on this program.
Read more from the Feed the Future Mali Livestock Technology Scaling Program.

For more information, contact Abdou Fall, program manager, ILRI, a.fall@cgiar.org

ILRI senior livestock adviser Barry Shapiro (photo credit: ILRI).

A new livestock sector analysis from the Ethiopia’s Livestock State Ministry (LSM) and Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries (MoLF) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) was recently published. This work was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to help Ethiopia in its fact-based planning.

Lead author of the analysis, ILRI senior livestock advisor Barry Shapiro, had this to say about his team’s findings.

The results of the Ethiopia Livestock Sector Analysis clearly demonstrate that there are very attractive potential returns to investing in improving animal production in the country.

These potential returns, ranging from about 20 to 40% per year, signify that much higher investments in the sector by governments, development partners and the private sector are warranted.

That Ethiopia is ambitious to improve livelihoods in rural areas significantly makes increased investment in livestock essential. This is due not only to the high potential returns to investment but also to the many benefits livestock bring to the country’s food and nutritional security and the large numbers of livestock-keeping households in Ethiopia.

Livestock already are making significant contributions to Ethiopia’s national economic growth. The sector now makes up 40% of the country’s agricultural gross domestic product and 27% of its national GDP.

The Ethiopia Government has many development objectives for the sector, some of them that could be conflicting. For example, while ambitious to increase red meat exports (from beef, mutton and goat) to earn more foreign exchange, the government also wants to meet a rapidly growing domestic demand for meat. (The current deficit of meat on the local market already makes the price of Ethiopian beef two times that of the world market price.)

A way to create a ‘win-win’ in this area, as the livestock sector analysis shows, is to invest heavily in broiler and layer chicken production so that domestic chicken supplies increase rapidly and the prices of all meat in Ethiopia decline—allowing more red meat to be exported. To achieve this, a change in cooking and eating habits will be needed, requiring significant investments in advertising and dietary education to promote eating broiler meat and layer eggs rather than the traditional local ‘doro’ chicken and eggs.

Increasing chicken production with broilers and layers rather than increasing the numbers of cattle, sheep and goats could provide the additional benefits of increasing investment in, and employment of, women and youth while lowering the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the country’s livestock sector.

—Barry Shapiro, ILRI senior livestock economist

From the executive summary
To effectively launch and carry out its work, Ethiopia’s new Livestock State Ministry (LSM) requires a vision of what can and needs to be accomplished to develop the sector, built on a factual baseline and realistic targets and priorities, along with a realistic strategy and ‘road map’ or action plan—what the ministry calls a ‘livestock master plan’. This Ethiopia livestock sector analysis is a critical input into Ethiopia’s livestock master plan.

This report also seeks to inform other Ethiopian government policymakers involved in livestock development on the current status and future potential for poverty reduction and economic growth of the livestock sector. It is based on a quantitative analysis of the technical performance of the sector and its economic contribution to the household and national economy, using a set of tools from the Livestock Sector Investment Policy Toolkit (LSIPT). This toolkit was developed by a group of international agencies under the aegis of the Platform for the African Livestock Development & Sustainable Economic Growth (ALive) of the African Union-Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR). The analysis is based on field surveys, literature and expert opinions, continuously validated through consistency tests.

Development of the Ethiopia livestock sector analysis
Using the most recently available data, from 2013, ILRI and the LSM employed the LSIPT2 to develop livestock herd and sector models and a baseline assessment of the current state of agricultural development in Ethiopia upon which to assess the potential long-term, 15–20 year, impact of proposed combined technology and policy interventions, referred to as the livestock sector analysis. The results of that analysis then formed the basis for the development of the Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) II targets and the Ethiopian Livestock Master Plan 2015–2020. The master plan is a series of five-year development implementation plans or ‘roadmaps’, to be used to implement in the GTP II period and beyond.

Interventions in the Ethiopia Livestock Sector Analysis and the Ethiopia Livestock Master Plan were tested using sector model measures of the Ethiopian Government’s livestock development and policy objectives for GTP I and II. The GTP objectives employed to assess the investment interventions of the Ethiopia Livestock Master Plan were to:

• reduce poverty
• achieve food and nutritional security
• contribute to economic growth (GDP) and agro-industry development
• contribute to exports and foreign exchange earnings and
• contribute to climate resilience

Using indicators for the above objectives, three key livestock commodity value chains—poultry, for chicken meat and eggs; crossbred cattle, mainly for milk; and ruminant livestock red meat and milk (from indigenous cattle, sheep, goats and camels)—were identified in the livestock sector analysis as those sub-sectors with most potential to contribute most significantly to the long-run development of Ethiopia’s livestock sector. In each of these commodity value chains, the analysis focuses on both smallholder family and specialized commercial production systems. These three value chains and six sub-value chains are found in one or more of the three major production typology zones of Ethiopia, officially categorized by the Ethiopia Ministry of Agriculture as: lowland grazing, including both pastoral and agropastoral systems; mixed crop-and-livestock production systems in rainfall-deficient highlands; and mixed crop-and-livestock production systems in rainfall-sufficient highlands.

A summary of the findings of the report shows the following

• The national herd, consisting of about 55.2 million cattle, 29 million sheep, 29 million goats, 4.5 million camels and close to 50 million poultry, annually produces some 1,128 metric tonnes (MT) of meat, 174 million eggs and 5.2 billion litres of milk. This national herd also provides about 68 million MT of organic fertilizer and almost 617 million days’ worth of animal traction. The technical parameters, in particular for mortalities of young stock, are poor compared to data from similar production systems elsewhere in Africa.
• For the purposes of this study, a typology for the different livestock systems was developed, consisting at the first level of (a) the predominantly grazing or grassland systems of Ethiopia’s lowlands and (b) the rainfall-deficient and (c) the rainfall-sufficient mixed farming systems at higher elevations. Most of Ethiopia’s cattle are found in the mixed systems, sheep are about equally distributed between highland mixed and lowland grassland systems, and goats and camels are predominantly found in the lowlands.
• Ethiopia’s national livestock herd provides all or part of the livelihoods of more than 11.3 million rural households, of which 27–35% of the highland livestock keepers and a larger proportion of the lowland herders live below the national poverty line, which, based on a 2010/11 household survey conducted by Ethiopia’s Central Statistic Agency, is 3,781 Ethiopian birr (ETB) per adult equivalent per year, or about ETB20, or USD0.50, per person per day.
• The highest proportion of poor livestock-keepers in Ethiopia is in the lowland grassland systems and the lowest proportion (27%) is in the rainfall-sufficient mixed highland systems. The highest absolute numbers of poor people are found in the rainfall-deficient mixed highland systems. A more in-depth analysis shows that (a) cattle is the dominant species for 70–90% of the livestock holding households; (b) livestock’s contribution to total household income is higher in poorer households in the highlands than in other zones; (c) village poultry across all agro-ecological zones and goats in the lowland grasslands have the highest annual income per unit of tropical livestock units. A focus on reducing poverty would give priority to cattle, goats and village poultry in all systems, especially in the lowland grasslands and the moisture-sufficient mixed crop-livestock highland systems.
• The direct contribution of livestock to Ethiopia’s gross domestic product (GDP) is estimated by LSIPT at ETB150.7 billion per year, which comprises 17% of Ethiopia’s GDP and 39% of its agricultural GDP. If livestock processing and marketing (estimated at ETB35.6 billion a year) is taken into account, this proportion rises to about 21% of national GDP and 49% of agricultural GDP. If the indirect contribution of livestock organic fertilizer and traction (estimated at ETB37.8 billion a year) is taken into account, the contribution livestock make to Ethiopia’s GDP rises to 25.3%.
• The direct contributions livestock herds and farms make to Ethiopia’s GDP are from milk (34%) and meat (32%), with the rest generated by other livestock services or products. In terms of livestock systems, these livestock contributions to Ethiopia’s GDP are about equally distributed over the countries’ three major agro-ecological zones, while the contributions of the specialized systems of urban dairy for milk and feedlots for red meat remain incipient.
• The demand for meat and milk in Ethiopia is currently met mainly from domestic production. But an exploding demand for meat and milk due to a growing population (estimated to reach 127 million people in 15 years) and rising per capita income, are expected to cause deficits of about 1.3 million MT (53%) of meat and 3,185 million litres (29%) of milk by 2028. Per capita meat consumption by that year should be about 24.5 kg/year, which is about on par with other countries at a similar stage of development. Meeting these meat and milk gaps will require substantial investments in the Ethiopian livestock sector.
• The livestock sector analysis projects that if the proposed investment interventions are put in place and successful, the country will have an annual 20% surplus of about 2 billion litres of milk by the year 2028. The analysis indicates that the projected milk surplus will be realized through investments in better dairy genetics, feed and health services for both traditional dairy farms and commercial-scale specialized dairy production units.
• Closing the projected gap in meeting meat consumption demands will require vast increases in both traditional backyard family poultry enterprises and commercial-scale poultry broiler and layer units.
• Investments in improving poultry production systems can also generate an overall surplus of meat production over projected consumption requirements by 2028. The surplus in 2028 is projected to be about 8%, or 181,000 MT of meat per year.
• Poor market access and lack of infrastructure limit the production of value-added livestock products (just 31.5% of farm/herd-level livestock products are ‘value added’ versus 100% or more of livestock products in member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Furthermore, relatively short supply channels lead to moderate post-harvest losses in livestock-derived foods. While the livestock sector analysis estimates Ethiopia’s post-harvest milk losses at just 3.4 %, post-harvest losses of all types of meat range from 11 to 24%.
• Price analysis along the meat and dairy value chains shows that the average price increases and gross margins are quite high for most of the actors in the chains, especially for processors and food service providers who are adding value through processing or transformation of livestock-derived foods. This implies that these livestock value chain actors are operating in a lucrative business environment with few competitors. Greater and easier entry into these livestock markets, however, will require policies improving access to land and credit.
• While improvements in animal health, genetics, feeding and management improve livestock performance substantially, the projected gap in Ethiopian milk supplies by 2028 remains large, implying that a broader effort will be required to close the milk gap.
• Inadequate feed supplies, of grass and fodder in particular, will most likely be the main physical constraint to further expansion of Ethiopia’s livestock population. The LSIPT feed resources module estimates that sufficient grazing and fodder in an average year is available only for the lower grasslands and is available for the rainfall-deficit mixed crop-livestock highland systems only in a ‘good year’. Furthermore, by 2028 all of Ethiopia’s agroecological zones except the lower grasslands are projected to be dramatically deficient in these livestock feeds if the current increases of the country’s stock numbers continue.
• The animal disease constraint analysis points to the following diseases that should be major priorities for Ethiopia: (1) foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), (2) peste des petits ruminants (PPR, also known as ‘ovine rinderpest’ and ‘goat plague’), (3) tsetse-transmitted trypanosomosis (often abbreviated to ‘tryps’), (4) external parasites (called ‘ekek’, the Amharic word meaning ‘itch’), (5) sheep and goat pox and (6) contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP).
• Clear policies exist regarding the roles of the private and public sectors in livestock development, in particular in the provision of livestock services and inputs, but implementation is limited. Unfavourable regulatory and fiscal frameworks for allocating land and producing livestock feed, respectively, lead to a reluctance of private operators to invest in livestock development and are constraints to further equitable growth of the sector.

Strategic policy recommendations

• Priority is given to increasing the productivity or production per animal by addressing feed deficits and improving animal health and genetics. Among the key policy and investment actions to support increased productivity are: (1) enhancement of veterinary coverage through private-public partnerships to reduce livestock deaths and disease, (2) promotion of fodder production through the revision of land allocation rules and (3) accelerated introduction of improved genetics once feed production and health services are in place.
• Convergence of Ethiopia’s livestock sector analysis with its climate-resilient green economy and livestock investment plan: The resilience of the livestock sector to climate change could be improved and other national development objectives could be met by dramatically decreasing the greenhouse gases (GHG) generated in chicken production and consumption and by regulating cattle and other higher GHG emitters through greater off-take. Furthermore, additional investments should be made to increase the productivity of all livestock species considered priorities in the livestock sector analysis.
• Since an increase in the numbers of ruminant animals in the national herd is still expected to occur, the environmental consequences of this increase will need to be closely monitored since it threatens resource degradation from overgrazing. Policies introducing disincentives to increasing herd sizes, especially of low-productivity indigenous breeds, rather than improving productivity and/or switching to lower emitting animals (such as a tax per animal head) could be considered.
• Success in modernizing the poultry subsector will require policy interventions that help ensure that sufficient land is allocated and put into poultry feed production (especially maize and soybean) and that the private sector is encouraged to invest in poultry agribusinesses—especially day-old chick production and meat and egg processing.
• If poultry can substitute for red meat, then red meat can be exported to meet the government’s export goals to earn foreign exchange. However, tastes and preferences for local chicken, or ‘doro’, would have to be changed through promotion of exotic chicken meat and changes in cuisine.
• While in the long run, government policy would have to focus on the threatening projected domestic supply gap, promotion of export beef can be the ‘pull’ factor for general improvement later. A dual policy of seeking broad animal health coverage for poor smallholders while increasing exports and gaining access to attractive and remunerative markets in the region is therefore needed. This will also require a major increase in investments to enhance the quality and safety of the animal-source food products.
• There is need for balanced policies to encourage investment in animal production and meat processing to meet rapidly increasing domestic demand for meat as well as for export to prevent the exploding domestic demand from constraining export potential.
• Special incentives are needed (review of the business climate, tax facilities, training) to promote more value adding through processing and product transformation combined with clearer roles of the public and private sectors.

This, in turn leads to the following scenarios that have been tested for their economic feasibility. The agents of change will be technology interventions supported by policy adjustments.

• Policy measures rationalizing public- and private-sector roles in the provision of veterinary services combined with investments in animal health, feeding and management to reduce young stock mortality in all livestock systems.
• Dairy breeding improvement interventions, combining artificial insemination (AI) using exotic semen with oestrus hormone synchronization in the rainfall-sufficient mixed highland systems. The investment scenario results of the livestock sector analysis show the rate of return on investment in AI and hormone synchronization is not attractive in the rainfall-deficient mixed highland systems.
• To reduce poverty, transform Ethiopia’s traditional backyard family poultry systems through massive importation and dissemination of improved semi-scavenging poultry breeds by the private sector and, where the private sector is reluctant to enter on its own, through public-private partnerships, with private animal health services providing critical vaccines and government extension services promoting better poultry feeding.
• In addition, mass introduction of ‘improved semi-scavenging crossbreeds’ or ‘improved indigenous semi-scavenging chickens’ to create a market-oriented improved family poultry system which produces far more eggs and meat when provided with supplemental feeding and adequate health services.
• Revision of the land allocation policy framework to enable investments in fodder production and trade.
• Promotion of feed efficiency through removal of the value-added tax (15%) and duty (53%) on feed mill ingredients and introduction of quality control measures.
• Enhanced livestock exports to more remunerative markets through introduction of a practical and affordable system of animal identification and traceability.

The livestock sector analysis shows attractive economic returns for these investments but, as stated, the resulting productivity increases have limited impact on closing demand-supply gaps. Closing the gap between Ethiopia’s meat supply and demand by 2028 requires both that the national herd grows and that additional productivity-increasing interventions are put in place. Achieving the required increases in milk productivity and milk production requires substantial genetic improvement of the national herd and concomitant improvements in animal feed, health and management practices.

Recommended follow-up actions

• Prepare action plans and start implementing the high-priority policies and investments identified in this report, i.e. in animal health, fodder and value adding.
• Use the LSIPT database and the Ethiopian ministry and ILRI staff trained in its use to further refine the options already tested and to assess new potentially attractive investments.
• Establish in the Ethiopian Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, in coordination with other relevant agencies, a livestock policy support unit with the staff, hardware, data and budget needed to support the ministry in policy formulation using the LSIPT database and other tools.
• Ensure that in all future surveys priority is given to closing the data gaps identified during this exercise, in particular for the lower grasslands, small ruminant systems and value chains.

Read the whole report: Barry Shapiro (ILRI), Getachew Gebru (Managing Risk for Improved Livelihoods-Ethiopia), Solomon Desta (Managing Risk for Improved Livelihoods-Ethiopia), Asfaw Negassa (ILRI), Kidus Nigussie (Ethiopia Ministry of Agriculture), Gezahegn Aboset (Ethiopia Ministry of Agriculture) and Henok Mechale (Ethiopian Meat and Dairy Industry Development Institute of the Ethiopia Ministry of Industry), Oct 2017, Ethiopia livestock sector analysis: A 15-year livestock sector strategy, ILRI Project Report, Nairobi, Kenya: International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).