Later this month, many staff, partners and members of the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) will gather in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the institute’s annual program meeting.

On the ILRI blog, Alan Duncan, chair of the organizing committee, introduces the theme of this year’s meeting: ‘Livestock: The good, the bad and the ugly?’

Those of us at ILRI are used to focusing on how farm animals offer poor communities in poor countries many benefits, or ‘goods’, such as better household nutrition, greater household income, and more sustainable crop farming through inputs such as livestock manure to fertilize soils. At this year’s annual meeting, however, the ILRI community will focus its discussions on the problems associated with livestock production—the so-called livestock ‘bads’—such as environmental degradation, water pollution, diseases transmitted between animals and people (zoonotic diseases), overgrazing and loss of biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, and the common view in rich countries today that eating too much meat is bad for people’s health.

To read more on some of these issues, check out some of these posts:

• Livestock, feed and food security

• Intensive versus extensive livestock systems and greenhouse gas emissions

• New study injects new life into the livestock ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ controversy

• The State of Food and Agriculture 2009 – Livestock in the Balance

• An even more inconvenient truth: Animal agriculture and the environment

• UN body to look at meat and climate link – also the comments

• Smart investments in sustainable food production: revisiting mixed crop-livestock systems

• Livestock, livelihoods and the environment: understanding the trade-offs

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Editor’s note: We will publish news and updates on these discussions on our blogs, on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ILRI) and on our website (www.ilri.org). Look out for the special APM logo and the ‘ILRIapm2010’ tag.