For people living in absolute poverty and chronic hunger, the solution is not to rid the world of livestock, but to find ways to farm animals more efficiently and more sustainably
We need to conserve the most important livestock genetic diversity for possible future use – by poor and rich farmers alike
Livestock feed is a key constraint to the commercialization of smallholder livestock production
While vaccines remain the most cost-effective medical and veterinary interventions for controlling disease, opportunities also exist to improve animal health by improving existing veterinary services and access by poor livestock keepers to those services
Mixed crop-and-livestock farms will, more than the traditional breadbaskets and rice bowls of the past, feed the developing world over the next few decades
Human, livestock and environmental health are inextricably linked, Sixty-one per cent of all diseases are ‘zoonotic’ –that is, transmissible between animals and humans.
Making smallholder production more competitive is a powerful tool to reduce poverty, raise nutrition levels and improve the livelihoods of rural people in many developing countries
Expert opinion agrees that the best way to tap into the potential of the drylands is to build on the foundation of their livestock economies rather than ignoring them or seeking to replace them.
An animated 3-minute video clip by the University of Minnesota’s Institute for the Environment. Justin Gillis has published an interesting piece this week in the Green Blog of the New York Times on a big study just published in Nature by Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. … Continue reading
A young boy herds a flock of goats on the road to Wajir from Garissa in northeastern Kenya (photo on Flickr by Ann Weru/IRIN). Debora MacKenzie writes in New Scientist this week that low-key projects keep Horn of Africa famine at bay. ‘Drought in the Horn of Africa threatens 13 million people with starvation and is … Continue reading
Watch this 6-minute ILRI film about a previous drought that devastated much of East Africa in 2008–2009. In Kenya, the Kitengela Maasai pastoral rangelands south of Nairobi, and the hot and dry crop-livestock farming district of Kitui further east, experienced many of the worst effects, including reports of the deaths of up to half of … Continue reading
Kenya refugee camps, July 2011 (photo on Flickr by IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation/Turkey). The International Agriculture and Development Blog reports that ‘The [famine] crisis continues to unravel in the Horn of Africa. . . . In an excellent commentary from Project Syndicate, Sam Dryden, the Director of the Agricultural Development Program at the Bill and … Continue reading
To escape the flooding in Pakistan, spiders create megawebs in trees (photo on Flickr from M1K3Y; more images on the Nej Lon Blog). More than 150,000 cattle have died in Pakistan as a result of the recent flooding, which, just 12 months after the last massive flooding in the country, has washed away fodder resources and … Continue reading
Feed scarcity in smallholder systems is a key constraint to improved livestock production in developing countries. However, development efforts which have taken a narrow technology-focused approach to dealing with feed scarcity have had limited success. The IFAD-supported ‘Fodder Adoption Project’ ran between 2007 and 2010 and aimed to address issues around inadequate livestock fodder at … Continue reading
This week’s Rome AgriKnowledge ‘share fair’ included a session on ‘innovation platforms’ as vehicles for rural change. It highlighted some experiences of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Crops Research Institute for the Tropics (ICRISAT), and the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF). The innovation platforms discussed in the session grew … Continue reading
The march of the West Nile virus (illustration on Flickr by A J Cann: Present and future arboviral threats. Antiviral Res. 2010 85[2]: 328–345). Laurie Garnett, a scientific consultant on Steven Soderbergh’s new film ‘Contagion’, wrote the popular science book The Coming Plague in the 1990s. In a piece on CNN last week, she warns that … Continue reading
‘A competitive, international fund for research on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from pastoral farming is now open for applications. ‘Agriculture Minister David Carter announced the NZ$25 million Fund for Global Partnerships in Livestock Emissions Research at the inaugural ministerial meeting of the Global Research Alliance in Rome in June. ‘The Fund draws on the NZ$45 … Continue reading
Owen Barder at the opening of an ‘AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair’ held at the Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, campus of the International Livestock Research Institute in Oct 2010 (photo credit: ILRI/Apollo Habtamu). Owen Barder writes in his blog of an interesting recent meeting held on ‘the future of aid’ by the World Bank London office. He … Continue reading
ILRI Clippings 