Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
How growing corn and feeding it to livestock at a five or ten to one conversion ratio can
be construed as an 'efficiency gain' is a mystery that only economists can unveil. But the
FAO are correct to state that in traditional agricultural communities the main role of an-
imals is to turn vegetation that cannot be eaten or economically harvested by humans into
useful goods and services. In a default economy, animals are not often reared as the single
product towards which everything else is subjugated, unless (as in some pastoral environ-
ments) there are no other available products. Peasants with access to arable land, unlike
people who buy their meat from a supermarket, are only too aware from the exigencies of
their daily life that livestock are an inefficient way of producing human food. Pouring hard-
earned grain down the throat of an animal is not something any poor farmer is likely to do
to any great extent, unless there is a large surplus and no market for it. The role of the an-
imal in the traditional, peasant, default economy is to mop up wastes, residues, surpluses,
and marginal and interstitial biomass, and to provide services such as traction and nutrient
movement. Default livestock don't monopolize land that is required for other intrinsic ele-
ments of the agricultural ecology: the extent and nature of the animal foods and services
available are determined by the agricultural system as a whole.
In its 2009 State of Food and Agriculture report (SOFA), the FAO again describe how
traditional default livestock is under threat from industrial agriculture:
The move towards modern production systems has implied a decline in integrated
mixed farming systems and their replacement by specialized enterprises. In this pro-
cess, the livestock sector changes from being multifunctional to commodity specif-
ic. There is a decline in the importance of traditionally important livestock functions,
such as provision of draught power and manure, acting as assets and insurance, and
serving sociocultural functions. Livestock production is thus no longer part of integ-
rated production systems, based on local resources with non-food outputs serving as
inputs in other production activities within the system.
3
How big is the world's default livestock sector - how much meat and dairy produce
does it, or could it produce? To arrive at anything close to a precise figure would require
a accounting exercise that probably only the FAO are capable of carrying out - and to my
knowledge they haven't done so. However we are in a position to make a broad estimate
by summarizing some of the figures cited above:
(i) Food Processing Wastes
Fadel estimates the processing byproducts of six industries in 1993 were suffi-
cient to support the production of more than the entire world's milk supply, or roughly a quarter of all the nutrients
provided by livestock in the world.
4
(However, of this, about a quarter of the energy and more than a third of the
protein was derived from soybean meal, which is more a co-product than a byproduct.)
