Livestock in the Food Debate - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 515

a classic catch-22 situation—a circular paradox that is difficult to solve. No matter how
one thinks about developmental paths for livestock, there are always undesired results
that can be foreseen. Development cooperation on a global scale is one means to address
this dilemma, but livestock carries a number of political negatives. Some are concerned
for the ethical treatment of animals: rearing them only for slaughter seems indefensible
to many. Public concerns on food safety, animal welfare, and climate-changing emis-
sions work against prioritizing research and development in the livestock sector. And
yet, from the point of view of the most marginal and vulnerable, such concerns sound
elitist and uninformed. The other side of the story concerns the welfare of some two bil-
lion people depending on livestock for livelihoods.
Message in the Bottle: Does Livestock
Matter More?
The debate around “feeding the world” is a sensitive and sometimes emotional one; it
is hard to make a credible argument that hunger is acceptable and inevitable (Korthals,
this volume).
Paraphrasing the powerful image in James Martin's 2006 book, humankind at the
beginning of the twenty-first century has now entered into a deep river canyon heading
downstream on turbulent waters in multiple rafts toward a narrow bottleneck around
2050, before reaching calmer waters at the end of the century. The bigger the turbulences
close to the narrow point of passage, the higher the risk is that the weakest rafters will
not make it through. The way humanity will go through depends on decisions made
to d ay.
The objective of policy makers in development cooperation is to make the passage
as smooth as possible and limit human and natural losses to a minimum. Finding suit-
able answers to deal with the livestock dilemma is a priority for this century. The goal is
to ensure diverse food systems at global level with a two-pronged approach. The first is
to support the transformation process of the almost two billion pastoralists and small-
holder animal keepers to assure right to food and food-systems diversity (Pimbert
2008). The second is to continue to match supply with the demand of a growing urban-
ized, globally interlinked world population through intensive animal production, while
ensuring minimum environmental damage and animal welfare.
Framing this more complex vision, however, confronts political challenges. Livestock
is, in many discourses, becoming the stalking horse of the food crisis. The good and the
bad of livestock are used ideologically, but not always factually or with nuance. There is
an urgent need to have a nonideological, more informed, equitable, differentiated dis-
cussion about management of animal resources between North, East, and South. Farm
animals can be seen both as a burden threatening the future of humanity or as an asset
for helping ferry it toward a better future. As summarized in Table 20.1, livestock has, at