Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 20.1 Reviewing the pros and cons of Livestock sector
Livestock “ the burden
Livestock “ the answer”
Use 33% of cropland for feed production
Support 2 billion people (600 million poor)
Emit 18% of the global greenhouse gases
Contribute 20-40% to agricultural GDP
Consume 32% of the global freshwater
Contribute 33% of world protein consumption
Eat 40% of the global grain production
Provide 17% of world calories (8% in Africa)
Source : Authors
the same time, a negative ecological footprint when farmed intensively, but a positive
developmental footprint for alleviating hunger and poverty, when farmed in a greener
way by the planet's poorest. It has not only an economic value of at least $1.4 trillion; it
may be an invaluable resource for humanity to cope with the uncertainties of the climate
change impact on global food security (Herrero 2012, Ficarelli 2009). We need to move
to a new narrative for livestock (Dijkman 2013).
Popular food-systems thinker and writer Michael Pollan was asked what he would
do if he could change just one thing about America's industrial food production. “I'd
put animals back onto America's farms,” he answered. he age-old practice of raising
farm animals and growing crops together, he said, generates so many benefits, and on so
many levels, that this to him was the single most important missing piece in transform-
ing America's unhealthy and unsustainable industrialized food system into a healthy
and sustainable (and less-industrialized) one (Pollan 2006).
This injunction is not without its critics in the world that Pollan imagines as our past
heritage. The antilivestock arguments being made in reference to the world's poorest
countries tend to focus on a different set of environmental concerns, citing rangeland
degradation, and even widespread desertification, as evidence of the damage caused by
growing pastoral and agropastoral communities keeping more cattle, sheep, and goats
than their marginal lands can support; UNFAO labeled these concerns Livestock's Long
Shadow . At the same time, environmental and other groups, fearing that livestock pro-
ducers in China, India, Brazil, and other fast-developing countries are adopting the same
industrial practices now under attack in rich countries, with the same predictable dam-
age occurring to environmental, medical, and animal well-being in these emerging econ-
omies, are arguing for policies and regulations that keep livestock production systems in
the emerging economies from going the way of factory farms in the industrialized world.
The two paths are not necessarily contradictory; we as a species live in radically dif-
ferent political economies. Whereas livestock began to disappear from farms in the
world's industrialized countries starting in the 1960s, to be raised on ranches and feed-
lots and large-scale batteries and piggeries, livestock is still raised on hundreds of mil-
lions of farms throughout the developing world. One of the most important things donor
agencies and policymakers could do to help Third World countries develop and sustain
their agriculturally based economies is to support explicitly these ubiquitous “mixed”
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