Uncategorized – Page 3 – Livestock Futures

17. June 2012

Livestock keepers need a voice!

Statement to Dr. Sadana — Indian pastoralist leaders hand over petition about Livestock Keepers’ Rights to Dr. Sadana of the National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources

There is no shortage of global initiatives in the livestock sector. There is of course the Global Agenda of Action towards sustainable livestock sector development – we wrote about it previously. But there is also the Global Alliance for a safer, fairer and more sustainable livestock sector that apparently was launched during a meeting at ILRI in March. Notable is the overlap in the big organisations that are involved: FAO, ILRI, and Worldbank. Others in the Global Alliance are IFAD, OIE (World Organisation of Animal Health), the African Union’s Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One wonders about the reasons behind these coalitions. And we also wonder why livestock keepers are not (yet) officially recognised or mentioned as a stakeholder group in these processes which include governments, research institutions, private sector and NGOs, but no representatives of the 600-800 million poor livetsock keepers in the world. The LIFE Network is of course working and advocating to change this and presented a statement to this effect in the 23rd meeting of the Commission on Agriculture, a body that is composed of government representatives, and that was asked to gives its backing to the GAA and its secretariat being hosted by FAO for the time being. The statement was also on behalf of CELEP, the Coalition of European Lobbies for East African Pastoralism. We are sure that this was taken note of and will continue to pursue the issue. In the next few weeks this blog will provide some more background information about “small-scale livestock keepers” and why they are so important to listen to. Watch out for the next post!

14. April 2012

Livestock out of balance

Well, due to travel and slow internet connection in Rajasthan its been a while, but at least there has been some progress and follow-up with respect to the issues raised in the last post. In the meantime, my colleague Evelyn Mathias has completed a study about the impact of the Livestock Revolution on farmers – which gives ample food for thought. The results are preliminary and need to be discussed with economists, but they are on-line now as a discussion paper “Livestock out of balance. From asset to liability in the course of the Livestock Revolution.” on the LPP website. One of Evelyn’s conclusions is that the enormous competition for ever cheaper livestock products is creating incentives for “unethical behaviour”, such as the use of banned antibiotics and many environmental sins.

Well, I will be attending the 13th Inter-Agency Donors Group Meeting, this time organised by the Worldbank in Washington DC, over the next couple of days. One of the priority themes is “equity” and I am really curious what the results of the discussions will be!

26. November 2011

Promoting Biocultural Protocols in Africa

I’m in Nairobi now, helping the LIFE Africa coordinator, Jacob Wanyama, prepare for our workshop “Biocultural Community Protocols: An emerging approach to strengthening livestock keepers” that will be held at the Kenya School of Law on 29th November. We are excited to share and discuss the existing experiences with BCPs (Biocultural Community Protocols) with a wider audience. Dailibai Raika from Rajasthan will give a presentation about the Raika Biocultural Protocol and we will also hear about the Samburu BCP. Unfortunately, Abdul Raziq, the facilitator of the Pashtoon BCP, can not make it due to the difficultues of obtaining a visa in Pakistan. The workshop is organised in collaboration with Natural Justice and WISP, the World Initiative on Sustainable Pastoralism. It will be facilitated by our old friend, Getachew Gebru from Ethiopia.

17. April 2011

Why the EU does not reject cloning

I am sure many of you have wondered why the EU commission meakly accepts cloning and refuses to label meat from clones or clone offspring, despite the overwhelming majority of citizens being very much opposed to this. A paper by the European commission that was obtained by Testbiotech and published by Foodwatch reveals the arguments:

1. Its not deemed possible to actually trace the meat of cloned animals or their offspring – which is already on the market in Europe – and regulations for labelling would practically mean an import stop for all bovine meat. (So far only beef deriving from clones and their offspring is available, while pork from cloned pigs apparently has not yet hit the market.)

2. The EU is afraid of “carousel sanctions” under the WTO that would impact both its imports of livestock products to the tune of € 2 billion as well as its exports to the tune of € 6.9 billion.

Its almost hilarious. So much effort and costs have been invested in obtaining traceability of all livestock products in the EU, yet cloning is not considered a criterion. And the EU is afraid of risking the ire of the WTO fearing that it will lose the market for its excess meat – produced to 78% by using protein feed that is imported from the Amercias where the Amazon forests are being cut down for this purpose. …. Ah, that means economic sustainability for the few grain traders that dominate the global market!

9. April 2011

Five reasons against farm animal cloning

Selling food from cloned animals without special labelling has been confirmed as legal by the European Commission, while at about the same time representatives from USA, New-Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay issued the Buenos Aires Declaration on Livestock Cloning, under the guise that such new technologies would be essential for food security. I beg to differ for the following reasons:

It is undemocratic: While 58% of European consumers are against it, in the USA its a whopping 67% that oppose eating meat from cloned animals or their descendants.
It is causing immense animal suffering: According to the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA), “health and welfare of a significant proportion of clones have been severaly affected, often severely and with a fatal outcome.” Only a small percentage of the embryos actually survive and the remainder develops in odd ways.
It is eroding genetic diversity: pretty soon the supermarkets will only want products from exactly the same animals – so they can fit better into the standardized trays.
It undermines food security: We dont need more soy-bean and corn guzzling super animals – that basically compete with humans for food/feed. Instead we need robust, vital and self-contained animals that can fend for themselves and live off the vegetation of the drylands and mountainous areas of the world – that would otherwise go unutilized. Only pastoralists keep these types of animals, and they dont lend themselves to cloning, since much of their behaviour is learned and not genetically inherited, as my friend Saverio Krätli has convincingly shown.
It is a waste of resources – that benefits only the scientists and companies that have invested not only in the technology but also substanial amounts in lobbying lawmakers.

24. March 2011

What’s a breed?

I have been discussing this topic recently with my friends and learned colleagues in India. It came out that there actually never has been a scientific breed survey in the country and that basically India’s breed classification dates back to colonial times. It was always assumed a priori that only 20% of livestock belongs to a specifc breed and that the rest is non-descript. No wonder then, that new breeds are coming to light now and then. For instance the NGO Lokhit Pashu-Palak Sansthan (LPPS) reported about Malvi camel and Nari cattle sometime ago. Then Sahjeevean, an NGO based in Kutch (Gujarat), managed to get the Banni buffalo breed officially recognized. Now, they have identified another breed, the Kharai camel, that swims to and lives off the mangroves on the coast.
Getting a “new” breed recognised is a major effort, requiring lots of genetical studies to confirm that the breed is indeed unique. But it seems to me this approach needs to be streamlioned, especially if there apparently never was a real breed survey and the existing classification is based on more or less anecdotal evidence.

21. December 2010

“Livestock Keepers’ Rights should be addressed”

The much talked about “Access and Benefit-Sharing” is not a concept appropriate for animal genetic resources – this was the conclusion of an International Technical Expert Workshop on Access and Benefit-Sharing for Animal Genetic Resources that took place in Wageningen in the Netherlands at the beginning of December. Organised by the Dutch government as well as Switzerland and Norway, the meeting sought to analyse the implications of the Nagoya Protocol on the exchange of breeds and genes across international borders. Normally this works quite well, as individual animals – that embody the genetic resourcs -are sold to their new owners in other countries at a certain price, and the government only comes in, if there are hygienic restrictions or if does not allow export. But now, if the Nagoya protocol was implemented according to the letter, the procedure would change: every time there is an international transaction, a contract about Access and Benefit-Sharing would need to be developed.
The experts at the meeting, representing almost all stakeholder groups and more than 30 countries, agreed that exchange of livestock genetic material needed to be as unimpeded as possible. The positive thing was the consensus that “Livestock Keepers’ Rights” needed to be addressed, and that maybe this should be done on the context of an amendment to the Global Plan of Action on Animal Genetic Resources. There was also widespread support for Biocultural Community protocols which were also mentioned in the recommendations. These will be presented to the next meeting of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (CGRFA) that will be held at FAO in Rome in July 2011.