Category: Livestock

Posted on

Feral livestock: pest or useful resource?

I ((Contributed by Michael Kubisch)) came across an interesting article while browsing through my archives. ((Dirk van Vuren and Philip W. Hedrick. Genetic Conservation in Feral Populations of Livestock. Conservation Biology, Vol. 3, No. 3. (Sep., 1989), pp. 312-317.)) It is by now quite dated, but with global climate changes upon us, I think it may actually be more relevant now than it was 20 years ago. The article makes a case for the preservation of feral livestock which are descendents of animals that, once kept by humans, either manage to escape into the wild or are simply abandoned when no longer useful.

Not all species do this equally well. Sheep have a hard time managing on their own, while pigs, on the other hand, easily adapt to all sorts of environments. In the US there are an estimated 4 million feral pigs, many of which may be descendents of pigs brought over by the Spanish in the 16th century. Similarly successful have been feral horses in the US and camels in Australia, the latter being so abundant that there are efforts underway to use them for meat production.

The article makes the case for preserving feral livestock as a valuable genetic resource because the adaptation to life in the wild may have favored or preserved traits, for example resistance to specific parasites or a higher temperature tolerance, that domestic livestock may have lost.

Of course, there are drawbacks: in some countries feral animals are considered pests and there is no doubt that particularly pigs can and do inflict serious damage on the environment. And because of this there are often programs in place to eradicate or at least control feral populations, although such attempts have not always been all that successful. At any rate, in an age of changing climate conditions it might perhaps be more worthwhile to keep some feral livestock around than to try to get rid of it. 

Posted on

A policy for pastoralism in Africa?

The African Union apparently launched a Pan-African Pastoral Policy Initiative at a conference at Isiolo in northern Kenya last week. There’s a little bit about the event on the website of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Pastoralist Communication Initiative (one of the organizers), but not much. An article summarizing some of the results was released a few days ago by the UN’s Integrated Regional Information Networks and got picked up by various agencies. But that’s all I’ve been able to find. Which is a pity, because listen to what the IRIN article says:

The key issues that emerged from the discussions included: governance; land; education; markets and financial services; conflicts; and poverty risk and vulnerability. Another point was the ‘biological dimension’ – feed resources and animal genetic resources.

There’s nothing about biodiversity in the African Union pamphlet introducing the policy initiative, but it sounds as though that may have been rectified during the meeting itself.

The IRIN article is very good, full of pithy quotes and interesting information, like this:

A concept note prepared by the AU and OCHA-PCI on the continental policy framework quotes UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2005 figures, which indicate that the continent has 235 million cattle, 472 million goats, 21 million pigs and 1.3 billion poultry, all valued at US$65 billion.

I did look for this concept note but sadly couldn’t find it online.

Posted on

Surveying diversity

The kind of survey where a researcher turns up at farmers’ houses and starts asking a lot of standard, rigid questions about the problems they have been having with their crops and livestock has been somewhat unfashionable of late. In fact, one of the reasons for the explosion of rapid rural appraisal (RRA) methodologies in the 1980s, followed by more participatory, often qualitative, methods (PRA) in the 1990s, was so-called “survey slavery: questionnaires surveys which took too long, misled, were wasteful, and were reported on, if at all, late.” ((See this note prepared for participants in a workshop on PRA.))

A way — in fact, a whole menu of ways — was found, as a result of the pioneering work of some NGOs and universities, of allowing people, even marginalized groups, to set the very agenda of research, as opposed to just answering a bunch of questions that researchers thought interesting.

But there is a place for well-designed, carefully tested and sensitively-administered surveys to document and analyze the ways farmers manage their resources — including their agrobiodiversity — and to provide a baseline against which to gauge the effectiveness of interventions or other possible changes. I want to talk about two recent papers that use farmer surveys to characterize farming systems, as examples of the kind of thing there might be more of in agricultural biodiversity work.

The first paper, on surveys of smallholder families in northern Pakistan, focuses on livestock production. ((Abdur Rahman, Alan J. Duncan, David W. Miller, Juergen Clemens, Pilar Frutos, Iain J. Gordon, Atiq-ur Rehman, Ataullah Baig, Farman Ali and Iain A. Wright. Livestock feed resources, production and management in the agro-pastoral system of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan region of Pakistan: The effect of accessibility. Agricultural Systems, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 5 July 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2007.05.003)) The surveys were done along two transects which contrasted markedly in their transport infrastructure. One of the things the researchers looked at was the percentage of cross-bred animals per household. They found that there was a higher proportion of such improved animals in the transect with well-developed transport links and more accessible markets than in the more isolated area. As the roads get better in this latter area, the researchers think that “the proportion of traditional, unimproved animals … is likely to diminish,” and there are also likely to be “changes in land use towards higher-value commodities such as potatoes.” An interesting conclusion about likely genetic erosion — in both crops and livestock — in the region. One could imagine using this kind of information to identify areas throughout the country which are at high risk of genetic erosion due to impending road building or improvement.

The second paper looked at the adoption of soil conservation practices in Kajado district, in the Rift Valley province of Kenya. ((Jane Kabubo-Mariara. Land conservation and tenure security in Kenya: Boserup’s hypothesis revisited. Ecological Economics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 9 July 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.06.007)) The researcher, Jane Kabubo-Mariara of the University of Nairobi, was particularly interested in whether population density and land tenure arrangements had an effect on the likelihood of farmers constructing soil bunds and terraces and planting trees. She found that as population pressure increases, there is a “significant shift towards increased individualization of tenure” and also a “higher probability of adoption of soil bunds and planting drought-resistant vegetation.” Now, that’s fascinating enough, but what caught my attention was the dog that didn’t bark. Wouldn’t it have been interesting to know whether farmers in high density areas grew more or fewer crops, and more or fewer varieties of each?