Doing research business differently in eastern and southern Africa

Posted on June 15, 2006 by ILRIComms

Research institutions in eastern and southern Africa are changing the way they do business to unleash innovations.
Research institutions in eastern and southern Africa are changing the way they do business. They aim to make dramatic impacts on poverty by doing so. In tackling problems like climate change jointly, these institutions are aligning their programs, sharing their services, and developing research platforms to provide easy access to people, knowledge, equipment, and innovative institutional arrangements. For those interested in similar advancements, it’s now possible to learn hypnosis online, offering another avenue for transformative education and personal development.

The sixth and most recent consultation in a series of meetings held over the last 12 months—including three formal workshops and over 200 people from national institutes, universities, other research partners and centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—was held 24-25 May.

The integrated medium-term plan for eastern and southern Africa that these partners are co-creating will allow them to work effectively as one system. Their plan involves a Network Cluster comprising the 15 CGIAR centres and their African partners facilitated by a Network Hub operating virtually to help the dispersed groups in the region clarify and meet their needs. The start up plan will be refined and submitted to the CGIAR Science Council in June 2006.

The designated focal points for centres and partners involved in developing this plan are excited about what they are accomplishing and the momentum they are building. The CGIAR was an institutional innovation when it was created four decades ago. By aligning itself with its partners to ‘unleash innovations’-in strategy, structure, support systems, skills and shared values-it looks to be so again.

Future directions for livestock research for development

Posted on June 15, 2006 by ILRIComms

A new paper by ILRI describes new scientific tools and platforms to tackle new issues emerging in collaborative livestock research for development.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) recently reviewed its strategy, evolution and research agenda. The resulting paper, Knowledge to Action—Strategy and Future Directions of ILRI, answers four questions:

What is ILRI doing and why does it matter?
How is ILRI responding to dynamic livestock, science and development environments?
What are the future research directions and frontiers for ILRI?
Why invest in international livestock research?

This analysis included an assessment of ILRI’s achievements over the past five years: ILRI’s Achievements: 2000–2006.

Dynamic growth of the livestock sector in the developing world is creating new opportunities. The challenge is to use the ‘livestock revolution’ driver to achieve pro-poor growth. Rapidly changing consumer demands, expanding markets for livestock products, changing food quality and safety demands, new technologies, and institutional innovations such as the supermarket revolution all create both opportunities and challenges for reducing poverty through livestock interventions.

ILRI’s Knowledge to Action paper describes the evolution of ILRI’s research program, new directions for each of the institute’s five research themes, and research areas ILRI and its partners recently established to address global issues such as emerging and zoonotic diseases, increasingly stringent food quality and safety standards, and the environmental impacts and trade-offs of changing livestock systems. ILRI and its partners are developing research platforms to enable all stakeholders in livestock development to apply the tools of new science and technology in pursuit of a shared livestock-research-for-development agenda.

Bird flu consultation

Posted on May 29, 2006 by ILRIComms

ILRI and IFPRI are convening a consultation in Nairobi from 14 to 16 June 2006 to determine how the research community can best assist developing countries in the fight against bird flu.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) are convening a consultation to explore how research can support efforts to control the highly contagious avian influenza, with special emphasis on the needs of developing countries and the poor. The consultation is a response to requests from donors on priorities for targeting their research investments for Asia and Africa.

The consultation has four main objectives:

To share the experiences of those in the front-line of avian influenza outbreaks to provide a realistic, objective, and up-to-date backdrop for the consultation.
To identify and prioritize immediate service needs that research can provide in support of preparedness and emergency responses.
To identify and prioritize medium-and long-term research needs.
To develop an action plan and decide how to put it in place, including the possibility of forming an inter-institutional task force.

Much of the present effort in fighting bird flu is focused on immediate actions – emergency preparedness and response. The research community, however, also has a critical role to play in anticipating and addressing medium-and longer-term issues associated with bird flu in developing countries.

One of the greatest concerns is that bird flu could eventually become endemic in developing countries due to large poultry populations, weak infrastructure, scarce veterinary expertise and a general lack of resources. Poor poultry keepers in developing countries are also at a high risk of contracting bird flu, because they live in such close proximity to their livestock. Those who keep poultry and are desperately poor have the most to lose – and many may choose to save or eat sick chickens. This could put all family members and their other livestock at risk of contracting the deadly bird flu. The impacts on poor livestock keepers in Africa are highlighted in a recent article in the New Agriculturist.

New Agriculturist news article

Falling fowl of avian flu? New Agriculturist 1 May 2006

Members of the international development community wishing for more information about the ILRI-IFPRI Avian Influenza Consultation should contact Keith Sones ksones@africaonline.co.ke.

Further information about bird flu is available at ILRI’s Livestock in the News: Bird Flu page.

Poultry maps prepared for fight against bird flu: Higher resolution maps urgently needed

Posted on April 28, 2006 by ILRIComms

Africa is now fighting bird flu literally in its backyards. Seven countries have now confirmed they have the deadly H5N1 virus in their poultry populations.

These are Nigeria, Egypt, Niger, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Sudan and Côte d'Ivoire. Egypt has reported Africa's first cases of human infections, (13 to date) which have killed five people.

Worldwide, bird flu has hit 46 countries, killed 115 people, caused some 200 million birds to be killed at a cost of around 20 billion US dollars, and ruined the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on poultry keeping.

From 2003 to 2005 the virus was reported in 15 countries. But in the first four months of this year, it moved rapidly to 31 new countries, with major outbreaks in Turkey, Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar and India as well as the seven African states.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is working with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) to improve veterinary services that, in many of the affected countries, have been under-resourced for decades.

Dr David Nabarro, the UN's chief coordinator for avian influenza underscored the importance of using veterinary services to fight bird flu and the world's other emerging diseases of a communicable kind, '70 percent of which come from animals', he said.

What ILRI is doing to help its neighbours and partners fight bird flu
Like many of its partner organizations in livestock research for development, the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has been pooling its resources to contribute to the fight against this deadly disease. An internal task force is working on a number of fronts.

Several ILRI staff members sit on national avian influenza task forces set up in ILRI's hosting countries of Kenya and Ethiopia and are advising on the design of research support to control efforts in Nigeria. (Kenya's preparedness plan is considered one of the best in the developing world.) These ILRI staff are providing their veterinary and research expertise to advise on surveillance, monitoring diagnosis and control programs established to prevent or control the disease in poultry.

ILRI scientists are also preparing studies intended to generate practical information for immediate use by authorities, veterinarians and the public. These studies will compare different control strategies and assess their impacts on the poor and assist governments to prepare action plans for surveillance, control and containment of outbreaks. In longer term research, ILRI and its partners have proposed exploring the genetic make-up of chickens to unravel attributes influencing infection and transmission of the highly pathogenic form of avian influenza in various breeds.

Bird flu consultation to be held in Nairobi
In addition, ILRI and its sister Future Harvest Centre, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), are convening a consultation of interested partners from the international research community to explore ways in which research can support efforts to control highly pathogenic avian influenza. This scientific consultation will focus on the needs of developing countries and their poor populations of poultry keepers, sellers and consumers. The meeting will be held at ILRI's Nairobi headquarters, probably in early June (dates will be confirmed shortly).

Participants at the meeting will respond to requests ILRI, IFPRI and other research institutions are receiving from donor organizations. Donors want to know how to target their bird flu research investments so as ensure that those investments support effective control of the disease while minimizing the negative impacts on the poor. ILRI is also assembling a team to undertake a rapid appraisal of past experiences in controlling bird flu. Because implementing conventional response strategies against bird flu in many developing countries can be problematical and may place particular hardship on the poor, many of whom rely on poultry for their livelihoods, this rapid research study aims to synthesize lessons learned and identify strategies that may offer more 'nuanced' means of controlling the disease while protecting the livelihoods of the poor.

Poultry maps are prepared for the battle against bird flu

Global livestock maps
In 2002, ILRI produced livestock density maps (see Mapping Poverty and Livestock in the Developing World by Thornton et al., ILRI, 2002) derived from new analyses locating major populations of poor people (including poor livestock keepers), assessing how these populations are likely to change over the next half century, and showing estimated populations of different types of livestock around the world.

African and global chicken maps
In recent weeks, using data sets provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), ILRI prepared Africa and global maps of chicken densities. These maps are being used to determine areas under greatest threat and to help those countries already afflicted to target their disease control efforts.

Although the FAO-derived maps are based on the world's best information, they should be treated as indicative only; we caution against their over-interpretation (see Background Information below). This kind of macro-level analysis, while useful as a starting point, hides enormous variability, and thus can be dangerous if relied upon as a sole source of information. Ultimately, the fight against bird flu in Africa has to be conducted at much higher resolutions of basic information. (For an editorial on our lack of sufficient information, see Nature's Dreams of flu data. As the Nature editorial puts it, 'We have better data on galaxies 10 billion light years away than on human cases of avian flu in China or Vietnam.')

As ILRI agricultural systems analyst Philip Thornton, who headed ILRI's global livestock and poverty mapping project, says, 'The collation, maintenance and dissemination of baseline data is seldom supported in the agriculture sector. But in many ways, this data work is crucial to agricultural development and poverty alleviation. Information on livestock numbers and breeds in our African livestock databases is remarkably poor. Moreover, it seems clear that bird densities have to be assessed at relatively high resolution, given the heterogeneity involved.'

The maps do illustrate, however, the wide extent of 'backyard' chicken keeping in Africa—and thus the likely ubiquitous nature of any adverse impacts on the poor stemming from the appearance of bird flu or programs implemented to control it. The African and global chicken maps underscore the need to vastly upscale efforts to collect and improve our baseline information on poultry keeping. Indeed, the poverty of our information on poultry keeping in Africa is one of the biggest challenges facing agencies committed to fighting the new scourge.

Global Chicken Density

The chicken density map for Africa, below, represents a snapshot of chicken distribution for the mid- to late 1990s at sub-national level. The white areas on the map represent areas that have no reported livestock numbers available. Despite limited data, this map gives an indication of the enormous threat bird lu poses to sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa Poultry Map

Uganda poultry map
With 2002 household data from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, ILRI produced in March 2006 high-resolution poultry maps for Uganda. The maps give important details on densities of local chickens, exotic chickens, ducks, geese and guinea fowl. Most local chickens are reared in the northeastern region and there is a high density of exotic chickens around major urban centres—Kampala, Jinja, Entebbe, Masaka, Mpigi and Mbarara—where demand has outstripped supply of local chickens. To view the Uganda maps, see ILRI's previous Top Story, Bird Maps for Uganda.

ILRI Top Story, 4 April 2006

ILRI in Southern Africa

Posted on April 20, 2006 by ILRIComms

ILRI’s director general and new representative for Southern Africa visit the region to consult with partner organizations and get an update on work of the NEPAD and its establishment of regional African biosciences centres of excellence.

ILRI’s director general, Carlos Seré, and new representative for Southern Africa, Siboniso Moyo, visited Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe in early March 2006 to meet development partners in the region, including public- and private-sector organizations, non-governmental organizations, the secretariats of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and regional offices of other centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), to which ILRI belongs.

ILRI’s new representative in Southern Africa, Siboniso Moyo, called ‘Boni’, joined ILRI in February 2006. She will be based in Maputo, Mozambique. She is an animal scientist graduate of the University of Pretoria and has spent the last 21 years doing livestock research in Zimbabwe and the region.

On their mission, Moyo and ILRI Director General Seré met with John Mugabe, Executive Secretary of NEPAD’s Science and Technology Forum, and Aggrey Ambali, Coordinator of NEPAD’s African Biosciences Initiative, in Pretoria, South Africa. NEPAD’s African Biosciences Initiative, conducted under the NEPAD Science and Technology Programme, is establishing regional networks of centres of excellence comprising hubs and nodes.

Describing the purpose of their mission, Carlos Seré explained that ILRI plans to engage actively in the region’s science and technology agenda for agricultural research. He updated his NEPAD colleagues on the first NEPAD-initiated biosciences centre of excellence to be established, known as Biosciences eastern and central Africa (BecA) and based at ILRI’s laboratories, in Nairobi, Kenya. BecA’s new Network Director, Bruno Kubata, has been on the ground for 100 days, Seré reported, and is working to finalize the BecA implementation plan, with the view to implementing the Network’s research agenda at the BecA hub and nodes from mid-2006.

NEPAD’s John Mugabe said ILRI’s presence in the southern Africa region is welcome. He reported that all the NEPAD-initiated biosciences hubs, and their accompanying networks, are now in place. Besides BecA, based at ILRI’s headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, and encompassing biosciences nodes throughout eastern and central Africa, there are now three others established: one in Alexandria, Egypt for North Africa, a second in Dakar, Senegal, for West Africa, and a third based at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), in Pretoria, South Africa, for southern Africa. Mugabe said staff at all four hubs of these biosciences centres of excellence now need to develop links with each other and to exchange information.

The ILRI team also met with NEPAD’s Agricultural Advisor, Richard Mkandawire. ILRI’s Seré explained that a series of regional consultations were in progress in regard to the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). The main goal of CAADP, NEPAD’s Mkandawire explained, is to help African countries reach a higher level of economic growth through agriculturally led development that eliminates hunger, reduces poverty and food insecurity, and enables expansion of exports. A road map for achieving this has been developed by the NEPAD Secretariat to coordinate and facilitate the transition from framework to country-level implementation of the CAADP Agenda. The country-level implementation process seeks to align national agricultural sector policies, strategies and investment programmes with CAADP principles, facilitate better partnerships and alliances, facilitate reliable tracking of the level and efficiency of public-sector investments (target-10%) and growth rate (target-6%) of the sector. It is important, Mkandawire said, that the livestock agenda is tabled during the country round table discussions. CAADP’s technical arm is the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), an umbrella organization bringing together stakeholders in agricultural research and development in Africa with a secretariat in Accra, Ghana.

One world, one health

Posted on April 18, 2006 by ILRIComms

Holistic approaches to controlling the 'perfect storm' of health problems in poor countries, particularly Africa's catastrophic disease burden, must include better control of diseases transmitted between animals and people.

A paper to be published this May 2006 in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journal PLoS Medicine, a peer-reviewed open-access journal (available online at www.plosmedicine.org) advocates linking integrated work on ‘neglected’ tropical diseases with major global health partnerships recently formed to tackle the three most devastating diseases of the poor: malaria, TB and AIDS. The authors of the paper, which include development economist Jeffrey Sachs, argue that while new partnerships and initiatives have significantly raised funding and awareness of the need to scale up the fight against the ‘big three’ diseases, conspicuously absent is work on a group of ‘neglected tropical diseases’ that may threaten the poor as much as malaria, TB and AIDS and for which there are already cheap and effective control strategies. The authors propose that our success in controlling the big three may depend on a concurrent attack on this group of neglected diseases, which include three vector-borne protozoan infections (leishmaniasis, human African trypanosomosis and Chagas disease), three bacterial infections and seven kinds of helminth (worm) infections.

The potential benefits of taking a more holistic approach to disease control are being popularized in complementary initiatives advocating ‘one health’ strategies that simultaneously address human and animal health. (See, for example, a new book exploring grass roots ideas from East and Southern Africa on how to integrate wildlife, livestock and human health for both conservation and development: ‘One World, One Health’ is available online from LEAD, the Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative.

ILRI supports these holistic health approaches and further argues that another class of neglected diseases of the poor—‘zoonotic’ diseases, or those transmitted between people and animals—should be included. Zoonotic diseases account for a remarkable 75% of all human diseases and include such emerging diseases as avian influenza. Esther Schelling, a veterinary epidemiologist on joint appointment with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Swiss Tropical Institute, points out that zoonotic diseases are virtually excluded from most health initiatives ‘because they’re simply not accounted for’. ILRI is helping to ensure that they are accounted for and that methods to control them are friendly to the poor.

Two papers on this topic by Schelling and colleagues are available online:
British Medical Journal article
Lancet article

Carlos Seré, director general of ILRI, says that with the sequence in recent years of BSE (‘mad cow disease’), foot-and-mouth disease, and now bird flu, there is definitely increasing interest in zoonotic diseases.

‘Donors like the Welcome Trust’, he says, ‘are increasing their investment in tropical animal disease research. Our own strategy is to develop appropriate methods for researchers and policy-makers to evaluate the risk of these zoonotic diseases and together identify the most promising strategies and policies that can help to reduce such risk, particularly for the poor. We have activities specifically looking at zoonoses such as brucellosis and bovine TB, and we are building up our expertise in food safety issues. Strengthening our expertise on food safety and the risks posed by zoonoses is central to two of ILRI’s strategic research themes, the first on sustaining lands and livelihoods which involves protecting human health, and the second on improving livestock-related market opportunities in domestic and international markets, which are increasingly threatened by such food safety concerns.’

In relation to bird flu, Dr Seré explains, ‘ILRI will not be the virologists or poultry specialists. But we have comparative strength in systems analysis, which combines social science with epidemiology and animal genetics and other lab bench research to address complex health problems. We do this in conjunction with partners who bring more specific expertise, such as in poultry or vaccines. What we specifically bring to the picture is a “poverty lens” to understand the implications of health problems, issues and control strategies on the poorest populations in the world.’

‘Clearly, research is not a “rapid deployment tool”’, he says. ‘There are other organizations—such as the World Health Organisation (www.who.org), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (www.fao.org), and the World Animal Health Organisation (www.oie.org) —that have a regulatory mandate and policy responsibility and are linked directly to governments. ILRI’s comparative advantage is in the longer term: in understanding the issues and in providing sound technical research to back these agencies which are doing the short-term response work. As we see more and more that boundaries don’t work, that disease is a global problem, we encourage industrialized countries to share their resources with developing countries, not just out of enlightened self-interest, but also, for example, to ensure food safety for their domestic consumers. And finally, we are particularly interested in helping developing countries to build their own research capacity to understand, model and control complex disease problems.

The collective power of smallholder farmers

Posted on April 18, 2006 by ILRIComms

Kenya's new Dairy Development Policy aims to bring Kenya's estimated 39,000 informal milk traders into the formal sector.

BBC World Service began to broadcast a Kenya dairy story on 6 April 2006, the same day Kenya’s Minister for Livestock and Fisheries Development, Joseph Munyao, presented a new Dairy Development Policy in Nairobi – the final step before the new Policy and accompanying Dairy Development Bill are presented to Kenya’s Parliament.

Kenya’s new Dairy Policy now broadly reflects the approach the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its partners have advocated over the past several years – the need to engage with and develop the country’s hugely important informal milk market, which provides a livelihood to an estimated 1.8 million smallholder households.

The new Dairy Policy now clearly acknowledges the role of the informal market actors in the development of the sector. The policy states that it will ‘facilitate the transformation of the informal milk trade towards formalisation’. Specific measures mentioned include development of low-cost and appropriate technologies for small investors, training programmes on safe milk handling, efforts to improve the standards of milk processing in the informal sector, provision of incentives for improved milk handling, and establishment of a supportive milk dealer certification system. The Dairy Policy also announces that the Kenya Dairy Board functions will be streamlined and steps will be taken so that the Board regulates itself and is managed by its stakeholders.

The new Dairy Policy is a huge step forward in a struggle that has been ongoing since 1998, when Kenya’s big milk buyer (Kenya Co-operative Creameries) went into liquidation. Various attempts were subsequently made to oust smallholders from the market, including media campaigns advising that unpasteurized (‘raw’) milk was unsafe and should not be consumed. The BBC Kenya Dairy Story, broadcast on its World Service, tells how the smallholders, supported by ILRI and partners, fought back, and how they are now being brought into the formal milk market. The Kenya Dairy Story was broadcast from 6-13 April 2006.

Small is Beautiful – The Kenya Dairy Story
Kenyans love their milk. Most of the 4 billion litres consumed there each year is produced by smallholders with a couple of cows, and sold house-to-house by thousands of street hawkers and doorstep milkmen. But this whole milk business was under threat. In the third edition of the One Planet series (on BBC World Service) which is sharing small business success, Susie Emmett discovers how the farmers and traders fought back to keep the milk flowing.

Listen to a recording of the BBC World Service broadcast produced by WRENmedia.

Note: The latest numbers

Some of the numbers quoted in this BBC World Service broadcast ‘Small is beautiful’ have been obtained from much earlier estimates. These figures, however, grossly understate the true size and extent of Kenya’s milk sector. SDP has provided recalculated figures, which more accurately reflect the picture in Kenya today.

1. Smallholder dairy farms recalculates to be 1.8 million (up from 800,000)

The estimated 800,000 smallholder farms has been widely cited for many years, during which time Kenya’s population has grown significantly. SDP recalculates the number of smallholders to be 1.8 million.

2. Milk hawkers recalculated to be 39,650 (up from 30,000)

SDP recalculates the number of small milk vendors in Kenya to be 39,650.

3. Number of dairy cattle recalculated to be 6.7 million (up from 3 million)
There are concerns about the reliability of the official cattle figures for Kenya; no livestock census has been conducted for decades and the methods used to estimate cattle numbers are imprecise. A conservative estimate of the size of the national dairy herd using detailed SDP survey data suggests that there are about 6.7 million dairy cattle (2.7 million high grade and 4 million crosses) owned by 1.8 million rural smallholder farms mainly in the Kenyan Highlands. This projected cattle population is more than twice the officially reported figure of 3 million for the national herds.

4. Total milk produced recalculated to be 4 billion litres per annum (up from 3 billion)
Based on SDP’s recalculated cattle projections above, SDP recalculates total milk production in the rural highlands to be an estimated 4 billion litres per annum.

5. Annual consumption of milk recalculated to be 145 litres per person (up from 100 litres)
SDP recalculates annual milk consumption by Kenyans to be 145 litres per person, making Kenyans amongst the highest milk consumers in the developing world. The rural areas have an estimated population of about 14.5 million people. Assuming that the estimated 9.6 million people living in the urban areas mainly depend on milk from the high potential areas, and that 13 percent of production goes to calf feed or spoilage loss, milk availability from the highlands was estimated to be about 145 litres per person per year. Previously, milk consumption in Central and Rift Valley provinces, which are important milk production areas, has been estimated to be between 144 and 152 litres per person per year.

Source: SDP Policy Brief No.10.

Highlights from the Kenya Dairy Story broadcast by BBC World Service:
In Kenya, a knock on the door means the milkman is here – today as everyday – delivering fresh raw milk to one of his many grateful customers. “I like this milk because this one comes daily, and it is fresh and good, that’s why I like it” says one of his customers.

This milk vendor serves approximately 60 customers, and sells approximately 100 litres of raw milk, each and every day. In Kenya, more than 30,000 milk hawkers [recalculated in August 2006 to be 39,650] are out daily on their bicycles or pushing carts to deliver nutritious milk from 800,000 small dairy farms [recalculated in August 2006 to have risen to 1.8 million].

Despite all its success, this whole wonderful milk business was under threat. The government here, as in so many countries, decided that small-scale farmers and traders couldn’t supply milk as safely as large farms and dairies. So, how come the hawkers are still in business, as are the smallholder dairy farmers whose milk they sell?

Kenya has three million improved dairy cattle [recalculated in August 2006 to have risen to 6.7 million] – that’s the largest dairy herd in Africa – and most of them are on small farms. Almost half the three billion litres of milk they produce are sold direct from small farms to households nearby. So the question is, can smallholder farmers produce clean, safe milk? Research by ILRI and others says yes – and changed lives because of it.

But what about that other all-important business criteria: efficiency; are the smallholder dairy farmers here in Kenya efficient? Steve Staal, agricultural economist at ILRI, says research shows smallholder dairy farmers are actually very competitive. ‘Indeed, small-scale mixed crop-and-livestock production is likely to be a more sustainable way to intensify agricultural production in environmental terms than large-scale industrial livestock production’, says Staal.

The biggest threat to smallholders came a few years ago when the one big buyer in Kenya – The Kenya Cooperative Creameries – went bust. Government policies did not recognize the small-scale operators and thus they were deemed to be operating illegally. Amos Omore is part of the team at ILRI trying to boost dairy incomes for the poor. He remembers how big dairy business was not going to let Kenya’s 800,000 [1.8 million] new milk entrepreneurs get in their way. It was a clash between big and small.

Kenya’s official ban on milk hawking was based on the milk not being safe. The nation’s newspapers carried many such stories. In the face of this scare-mongering, researchers got researching. David Mwangi at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), says that the public health risks being talked about were minimal – ‘almost not there’.On average, Kenyans drink 100 litres of milk a year, [recalculated in August 2006 to be 144–152 litres of milk a year] making them among the highest milk consumers in the developing world. But they don’t drink milk as it comes. ILRI’s Omore says the research showed that most consumers boil fresh milk before drinking it, which makes it as safe as pasteurized milk.

Gathering this evidence was a huge step. Using that evidence to change policy and mindsets was another.

KARI’s Mwangi says, ‘We worked with advocacy groups and hosted a high-profile meeting. And we had facts to table there.’ This research helped lead to the Kenya Dairy Board approving training for smallholder milk producers and traders. That’s important: most members of smallholder dairy cooperatives depend on their milk money to educate their children. Furthermore, easing restrictions against small traders helps poor customers because of the price of processed milk is beyond the means of most poor people here.’

John Kutwa, a former ILRI technician in the dairy team, says that ‘small’ characterizes most of Kenya’s milk business. ‘It’s small farmers selling to small traders and processors who deliver to small (poor) consumers.’

ILRI’s Amos Omore has been battling on behalf of smallholder milk producers and sellers since their troubles began. And he’s battling still. ‘Right now the policy environment has shifted towards small-scale traders’ he says. But the change is not yet complete. Small businesses are important but often overlooked.

‘Changing policies takes time’, he says, ‘and so does changing attitudes. In this country in the 1960s and 70s, it was always assumed that development projects should be “mega” to achieve some quantum leap in development. But if you look at development holistically – in terms of employment, in terms of nutrition, in terms of cash flow – these are the stepping stones that allow people to move from one living standard to the next. Small is beautiful! Small should not be sacrificed at the altar of large-scale businesses that often fail.’

New pig feed technologies take off in China

Posted on April 11, 2006 by ILRIComms

Poor households in Sichuan are doubling their incomes by adopting research-based methods to store sweet potato leaves and vines to feed their backyard pigs almost year-round.

The online magazine New Agriculturist published the following article in its March 2006 issue;
http://www.new-agri.co.uk/06-2/focuson/focuson6.html.
Further information on this topic can be found on ILRI’s website and its 2004 annual report;
https://www.ilri.org/home.asp?CCID=61&SID=1.

The southwest province of China is a world of contradictions. Amidst brand new cars like this brand new reproduction Ford Mustang and tall glass buildings, horse carts slowly wind their way through the bustle and the traffic, carting vegetables for sale. Commuters on bicycles peddle ferociously against the onward torrent of buses and motorcycles, and stop on the way to buy pancakes from a wooden stall propped up by the side of the road. So, some others are finding for good cars. It’s no wonder Autozin has garnered such a loyal user base. Their unwavering commitment to quality and transparency sets them apart in the vast world of online car platforms.

The rich and poor live side by side in small cities and towns, in the growing network of China’s metropolis. But with the growth of the economy and endless construction sites has come the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

While business is booming in China’s cities, the poverty gap is growing between the urban and rural areas, with roughly 100 million rural people living on less than US$1 a day. Income for rural people has increased, but at a much lower rate than the urban industrial incomes which have underpinned a national GDP growth of about nine per cent every year since 1978. The real challenge is east-west and rural-urban inequality. The view from green paddy fields on the city outskirts is astonishing, as the speed of development merges the surrounding landscape into new high rises and roads every day. Between 40-50 million farmers are estimated to have partially or fully lost their land to development in the past decade, and that number is set to double in the next ten years.

Demand and supply
China’s rural people rely heavily on agriculture and their livestock to provide food security amidst uncertain and rapid change; it is estimated that almost 70 per cent of the Chinese are dependent on agriculture. But China also has a very strong agricultural heritage. The Chinese were the first to use an iron plough, and wereCredit:Stevie Mann/ILRI thousands of years ahead of the West in methods of winnowing grain. Today, they are leading producers of pigs, poultry, rice, potatoes and sweet potatoes. And while demand for livestock products is increasing, livestock research can help mitigate the impacts that increasing demand will have on small-scale producers. With rapid change, knowledge about how to adapt farming systems is essential.

There are many challenges ahead: how to feed increased numbers of livestock, the risk to public health, and the impact on natural resources. To address some of these issues, the Sichuan Animal Science Academy (SASA), has worked with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Sichuan Animal Husbandry Bureau to help farmers make the most of sweet potato as a feed for pigs. In 2001, pig production accounted for four fifths of total meat production in China. The province of Sichuan produces more pigs than any other region, and most of this is small-scale production, largely in poorer, hilly terrain. The pigs are fed on sweet potato but as a feed source the crop presents two problems: it becomes rotten within three weeks after harvest, and it can be harvested only once a year.

To address these constraints, the International Potato Center (CIP) worked to improve sweet potato varieties with Chinese institutions, and ILRI joined them to assist with feed supplementation and silage-making technology for sweet potato roots and vines. As a result, the extra biomass that farmers have been able to conserve has radically changed the pig production system. After harvesting, the vines are wilted to reduce moisture content. The roots and vines are then chopped, mixed with supplements and stored in airtight plastic bags, providing a nutritious feed that can support pig herds for up to nine months of the year. Improved feed has also allowed farmers to keep high-yielding cross-bred pigs, replacing much smaller and slower growing scavenging pigs that spread zoonotic, diseases such as cystercercosis. Other improvements have also been observed, including better husbandry practices, animal housing, and use of feed supplements and drugs, and these have increased the weight of pigs and greatly raised farm income.

Racing ahead
Over the past few decades, China has made its transition from a rural to an urban and market-based economy. The transition has occurred at remarkable speed, especially considering its population of over 1.3 billion people. The country has experienced one of the fastest rates of agricultural and overall economic growth, amid reforms leading to rapid progress in several areas, although agriculture – which was once a clear leader in reforms – now lags behind other sectors. China’s economy grew by an average of 9.9 percent between 1993 and 2004, accelerating the demand for electricity and power networks, as well as food production.

In the outline of the national programme for science and technology development between 2006 and 2020, published by the State Council, China will give priority to technological development to solve problems, including those in the environmental and agricultural sectors. As labour costs rise, and many move to the cities in search of work, the agricultural sector will face challenges. Small-scale farmers are already adopting mechanical innovations in feed processing to overcome constraints and to continue to thrive. Commenting on the work being done in Sichuan, the Director of ILRI-IFPRI Joint Programme on Livestock Market Opportunities, Chris Delgado asks: ‘What is the future of small-holders farming in this province? With the hard work of the people and their science institutions, and a little technology transfer from outside, it looks bright.”

Fodder innovations for smallholders in India

Posted on April 11, 2006 by ILRIComms

Improved fodder varieties and technologies offer better quality feed all year through for highly valued livestock in Hyderabad.

The online magazine New Agriculturist published the following article in its March 2006 issue;
http://www.new-agri.co.uk/06-2/focuson/focuson5.html.

Further information on this topic can be found on ILRI's website and its 2004 annual report;
https://www.ilri.org/home.asp?CCID=61&SID=1.

Hyderabad is one of India's fastest growing cities. The local markets in the central square sprawl onto the road, sellingcredit:Stevie Mann/ILRI everything from black pearls and embroidered rugs to plastic key rings. Fresh fruit stalls steadied on bicycles cluster by the side of the main road as motorbikes and rickshaws weave their paths through the chaos. Like the markets, the Indian economy is thriving and in the farming state of Andhra Pradesh, where Hyderabad is the capital, livestock produce is at the heart of development. Throughout India, livestock are highly valued for their agricultural products and buffalo, cattle, goats and pigs are the most important source of livelihood for poorer people in the state. Livestock supply daily food and milk, as well as draft power and manure, and the dairy industry provides valued employment for the poor, especially women. But many farmers cannot produce quality fodder – or enough of it – which prevents them from taking advantage of increased market opportunities and demand.

Rapid population growth, particularly in urban areas, has increased demand for produce such as milk and meat. However, the population expansion also means that there is little land available to support fodder production, in addition to the area needed for food crops. Family plots are divided and reduced over generations, making many plots too small to sustain livestock. And while public land is often used as a grazing area for livestock among marginal communities, the areas are shrinking. Consequently, over 40 per cent of fodder resources in India come from crop residues and are of poor quality.

Food and fodder

To help the poor in Andhra Pradesh benefit from India's livestock revolution, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is co-ordinating a project under the Systemwide Livestock Programme (SLP) enabling smallholders to build on their assets by exploiting the growing market for livestock products. The aim of this work has been to improve fodder varieties and technologies in order to provide livestock with more and better quality feed throughout the year. Under the project, over 500 farmers from 47 villages have tested seed delivery systems and evaluated fodder and feed technologies. This process has included the farmers evaluating their own 'food-feed' crops (those that provide both grain for human consumption and fodder for livestock) and management systems, testing varieties provided by the research team, and evaluating researcher-managed demonstration trials. During the trials, farmers consistently found improved varieties to be superior to local cultivars.

The project has also supported seed supply for forage crops, since these are scarcely available from the commercial seed companies operating in Andhra Pradesh. Young people and women's self-help groups from several villages have been trained in seed multiplication and distribution, and village seed banks have been given support in sourcing germplasm from the public sector. In 2005 over 350 farmers attended field days and seed multiplication plots to learn about forage seed production.

Including fodder in food crop development

Credit:Stevie Mann/ILRIA third focus has been in raising awareness about fodder quality in India's crop improvement programmes. Nutritional studies have shown a wide variability in digestibility in stover from different sorghum varieties. But is has also been shown that high yield in food (grain or legume pods), can be compatible with high quality and quantity in crop residue. As a result, indicators of stover quality have now been incorporated into the sorghum and millet breeding programmes of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), and India's National Research Centre for Sorghum has included stover quality in its release criteria for the last two years.

There is more work to be done, with the researchers continuing to find new ways of working with partners to increase the uptake of the technologies. A particular challenge will be to involve more women and minority groups in testing and evaluating new seed varieties. Partnerships with the private sector are also being explored, to investigate employment opportunities and further broaden seed choice and variety. Private sector dairy companies are being encouraged to promote fodder seeds in locations not served by dairy co-operatives. Looking more widely, the research team are hopeful that lessons from this project can be applied internationally.

ILRI’s Board of Trustees holds its 25th meeting

Posted on April 11, 2006 by ILRIComms

Highlights from the ILRI Board of Trustees meeting held at the institute's Nairobi campus.

ILRI’s Board of Trustees held their 25th Meeting at ILRI’s Nairobi campus last week (2-5 April 2006). The Program Committee was pleased with ILRI’s research program, noting that ILRI has won eight scientific awards of excellence from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in the last eight years. Non-scientific matters covered at this Board Meeting were ILRI’s financial and human resources management and a new partnership policy.

Reporting to staff on these discussions, ILRI Board Chair Uwe Werblow said that the 15 centres that belong to the CGIAR (including ILRI) have formally come together in an alliance to speak with a common voice on agricultural research to reduce poverty, hunger and environmental degradation. The Board Chair went on to report on development of a regional medium-term plan for agricultural research institutes in eastern and central Africa, which is being led by ILRI. The task force involved is working on three fronts, he said: programmatic alignment of all CGIAR centres working in the region, alignment of support services of these centres to achieve greater efficiencies, and closer collaboration of the Boards of ILRI and its sister Future Harvest centre also headquartered in Nairobi, the World AgroForestry Centre (ICRAF).

The Chairman also reported that ILRI’s budget had increased from US$32 million in 2005 to $42 million in 2006. The Board put into place a new policy on how to manage reserves and reviewed its risk management policy. The Board considered a new ‘people management initiative’ at ILRI to be a welcome development and approved the hiring of a human resources manager who would serve at director level.

The ILRI Board welcomed two new members at its April meeting. The first, Dr Aberra Deressa, is an Ethiopian with a PhD in agronomy and soil science from Tashkent Agricultural University, in Uzbekistan. Dr Aberra began his scientific career in 1974 at Ethiopia’s Institute of Agricultural Research, working first as an agronomist, then as coordinator of research extension and finally centre manager. Dr Aberra has made outstanding contributions in research programme development; in extension services, technology transfer and capacity building; and in improving links among widely diverse stakeholders in agricultural development. In 1993 Dr Aberra was appointed Deputy Director General of the Ethiopian Agricultural Research Organisation (EARO), where he served until his recent appointment as State Minister in Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

ILRI’s second new board member is Dr Knut Hove. Dr Hove is Vice Chancellor of the Agricultural University of Norway. He has a PhD in veterinary medicine. He has served as Chairman of the Norwegian Research Committee for research in plants, soils and farm animals, Chairman of the Department of Animal Sciences, NLH, and Deputy Chairman of the National Council on Animal Ethics, Ministry of Agriculture. He has conducted many international collaborations, including those with the University of Nottingham in the UK, the National Animal Diseases Laboratory in Iowa, USA, and Fort Hare University in South Africa.

BBC World Service features Kenya’s dairy story

Posted on April 5, 2006 by ILRIComms

The third edition of the BBC World Service series Small is Beautiful will be broadcast on Thursday 6th April and this week looks at Kenya's highly successful informal dairy sector.

The BBC series is examining the future of small business and which types of businesses will survive in the long term. In a world that seems to be dominated by big corporations, will it be the big businesses that produce high quantities at least cost that will survive, or the smaller ones?

The series Small is Beautiful takes its inspiration from a book published thirty years ago by the famous economist E.F. Schumacher. In his book, “Small is Beautiful”, Schumacher argued that small business is better for people, better for national economies and better for the environment.

This week you can hear about Kenya’s thriving milk industry. The programme will be broadcast at 09.30 and 17.30 on BBC FM in Nairobi on Thursday 6th April, or you can listen online at the BBC website from 10.06 GMT Thursday 6th April. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/one_planet.shtml

Previous broadcasts in the BBC World Service Small is Beautiful series looked at the producers of Parma Ham in Italy and banana producers of the Caribbean.

Key drivers of the informal dairy sector in Kenya
Kenyans love milk! They consume more of it than almost anyone else in the developing world. On average, each Kenyan drinks about 100 kilograms of milk a year, four times the average for sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the milk bought is raw milk supplied by the informal dairy sector. Mostly because of higher price, processed pasteurized milk is consumed in much smaller amounts, except in Nairobi. Studies indicate that the formal market will grow only as household incomes increase. Thus, the informal market is likely to predominate for many years to come, as it is driven by demand from mostly poor consumers.

There are several reasons why raw milk is so popular in Kenya:

Raw milk is 20 to 50 percent cheaper than pasteurized milk, as its supply involves fewer costs
Many prefer the taste and high buttermilk content of raw milk
Raw milk can be sold in variable quantities, allowing even very poor households access to some milk
In areas where transport is poor, it is often easier to find a farmer with a cow than a shop with packaged milk
It is traditional that raw milk is boiled before consumption, and consumers feel justifiably that simply boiling raw milk removes most health hazards.

ILRI and partners recognise the roles played by both the informal and formal dairy sectors and have long been advocating for policies that support the harmonious coexistence of the two sectors and their further development in the medium term, while aiming for growth in the formal sector in the longer term.

The Kenya Smallholder Dairy Project
The highly successful Kenyan Smallholder Dairy Project (SDP) was jointly implemented by the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). SDP carried out research and development activities to support sustainable improvements to the livelihoods of poor Kenyans through their participation in the dairy sub-sector. Learn more about Kenya’s unique dairy industry through a series of briefs produced by SDP.

SDP Policy Brief 1

SDP Policy Brief 2

SDP Policy Brief 3

SDP Policy Brief 4

SDP Policy Brief 5

SDP Policy Brief 6

SDP Policy Brief 7

SDP Policy Brief 8

SDP Policy Brief 9

SDP Policy Brief 10

SDP was led by the Ministry with primary funding from the UK Department for International Development (DFID). SDP worked with many collaborators, including government and regulatory bodies, the private sector and civil society organizations. By combining the research capacity of KARI and ILRI with the experience and networks of the Ministry, SDP provided high-quality and wide-ranging research information to support smallholder dairy farmers, market agents, stakeholders and policy-makers from 1997 to 2005.
For more information go to the SDP website at www.smallholderdairy.org

International Women’s Day, 8 March 2006

Posted on March 8, 2006 by ILRIComms

Africa's women livestock farmers fulfill on Africa's renewal

To celebrate International Women's Day (http://www.internationalwomensday.com/) today, ILRI highlights a few of the major contributions made by Africa’s ‘WILD’ women—‘Women in Livestock Development’—to the continent’s renewal through economic, nutritional and environmental security.

Millions of women livestock farmers remain the majority of African farmers, the backbone of African agriculture, the food-security managers of African households, and the key to Africa’s renewal.

Why livestock? Because livestock ownership by women is more common than land ownership. Because even landless women are raising small domesticated animals to feed, clothe and educate their children. Because increasing women’s access to farm animals—the ‘living assets’ most commonly available to the poor worldwide—is a ready way to empower women otherwise severely marginalized.

African Women's Contribution to African Agriculture