Category Archives: Livelihoods

New film shows how herders and farmers were affected by the recent East African drought

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A new film by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) shares the experiences of Kenyan herders and farmers who were affected by the 2008-2009 East African drought. The film documents the stories of Maasai herders in Kitengela who lost nearly half of their livestock to the drought and disease and how this led some to seek alternative livelihood sources to cope. The film also shares the story  of a farmer in Kitui district whose  experience of the drought, which is shared by other farmers and livestock keepers  in the drought-prone district, shows how the poor continually face threats to their livelihoods as a result of changes in climate. 


Serengeti surely SHALL die if a proposed highway bisects its northern wilderness—and if its human neighbours remain poverty-stricken

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Zebra and wildebeest in the Masai Mara Game Reserve

Zebra and wildebeest in Kenya’s Masai Mara Game Reserve (photo credit: ILRI/Elsworth).

The New York Times and other media are reporting this week that one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on earth—the annual migration of nearly 2 million wildebeest and zebra from the drying savannas of the Serengeti, in Tanzania, to the wetter, greener, pastures of Kenya’s adjacent Masai Mara, and back again—is threatened by a proposed new national transit road for northern Tanzania that would cut right across the migration route of these vast herds of ungulates, likely leading to the collapse of this migration and possibly the crash of this ecosystem as a whole.

Kenya’s Masai Mara is the only year-round water source in the Greater Serengeti, and thus serves as critical dry-season grazing grounds for these vast herds of big mammals.

Just one of the problems such a road would bring is a greater disease burden to people, livestock and wildlife alike. In her extensive and useful research notes to her recent article, ‘Road Kill in the Serengeti’, in the New York Times, Olivia Judson refers readers to a scientific paper written by Eric Fevre, of the Zoonotic and Emerging Diseases research group at the University of Edinburgh, now based at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kenya while working on a 3-year human-animal disease research project in Busia District. Fevre describes the spread of animal diseases through animal transportation in his article, ‘Animal movements and the spread of infectious diseases’ (Trends in Microbiology, 2006).

Perhaps just in time, just this month former ILRI ecologist Robin Reid, now director of the Center for Collaborative Conservation at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, USA, began a project in Kenya that is putting radio collars on wildebeest to learn more precisely what routes the animals take in their migration. This project’s members are involving Maasai schoolchildren, who are naming the wildebeest, which they will then be able to follow. The wildebeest collars send regular tracking signals to Safaricom, which are then sent to Colorado, where the routes are posted on a web map that the schoolchildren can follow.

This year’s annual wildebeest migration has already begun. Herds are reported to have crossed the common border of Kenya/Tanzania from Northern Serengeti into Masai Mara, about 4 days ago. ‘What has been unusual about this year’s migration,’ says Paul Kirui, in the Masai Mara, ‘is that the main migration from the south arrived in the Mara early ahead of the Loita herds—the Kenyan resident herds of wildebeest—which usually migrate into the Mara from the east of the park. Normally when we start seeing them move into the park, it is a sign that the main migration from the south is on the way.’

The first population of wildebeest that Reid’s team darted and then tagged with radio collars in the Mara is the Loita group that remains resident in Kenya all year round. Or so the researchers think. The radio collars, now fixed on the first 15 wildebeest, have already started to report back and will be letting scientists, and those schoolchildren, know just where they go, and when.

Reid’s return gave ILRI cause to revisit two remarkable films about her ILRI research in the Mara. Counting in a Disappearing Land (ILRI, 11 minutes, 2007) describes Reid’s project with a Maasai community that has traditionally herded their livestock in Kenya’s wildlife-rich Masai Mara region. This ILRI project was looking to find ways of balancing the needs of people, lands and wildlife. In The Great Migration (CBS ’60 Minutes’, 15 minutes, October 2009), Scott Pelley interviews Reid about the threats to this natural spectacle and the part local Masai are playing to address these threats.

Collaborative conservation may indeed be the answer to saving the Serengeti ecosystem. Protecting majestic wild places and the wildlife they support, places that instill wonder in us, matters, of course, but so does protecting millions of people from severe poverty, chronic hunger and the afflictions that come in their wake: disease and untimely death.

With a large percentage of its land area under protection, Tanzania is a world leader in biodiversity conservation. It is also very, very poor. How this tug at resources—whether the Serengeti Plains will be used for wildlife tourism or other kinds of commerce—will play out may depend on how much the local communities living in poverty near the wildlife benefit from saving this, the last of the great migrations of big mammals on Earth.

More . . . (New York Times, 15 June 2010)

An alternative, southern road in Tanzania is discussed on a webpage of the Frankfurt Zoological Society.

See Paul Kirui’s blog on 17 June 2010 the migration on Masai Mara Updates.

Participatory land-use planning empowers the pastoral community of Kenya’s Kitengela Maasailand

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ILRI scientist David Nkedianye (left) and chairman of innovation land lease program Ogeli Ole Makui (right) discuss fencing issues in Kitengela.

Two Maasai from the Kitengela rangelands near Nairobi—David Nkedianye (left), an ILRI research fellow studying for his PhD, and Ogeli ole Makui (right), a participant in ILRI research—discuss a land-use planning map they have created with ILRI that will help the Maasai community in Kitengela to conserve both their pastoral ways of life and the wildlife that share their rangelands (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

In the beautiful, picturesque and wildlife-rich Kitengela plains just outside of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, a unique change is taking place among Maasai livestock keepers, who have roamed these plains with their herds of cattle, sheep and goats for generations.

This change is shaping lives as well as livelihoods. James Turere Leparan is a traditional Maasai elder and herder who has watched this change take place in the last few years.

It all began when a group of scientists from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) began a study in the area in 2003. ‘A group of people came to talk to us about our land’ he says. ‘They said they wanted to help us improve our livestock by helping us deal with the problems we were facing of conflict with wildlife and how best to deal with the division of what once was communal land. They began to meet with us in order to help us change the situation.’ At that time, human-wildlife conflicts between the Maasai people and wild animals from the adjacent Nairobi National Park were common. These conflicts stemmed from the fencing off of what were once communal lands. Such fencing had restricted, and in some cases blocked, animal migratory routes leading to greater conflicts between humans and animals. No less that 50 community meetings were held during the project.

At the time, ILRI planned to map out the Kitengela rangelands to find out how the sub-division of communal lands into private plots and subsequent fencing had affected herders and livestock productivity in the area. The mapping initiated by ILRI and the Kitengela community sought ways the community could best use the land for both domestic and wild animal enterprises.

‘One of the most important considerations we had in the project was to come up with solutions that would not compromise the wildlife migratory routes while also helping to improve Maasai livestock herding,’ says Mohammed Said, a scientist at ILRI and one of the leaders of the project. ‘We explored various innovative ways of helping the Kitengela community best use their land for both livestock and wildlife,’ he adds.

Most of the mapping was started by ILRI’s Mohammed and Shem Chege who are graduates of the faculty of Geo-information and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente in Netherlands. In partnership with the Africa Wildlife Foundation and the local community, ILRI extended a process of mapping using geographic information systems (GIS) technology to record spatial information about the Kitengela rangelands. Community members were trained in the use of global position satellite (GPS) devises to map the locations of fences, water sources, roads and open pasture land.

‘We soon realized that the local community had a lot of spatial knowledge,’ says Said. ‘They accurately collected spatial data about their land without the use of topographical maps, mostly by using physical features such as rivers. Their data were very accurate.’ ‘The decision to involve the community is one of the key strengths of this project,’ Said added. ‘We trained over 20 community members on how to use GPS equipment and systems to collect information that was then compiled. This built local ownership. The community realized that their contribution was just as important as that of the researchers.’

In 2001 a conservation group called Friends of the Nairobi National Park pioneered a land-leasing scheme that would pay livestock herders three times a year not to fence and develop their land, which would allow wildlife to move easily back and forth from Nairobi National Park within a Kitengela ‘corridor’. This scheme received support from the Africa Wildlife Foundation.

Soon after this, the project members identified the urgent need to develop a land-use ‘master plan’ for Kitengela to ensure that the lease program would succeed. David Nkedianye, a Kitengela Maasai who recently obtained his doctorate through his research at ILRI, said that for the program to succeed, ‘We needed to organize how we used the land. This prompted us to include in our research a project to map the lands in Kitengela that were fenced and unfenced. With this map, we could see where we needed to keep lands open for livestock and wildlife movements.’ This collection of spatial information and participatory land-use planning in Kitengela has produced some unique successes.

Now, four years after the start of this participatory mapping project, conducted with the help of geographic information systems, some 2000 sq km of the Kitengela plains have been mapped. These maps and other outputs of the project have been shared with the local herders and farmers. The local county council of Olkejuado has adopted the projects findings and maps.

The Council will use these to guide future land use in Kitengela’s wildlife-rich rangelands. A scheme to pay the local herders and farmers to keep their land open has been established. Such herders and farmers get US$4 for every acre of unfenced land. More than 30,000 acres of land are now under lease in this scheme and it is expected that this will double by the end of the year. The community is earning about US$120,000 each year from their land conservation efforts.

Other efforts in the Mara, such as those to develop community ‘wildlife conservancies’ have earned the Maasai community more than US$2 million. The availability of distribution maps of different species of animals, including livestock, now enables farmers to conduct their own ground counts of animals in the rangelands without having to use expensive methods such as aerial counts.

Since 2004, the rangeland maps have been updated to identify new and emerging threats that affect livestock keepers and herders. The community of Kitengela is now combining state-of-the-art geospatial information with local knowledge and experiences to better maintain their ecosystem while also benefiting economically from protecting the wildlife that co-exists with them. The greater income gained by James Turere and hundreds of others is bettering the lives of families and meeting their basic needs such as food and education. A major victory of this project has been its ability to influence land policy. Four months ago, the Kenya Government approved the Kitengela land-use map built by the local community, ILRI, the African Wildlife Foundation and other stakeholders.

The experiences and lessons of this project are now being applied elsewhere. One of the partners in the project is piloting a similar model to map land use in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve. A project in Tanzania conducted with ILRI and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation is encouraging local people to map their own land for better management of their livestock and wildlife resources. Said believes that more farming and herding communities should be trained to use geospatial technologies. He is optimistic that the lessons from this project will have lasting benefits on the region’s livestock sectors as well as on the people of Kitengela.

The findings of the participatory land-use planning project in Kitengela are among many experiences of using geospatial information to support African farmers that were shared during an African Agriculture Geospatial Week that took place at ILRI’s campus in Nairobi last week, 8–13 June 2010.

More information about how geographic information systems are being adopted by the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) can be found here. You can also see the proceedings from the conference on Twitter #aagw10.

Livestock goods and bads: Filmed highlights of ILRI’s 2010 Annual Program Meeting

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At the 2010 Annual Program Meeting (APM) of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), held in April in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, several hundred participants debated and discussed the challenges facing the global livestock industry. ILRI and its partners are investigating ways to promote smallholder participation in livestock markets, more sustainable ways for livestock keepers to use natural resources, and ways to improve livestock pathways out of poverty.

Some of the presentations made during the meeting on the theme of 'Livestock: the Good, the Bad and the Gaps' were captured on film. We share three of those below.

The first film is a presentation by ILRI agricultural systems analyst Mario Herrero on the important place of livestock for smallholder farmers in developing economies. Herrero highlights the many benefits livestock bring to the rural poor and argues that the rapidly expanding sector will need to be better managed and to reduce the environmental risks it poses if it is to continue to be productive. Herrero argues for an integrated assessment of the effects of the global livestock industry on various agro-ecosystems important to the poor.

In the second film, ILRI veterinary and food safety researcher Delia Grace discusses the human health risks associated with livestock keeping. Grace notes that zoonotic diseases (those transmitted between animals and people) and emerging infectious diseases (such as bird flu) are two of the well-known risks associated with livestock. But she says that animals provide a means of regulating diseases because they can serve as sentinels that lets communities and public health officials know of disease outbreaks before the diseases can affect humans. She makes the case for more research to address the many common misconceptions that exist about livestock and human health.

In the third film, Narayan Hedge, of India's BAIF Development Research Foundation, highlights the important role livestock play in providing a livelihood for nearly 700 million people in India. He makes an appeal for better livestock technologies, better infrastructure, and more efficient management of the industry so that more smallholder farmers can use livestock to escape poverty.

Kenya's Maasai herders take jobs and farm crops to cope with change

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Collaborative research between Kenyan Maasai communities and a researcher from Canada’s McGill University has identified how these semi-nomadic herding communities are changing to cope with changing climate and land tenure systems. Results of research conducted during a great drought in Kenya’s Maasailand and other regions from 2007 to 2009 show that more and more Maasai households are diversifying their livelihoods and making use of ‘strategic mobility’ to cope with changing land tenure systems.
In a presentation last week of research findings at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) campus, in Nairobi, Kenya, John Galaty, of McGill University, noted that ‘the Maasai community is dealing with the aftermath of the long drought, which devastated their livelihoods, by making more opportunistic use of their land, by diversifying into cropping, by keeping fewer and faster growing animals and by taking on paying jobs.’
In studies done across nine sites in Ole Tepesi, Maji Moto and Elangata Wuas in Kenya’s Kajiado and Narok districts, researchers found that members of the communities who diversified into agriculture had higher chances of maintaining their livelihoods during droughts than those who relied on animals alone. The research looked at the experiences of higher, medium- and low-income households.
Well-known methods used by the Maasai to cope with drought—such as splitting herds, keeping fewer animals and moving stock to find water or grass—are still in use. A closer assessment of mobility patterns showed that pastoralists with external sources of income could afford to keep their animals in one location during drought because they were able to buy and bring in feed and drugs for them. The poorest members of the community were hurt the most by drought because they were forced to move their animals in search of fodder or water. The study also disclosed that the richer members of the community hired their poorer neighbours to herd their animal stock to better grazing lands while they themselves pursued other livelihood options.
Galaty said that the movement of animals by the Maasai is never haphazard. ‘The Maasai just don’t start to move once the drought bites,’ he said. ‘We found out that most people moved their animals based on social relationships. People were linked to relatives or friends who lived in areas where pasture was still available. Others relied on word from other parts of the region that pasture was available before starting to move. In such cases, conventional boundaries were not enforced and people openly shared “private” resources. Some even moved their animals into Tanzania, where they were welcomed by the Maasai who live there.’ The research also showed that stock movement by members of Maasai group ranches was also well planned and coordinated.
Nonetheless, the increasingly popular subdivision of Maasai communal lands into private holdings, often with little consultation with the communities concerned, is greatly restricting the traditional mobility of these herding communities. Individuals are increasingly enforcing their rights to private ownership, and use, of land in both Kajiado and Narok districts. Such privatization of land threatens Maasai pastoralism by disrupting the well-established ‘mobility’ mechanism they use to cope with periodic drought.
An earlier (not yet published) study by David Nkedianye, a Maasai graduate student with ILRI, on the effects of the 2005 to 2006 drought on Kenyan Maasai indicates that land privatization and large movements of animals can weaken the ability of households to cope with drought. For example, at times in this drought the Kitengela Maasai rangeland, although it received relatively good rainfall, had the greatest number of livestock deaths because of an influx of livestock brought to Kitengela by herders from other Maasai communities in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.

Staff of ILRI’s People, Livestock and Environment Theme, who are conducting livestock research in these same Maasai lands, hosted Galaty and organized for his presentation.









Livestock research in a new ‘framework’ for agricultural development

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The following are highlights of a presentation made by Carlos Seré to open the annual program meeting of the International Livestock Research Institute in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 15 April 2010.

The reform process of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is moving full speed ahead. Yesterday, the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) agreed that we join the new CGIAR Consortium.

How do we fold ILRI’s core competencies into the more integrative programs the new CGIAR is developing?

The food price crisis triggered a reconsideration of the importance of international agricultural research. We made a serious mistake in decreasing investments in this area over the last two decades, and it is clear that we are paying the price for that mistake now. There is now renewed interest in agriculture, with many different funds being set up to support it. At the recently concluded Global Consultation on Agricultural Research for Development, in Montpellier, France, there was public recognition that the research and development system has been operating in a fractured way.

Those of us doing international agricultural research have been doing our thing, the national agricultural research systems of developing countries have been doing their thing, and so on. And even if these research organizations had been working effectively together, they have not matched themselves to programs in complementary sectors—in roads and other kinds of infrastructure, in markets, in extension services. Our challenge now is to see how all these investments can be better aligned. Our effort in the CGIAR to establish a Consortium is one part of that overall requirement for much clearer and explicit alignment of the different parts of the development process.

Why should livestock be part of the new CGIAR?

We know that livestock research can explicitly address poverty. ILRI’s research paradigm makes use of a ‘systems perspective’. And, understanding that technical solutions are only part of what poor communities and countries need, ILRI researchers have developed an ‘innovations systems mindset’.

What does ILRI bring to the new CGIAR?

Some examples in the area of 7 global issues that ILRI research addresses.

  1. SUSTAINABLE INTENSIFICATION OF AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS: more efficient and integrated mixed crop-and-livestock farming systems through development of improved dual-purpose food-feed crops and judicious use of available biomass.
  2. REDUCING PASTORAL VULNERABILITY: livestock vaccines, drought insurance for herders living in drylands, policies that encourage pastoral households to diversify their income sources.
  3. ADAPTATION AND MITIGATION STRATEGIES FOR CLIMATE CHANGE: livestock feeding regimens that increase milk yields while reducing the amounts of greenhouse gases produced; investigation of the levels of carbon sequestration in rangelands.
  4. ENHANCED FOOD SAFEY AND MARKET ACCESS: pro-poor regulations, policies and incentives, particularly for smallholder dairy systems in East Africa and South Asia.
  5. PREVENTION OR CONTROL OF EMERGING ZOONOTIC DISEASES: risk maps, better control of livestock disease outbreaks through participatory epidemiology.
  6. DEVELOPMENT OF LIVESTOCK VACCINES: improved existing vaccines and development of new ones and innovative public-private vehicles for delivering them to poor livestock keepers.
  7. 7 CONSERVATION AND USE OF ANIMAL GENETIC RESOURCES: evidence to support conservation priority setting, development of reproductive technologies and other methodologies for better conservation and use of native stock in poor countries.

What are our challenges? How do we integrate all this intelligently into the new CGIAR Consortium and its Mega Programs? How do we implement gender issues into all our research work? How do we build greater capacity in our national and regional partners in developing countries? How do we build the trust needed to make the new and deeper partnerships required by the new way of operating in the new CGIAR? And how do we do a better job of quickly distilling the knowledge from our research to address urgent global issues such as climate change and emerging diseases?

View the presentation:

The State of ILRI

View more presentations from ILRI CGIAR.

Livestock emissions and livestock systems in developing countries

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According to Carlos Seré, Director General of ILRI, the livelihoods of a billion people, particularly in Africa and Asia, are attached to livestock – and consequently to their greenhouse gas emissions. If livestock are removed, many of these people have few other livelihood opportunities. He argues: "improving feeding is one of the key interventions to improve the efficiency of livestock systems, i.e. to produce less methane per kilo of output" – which will relieve pressure on other natural resources like forests. He cautions that aggregating livestock emissions globally misses the big differences between developed and developing countries. It is important to separate the two. "To design policies you really need to clearly separate the problem." In developed countries, livestock production is mainly commercial and there are a number of policies and instruments that can be applied to reduce livestock emissions. In poor countries as well, he states, livestock emissions can be reduced – "but we need to be aware of the stark trade off. We may end up with lots more poor people and hungry children." View the video: [blip.tv ?posts_id=3005208&dest=-1]

Putting livestock on the climate change table

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New options should focus on helping hungry animals and people adapt to climate change while mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions of small-scale livestock production systems.

Farm animals have been providing the world with an uncommon array of benefits since before the dawn of agriculture. Indeed, most small-scale farming even today would be impossible without them. But it is the world’s poorest people—some one billion of them—who depend on cattle, sheep, goats, chickens and other domestic animals the most. Livestock keeping helps them sustain their herding cultures or small-scale farming (e.g., animal manure fertilizes croplands; cattle and buffalo pull ploughs and transport farm produce to markets). Livestock provide them with a rare means of earning and saving an income (people can sell milk, eggs, manure or surplus stock, or they can find jobs in dairy or related businesses). Livestock foods feed hungry people (families can consume the milk, meat and eggs their stock produce or sell these high-quality foods to buy cheaper starchy foods). And livestock are a last hedge to protect households against the shocks common to the rural poor—from drought, flood or disease that destroys food crops in the field, to market distortions that make farm produce worthless, to civil unrest that makes people flee their homes, and, finally now, to a warmer world with increasingly unpredictable weather and extreme weather events.

But the inexorable rise of human populations, along with the aspirations and appetites of their growing middle classes, have led also to global livestock populations of increasing numbers and increasingly intensive livestock production practices. While overconsumption of red meat and other livestock foods is damaging the health of many people of the North, under-consumption of these nourishing foods is hurting, and killing, many people of the South. In terms of the environment, livestock production globally causes up to 18% of the human-generated greenhouse gases that are warming our planet. Livestock do this both directly (methane, for example, is produced in the rumination processes of cud-chewing animals) and indirectly (such as the felling of forests to make room for fodder crops and ranching). The factory farms of industrialized countries not only can treat animals inhumanely but also can pollute air and water and threaten human as well as animal health. The herding and farming families of developing countries, on the other hand, typically maintain their ruminant animals on poor-quality feeds that make conversion of feed to milk and meat inefficient and environmentally damaging—skinny ruminants on poor diets, while not competing with people for grain, produce much more methane per unit of livestock product than do well-fed cattle, sheep and goats.

Just one hundred years ago, the principles and practices of animal husbandry were pretty similar across all the regions of the world where it was practiced (which pretty much meant all the regions of the world). But as schisms have opened up between the livestock production systems and peoples of today’s rich and poor worlds, we must now start from a new understanding—an understanding based on decades of livestock and systems research—that ‘local context’ is everything.

In the North, we need to focus on mitigating the impacts of livestock production and consumption on climate change. We already have many workable and alternative ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the environmental and health ‘bads’ of intensive livestock production systems. We need to get them implemented and to begin monitoring our reductions in livestock-produced greenhouse gases as we begin to build more sustainable and healthy food systems.

In the South, where most of the world’s poor live, work and are fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers and herders, the impacts of climate change will be greatest—and typically experienced at first hand. These farmers and herders include the largely rainfed crop-and-livestock farming communities that, unknown to many, have become the world’s biggest source of staple foods for the poor as well as many of the world’s most renowned herding cultures.

In the rural South, there are few ways of making a living other than by producing food from the land. Therefore, while we need to encourage people to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions generated by their livestock enterprises, we need to focus most urgently on helping these people and communities to adapt their production systems to climate change. New incentives and technology and policy instruments should allow them to continue to provide the foods, jobs, livelihoods and environmental services that their livestock make possible and doing so in increasingly more efficient and sustainable ways.

With a perfect storm of food, water and energy shortages fast approaching—and 1 billion livestock livelihoods at the very centre of a nexus of human, climate and environmental vulnerabilities—the time for helping developing countries and communities to transform their livestock sectors has come.

As we move further into a 21st century characterized by depleted natural resources and the projected ‘human tsunami’ that is expected to peak by mid-century with a population of more than 9 billion, those of us in research for development need to focus our energy and attention on the little- as well as well-known levers that drive big change.

Across the developing regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the raising and selling of farm animals, and the increasing consumption of milk, meat and eggs, together represent one of those ‘big-change’ levers. The ubiquitous small-scale livestock enterprises found in every country of the developing world can represent pathways out of poverty and hunger. They can also promote climate change. Livestock researchers are acutely aware that they are working at these critically important crossroads.

This is Chapter One of the ILRI Corporate Report 2008–09: Download the full report

Putting livestock food on the climate-change table

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It’s time for climate negotiators to put meat on the bones
of the next climate agreement

By Carlos Seré, Director General, ILRI

Mozambique, Tete province, Muchamba village

Worldwide our climate is changing, and livestock, which are vital to food security and to agricultural systems in most marginal regions of the world, must adapt to survive, as must the herders and farmers who keep them.

Livestock systems are a major global asset. They occupy 45% of the earth’s surface, employ at least 1.3 billion people, and are valued at about 1.4 trillion US dollars. They provide 17% of the calories and a third of the protein we consume. According to FAO, milk is the world’s number one agricultural commodity, worth about $144 billion annually, and meat from cows, pigs and chickens rank 3, 4 and 5, respectively.

These statistics, however, hide stark differences in how livestock are raised. In poor countries, most livestock are raised on small farms or herded by pastoralists. Throughout their (usually long) natural lives, they survive largely on grass and other vegetation, including the stalks, leaves and other ‘wastes’ of food crops after the grain has been harvested.

In contrast, most livestock in wealthy countries are ‘factory-farmed’ using industrial processes. These short-lived animals are quickly fattened by feeding them vast quantities of corn and other grains – food that could be eaten by people.

Livestock contribute about 18% of the global greenhouse gas emissions generated by human activity. The vast majority of these emissions come from wealthy countries practicing factory farming. All of Africa’s ruminants combined, for example, account for only 3 percent of the global methane emissions from livestock.

Most farmers in developing countries practice either mixed-crop and-livestock farming or pastoral production on rangelands. These smallholders and herders leave tiny environmental footprints in terms of inputs. Even so, investments that increase their efficiency and productivity in terms of breeding and feeding could remove millions of tons of methane and carbon emissions from the atmosphere.

Livestock play central roles in the lives of the poor. If livestock are lost, households can slip into chronic “poverty traps”. Experts believe that climate change is particularly hurting Africa’s livestock and other food producers and the ecosystems on which they depend. And they predict things are going to get worse on the continent, probably much worse. The productivity of rain-fed cropping systems is likely to drop, and do so dramatically in some areas; water shortages will become more common; and important human, livestock and crop diseases are likely to spread to new regions and become more severe.

Many of the world’s small-scale livestock keepers will have to adapt, for example, by changing the mix of livestock species they keep and the types of crops they grow, or switching to new sources of feed for their animals. Some will probably have to get out of agriculture altogether.

When negotiators meet later this year in Copenhagen to finalize the global climate pact, they must pay attention to the many small farmers and herders who are already feeding most of the world’s poor. And they must begin to pay attention explicitly to farm animals that remain neglected by policymakers even as they become increasingly important to food security and raising smallholder incomes. African negotiators in particular need to be champion the cause of small-scale animal agriculture, which remains the backbone of their nations’ economies.

Food security and climate change are inextricably linked. Policymakers must become adept at moving on both fronts simultaneously. And if our climate negotiators hope to address the needs of more than a billion animal keepers n the world, they must begin to provide differentiated policies that support rather than neglect the multifarious small livestock enterprises that make food production possible throughout the developing world.

Research project on fodder marketing in Bihar, India

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ILRI India

A recently completed research project has, for the first time, systematically studied the trading of fodder in Bihar with a view to determining the importance of fodder trading and marketing as a means of mitigating fodder scarcity. The study has also identified differences in the nutritive value of traded fodders.

Dr Iain Wright of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) which led the study explained, Scarcity of fodder is one of the key constraints to the development of the livestock sector in Bihar as well as India generally. We know that trading of fodder is important within villages, between villages and even between states, but until now we have not known much about the volumes traded nor the importance of fodder trading in supplying fodder to areas where there is a scarcity. We now understand more about the way in which fodder is moved within Bihar and even outside the state and how the marketing of fodder could be made more effective by partnering with a competent retail graphics design company.

Crop residues make up almost 50% of the fodder that is fed to livestock in India, and are even more important in Bihar where over 60% of all feed is contributed by wheat and rice straw, with rice straw especially important. Dr Wright explained that recent research by ILRI had shown that there were big differences in the nutritive value of straw from different varieties of rice. ‘We wanted to see whether these differences in the feeding value of rice straw are reflected in the prices paid for straw in the markets.’

The results of the study show the diversity of the supply and demand for fodder in different parts of Bihar. Areas with intensive cereal production supply dry fodder to the rest of Bihar. Dr Nils Teufel an ILRI researcher explained that farmers with small land-holdings have to purchase dry fodder to feed their animals while farmers with surplus fodder are selling about 45% of their dry fodder production. “Within villages, more than 80% of trade in fodder is usually directly between producer and consumers but trade between districts generally involves up to four trade transactions,” he added. Urban dairy producers are major buyers of fodder – they buy about 73% of dry fodder sold by traders.

The type of fodder used also depends on the intensity of production: with increasing intensification of dairy production, the share of wheat straw being fed to dairy animals increases.

Laboratory analysis of fodder samples showed the expected superior nutritional quality of wheat straw compared to paddy straw. In fact, the analysed paddy straw samples showed below average quality characteristics.

Traders and consumers evaluate straw by its appearance, but neither appearance nor the nutritional quality characteristics seem to have a strong effect on prices. This is in contrast to some other parts of India where prices are higher for fodder with better nutritional quality.

A workshop at which the key findings of the project will be presented and discussed is being organized by ILRI on 27 October 2009 at the ICAR Research Complex for the Eastern Region, Patna. The guest of honour will be Sri Anil Kumar Singh, Director, Dairy, Department of Animal Husbandry and Fisheries, Government of Bihar. Participants will include representatives of the primary stakeholders, i.e. fodder producers, traders and livestock owners of the state as well as research scientists and officials from different government departments. Members of the Press are cordially invited to attend.

For further information
contact Dr Iain A Wright, Regional Representative, Asia. Tel: 987 187 7038, email: i.wright@cgiar.org

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is one of 15 International Agricultural Research Institutes which are part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. ILRI carries out research to alleviate poverty through the development of the livestock sector in Africa and Asia. Its headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya. It has a team of scientists based in Hyderabad working to alleviate problems of feed scarcity and an Asia Regional Office in New Delhi. For further information on ILRI see www.ilri.org

The research project was funded by the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID) Vienna, Austria.

Drought hits Kenya’s livestock herders hard

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Llivestock in the current kenya drought

Drought hits Kenya’s livestock herders hard, forcing some communities out of self-reliant pastoral ways of life (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

Stories of the two-year drought biting deep in pastoral lands in the Horn of Africa are heartbreaking. Kenya’s livestock herders are being hit particularly hard. More than three-quarters of Kenya comprises arid and semi-arid lands too dry for growing crops of any kind. Only pastoral tribes, able to eke out a living by raising livestock on common grasslands, can make a living for themselves and their families here, where rainfall is destiny. With changes in the climate bringing droughts every few years in this region of eastern Africa, some doubt that traditional pastoral ways of life, evolved in this region over some 12,000 years, can long survive. Climate change here is not an academic discussion but rather a matter of life and death. But pastoral knowledge of how to survive harsh climates—largely by moving animals to take advantage of common lands where the grass is growing—is needed now more than ever.

This is especially true in Africa, whose many vast drylands are expected to suffer greater extremes in climate in future. Two of the recent reports are from America’s Public Radio International (‘Drought in East Africa’: <http://www.pri.org/business/nonprofits/drought-east-africa1629.html>) and the UK’s Guardian newspaper (‘The last nomads: Drought drives Kenya’s herders to the brink’: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/13/drought-kenya-nomads>). The Guardian article tells a heart-breaking story about “pastoral dropouts”, a story that may mark “not simply the end . . . of generations of nomadic existence in the isolated lands where Kenya meets Somalia and Ethiopia, but the imminent collapse of a whole way of life that has been destroyed by an unprecedented decade of successive droughts”.

The article says this region has experienced three serious droughts in the last decade, when formerly a drought occurred every 9 to 12 years. This change in global weather patterns ‘has been whittling away at the nomads’ capacity to restock with animals—to replenish and survive—normally a period of about three years”. The Economist in its 19 September 2009 edition says global warming is creating a ‘bad climate for development’ (<http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14447171>). The article says that poor countries’ economic development will contribute to climate change—but they are already its victims. ‘Most people in the West know that the poor world contributes to climate change, though the scale of its contribution still comes as a surprise. Poor and middle-income countries already account for just over half of total carbon emissions (see chart 1); Brazil produces more CO2 per head than Germany. The lifetime emissions from these countries’ planned power stations would match the world’s entire industrial pollution since 1850.

‘Less often realised, though, is that global warming does far more damage to poor countries than they do to the climate. In a report in 2006 Nicholas (now Lord) Stern calculated that a 2°C rise in global temperature cost about 1% of world GDP. But the World Bank, in its new World Development Report <http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14447171#footnote1> , now says the cost to Africa will be more like 4% of GDP and to India, 5%. Even if environmental costs were distributed equally to every person on earth, developing countries would still bear 80% of the burden (because they account for 80% of world population). As it is, they bear an even greater share, though their citizens’ carbon footprints are much smaller . . . . ‘The poor are more vulnerable than the rich for several reasons. Flimsy housing, poor health and inadequate health care mean that natural disasters of all kinds hurt them more. ‘The biggest vulnerability is that the weather gravely affects developing countries’ main economic activities—such as farming and tourism. Global warming dries out farmland. Since two-thirds of Africa is desert or arid, the continent is heavily exposed. One study predicts that by 2080 as much as a fifth of Africa’s farmland will be severely stressed.’

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its local and international partners are working to help pastoral communities in this region increase their resilience in the face of the current drought, as well as population growth, climate change, and other big changes affecting pastoral ways of life.

  1. Scientists are helping Maasai communities in the Kitengela rangelands of Kenya (outside Nairobi) obtain and use evidence that new schemes to pay herders small sums of money per hectare to keep their lands unfenced are working for the benefit of livestock and wildlife movements alike.
  2. Scientists are helping Maasai communities in the rangelands surrounding Kenya’s famous Masai Mara National Reserve to obtain and use evidence that public-private partnerships now building new wildlife conservancies that pay pastoralists to leave some of their lands for wildlife rather than livestock grazing are win-win options for conservationists and pastoral communities alike.
  3. Scientists have refined and mass produced a vaccine against the lethal cattle disease East Coast fever—and are helping public-private partnerships to regulate and distribute the vaccine in 11 countries of eastern, central and southern Africa where the disease is endemic—so that pastoral herders can save some of their famished livestock in this drought from attack by disease, and use those animals to rebuild their herds when the drought is over.
  4. Scientists are characterizing and helping to conserve the indigenous livestock breeds that Africa’s pastoralists have kept for millennia—breeds that have evolved special hardiness to cope with harsh conditions such as droughts and diseases—so that these genetic traits can be more widely used to cope with the changing climate.

But much more needs to be done. And it needs to be done much more closely with the livestock herding communities that have so much to teach us about how to cope with a changing and variable climate.

Staying Maasai? Livelihoods, conservation and development in East Africa rangelands

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Staying Maasai

As East Africa’s iconic tribe changes with the times to keep its pastoral heritage alive, will the herders also be able and willing to save the wildlife populations around them? (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

Every year, over a million people visit the national parks and game reserves in East Africa, generating up to nearly US$2 billion a year in revenue. The most famous of these parks are in the Maasai heartland straddling the Kenya-Tanzania border. This ‘Maasailand’ supports the most diverse concentrations of big mammals left on earth.

Often overlooked is the abundance of wildlife mixed with livestock and pastoral peoples on grasslands adjacent to the parks and reserves—and the ways these pastoral herders and their animal stock contribute to the balance of these wildlife-rich savanna ecosystems.

A new book, Staying Maasai? Livelihoods, Conservation and Development in East African Rangelands, looks at thirty years of research on East Africa’s iconic Maasai people. In it, a group of international researchers argue for big and deep changes in the region’s policies affecting Maasailand and its people.

Semi-nomadic herders have maintained a pastoral way of life, co-existing with the wildlife in this region, for several thousand years. But that balance appears to have reached its tipping point. A recent study by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), for example, has shown dramatic declines of six species of wild ungulates (hoofed animals)—giraffes, hartebeest, impala, warthogs, topis and waterbuck—in Kenya’s famous Masai Mara Game Reserve, in just the last 15 years. The researchers found that these wildlife declines are linked to growing human populations crowding at the boundaries of the Reserve, which are transforming these former grasslands, the traditional ‘dispersal lands’ for wildlife, into urban settlements and crop and livestock farms, thus fragmenting the former wildlife habitats.

Staying Maasai? portrays the many ways Maasai are adapting to—and driving—rapid environmental, political and societal changes. Substantial components of the book are a product of a collaborative research program, ‘Assessing Trade-offs between Poverty Alleviation and Wildlife Conservation’, involving a multidisciplinary and international group of natural and social scientists and their Maasai collaborators, funded by the Belgian Government and coordinated by ILRI. The book’s authors encourage decision-makers to look to the Maasai peoples themselves for sustainable solutions to conserving both wildlife and pastoral lifestyles, noting that contrary to conventional wisdom, few Maasai families are yet benefiting much from wildlife tourism. A fresh look at land, pastoral and conservation policies is urgently needed to ensure the survival of this community and its wildlife-rich pastoral lands in Kenya and Tanzania.

Wildlife revenues reach few Maasai people
The findings in this volume counter national policy maxims in Kenya and Tanzania by demonstrating the generally disappointing performance of wildlife for local livelihoods. While delivering significant returns to a few landowning households living adjacent to top-end wildlife eco-tourist destinations, wildlife brings very limited returns to most Maasai households.
A case study included in this book on wildlife and Maasai living in the Kitengela region just outside Kenya’s capital of Nairobi shows that leasing and other ecosystem services payment schemes are promising ways to enhance local livelihoods. Much more work needs to be done, however, to fulfil the promise of these schemes to benefit most of the pastoral people living in wildlife areas. Allowing the schemes to merely hobble on will fail to stop the continuing declines of wildlife and continuing impoverishment of most Maasai.

The lasting value of pastoral livestock production
The research findings reported in this volume confirm the continued centrality of livestock to local livelihoods across Maasailand, making clear the lasting economic importance and resilience of pastoral livestock production. Katherine Homewood, professor of anthropology at University College London, who is a lead author and co-editor of the book, writes in the final chapter that livestock production should not be viewed ‘as some romanticized throwback to an earlier age, but as a robust and vital component of twenty-first century livelihoods in Maasai rangelands.’

Four policy lessons
With a wide range of livelihood strategies now being pursued in East Africa’s Maasailand, pastoral policy needs to take better account of the situation evolving on the ground.

(1) Support livestock production.
First and foremost, says Katherine Homewood, policy needs to take account of ‘the central nature and resilience of livestock production in the rangelands, and to embrace and foster pastoral production, supporting mobility, access to key resources, veterinary provision and marketing infrastructures.’ Homewood argues that ‘Rather than dismissing pastoral production as backward, unproductive and as failing to contribute to the national economy,’ Kenyan and Tanzanian national policies need to recognize the actual worth of this form of land use. She says these issues are insufficiently addressed in Kenya’s draft National Livestock Policy and that Tanzania’s current policies not only deny pastoralists some of their basic rights (by evicting pastoralists from some areas and denying others grazing land tenure), but in addition are counter-productive to Tanzania’s stated aims for achieving environmental and economic sustainability.

(2) Limit cultivation.
Second, governments need to be more realistic about the potential for, and impacts of, intensifying or extending crop cultivation across the rangelands to replace pastoralist livestock production. ‘It is unrealistic to envisage a major increase in food production from cultivation in arid and semi-arid rangelands,’ writes Homewood, ‘given the agro-ecological limitations both of water availability and of soil fertility.’

(3) Encourage non-farm employment.
Third, governments need to foster potential for non-farm employment in Maasailand through rural industries and better education. ‘The potential of pastoral systems will be realized only with better educational and rural diversification opportunities,’ says Homewood, ‘and acknowledgement of the importance of pastoral livestock production.’

(4) Distribute tourist revenues.
Finally, governments and conservation groups need to rethink their understanding of the contribution of wildlife conservation to rural livelihoods. Homewood concludes that ‘The structure of the tourist industry needs to change to allow landowners in Kenya to capture more than the 5% of revenues they are estimated to receive.’

For more information on the book Staying Maasai? and the complexity of ILRI’s work, click on the links below.

Table of Content PDF
Chapter One Introduction PDF
Chapter Four Kitengela PDF
Chapter Ten Wildlife PDF

To order a copy: Staying Maasai? Order form

More relevant information:
1.ILRI wildlife study press release
2.Mara study press room
3.Mara report- MEDIA COVERAGE

For more information please contact:

Dr. Patti Kristjanson
Leader, Innovation Works Initiative
International Livestock Research Institute
Telephone: +254-20-422-3000
Email: P.Kristjanson@cgiar.org
Website: www.ilri.org/InnovationWorks