Towards a more coherent narrative for the global livestock sector

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Susan MacMillan

ILRI’s Jimmy Smith (left) and FAO’s Henning Steinfeld confer at a high-level consultation for a global livestock agenda to 2020 at ILRI’s Nairobi campus this week.

High-level leaders in the livestock world have agreed on major ways to fulfill on an ambitious global livestock agenda to 2020 that would work simultaneously to protect the environment, human health and socioeconomic equity. The heads of ten agencies met earlier this week in Nairobi to hammer out the outlines of a consensus on strategies for a global livestock agenda to 2020. This High-Level Consultation for a Global Livestock Agenda to 2020 was co-hosted by the World Bank and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

Three ‘pillars’ for the future of livestock were discussed: the environment, human health and social equity.

Henning Steinfeld, chief of livestock information and policy analysis at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), gave a presentation on the livestock-environment interface: Global environmental challenges [and livestock].

Bernard Vallat, director general of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), spoke on issues at the livestock-human health interface: Global animal health challenges: The health pillar.

Carlos Seré, chief development strategist at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), described livestock and equity issues: Global poverty and food security challenges: The equity pillar.

A major issue raised repeatedly throughout the 1.5-day consultation was the need to work in closer partnership not only to create synergies in institutional work programs but also to begin creating a more coherent narrative for the livestock sector. This new narrative is needed, it was said, both for some simple messaging to counter misunderstandings about the essential role livestock play in the lives and livelihoods of one billion poor people (e.g., dairying in poor countries feeds hungry children and pays for their schooling) and for more nuanced communications that help decision-makers and their constituencies better distinguish among livestock production systems, which vary vastly according, for example, to the different species kept (e.g., the rearing of pigs vs goats vs chickens), the environments in which the animals are raised (remote mountains vs fertile plains vs dry grasslands) and the particular livestock production system being employed (pastoral herding vs mixed smallholder farming vs industrial farming).

François Le Gall, senior livestock advisor at the World Bank, co-hosted an ILRI-World Bank High-Level Consultation on the Global Livestock Agenda by 2020, held in Nairobi, Kenya, 12-13 Mar 2012 (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Stephane Forman (left) and François Le Gall, both livestock experts at the World Bank (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

ILRI animal health scientist Jeff Mariner led discussions of one of several working groups at the consultation (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

IFAD’s Carlos Seré (left) and Baba Soumare (centre), chief animal health officer at AU-IBAR (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Walter Masiga and Bernard Vallet of the World Animal Health Organisation (OIE) (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

Kristin Girvetz, program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan).

In total, 14 leaders in global livestock issues took part in this week’s Nairobi consultation:

ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations)
Soloman Benigno, project manager and animal health expert

AU-IBAR (African Union-Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources)
Ahmed El-Sawalhy, director
Bruce Mukanda, senior program and projects officer
Baba Soumare, chief animal health officer

BMGF (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)
Kristin Girvetz (formerly Grote), program officer

EU (European Union) Delegation to Kenya
Bernard Rey, head of operations

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)
Henning Steinfeld, chief of livestock information and policy

IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development)
Carlos Sere, chief development strategist

ILRI (International Livestock Research Institute)
Jimmy Smith, director general (co-host)

OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health)
Bernard Vallat, director general
Walter Masiga, sub-regional representative for Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa

UN (United Nations)
David Nabarro, special representative of the UN secretary general for food security and nutrition (via filmed presentation)

World Bank
Francois Le Gall, livestock advisor at the World Bank (co-host)
Stephane Forman, livestock specialist for Africa

Read more about this consultation on this ILRI News Blog: Developing an enabling global livestock agenda for our lives, health and lands, 13 Mar 2012.

View pictures of the event on ILRI Flickr.

Developing an enabling global livestock agenda for our lives, health and lands

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Susan MacMillan

ILRI’s Jimmy Smith (left) and the World Bank’s Francois Le Gall are co-hosting a high-level consultation for a global livestock agenda to 2020 at ILRI’s Nairobi campus this week.

Can our global livestock systems meet a triple bottom line—protecting health, the environment and equity? Can 14 high-level leaders and thinkers outline and agree on a strategy that can help the world fulfill on that ambitious livestock agenda to 2020? Can all this be done in one and a half days?

Three weeks after Bill Gates announced at a meeting of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome new grants of USD200 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to support the world’s smallholder farmers—a meeting in which Gates called on the big United Nations food-related agencies to work together to create a global productivity target for those small farmers—those agencies are meeting this week in Nairobi to hammer out the outlines of a consensus regarding strategies for a global livestock agenda to 2020.

This High-Level Consultation for a Global Livestock Agenda to 2020 is being co-hosted by:
Francois Le Gall, livestock advisor at the World Bank, and
Jimmy Smith, director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

The dozen other heads of institutions and departments among the world’s leading bodies for food security that are taking part are:

ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations)
Soloman Benigno, project manager and animal health expert

AU-IBAR (African Union-Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources)
Ahmed El-Sawalhy, director
Bruce Mukanda, senior program and projects officer
Baba Soumare, chief animal health officer

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)
Kristin Girvetz (formerly Grote), program officer

European Union (EU) Delegation to Kenya
Bernard Rey, head of operations

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
Henning Steinfeld, chief of livestock information and policy

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
Carlos Sere, chief development strategist

United Nations (UN)
David Nabarro, special representative of the UN secretary general for food security and nutrition (via filmed presentation)

World Bank
Stephane Forman, livestock specialist for Africa

World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE)
Bernard Vallat, director general
Walter Masiga, sub-regional representative for Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa

Among the ideas rising to the surface for these leaders of global livestock departments and institutions are the need to shift focus from livestock per se to livestock-based lives and lands. The discussions are centering initially on three pillars of livestock development: health, environment and equity.

David Nabarro, the UN special representative for food security and nutrition, in a filmed presentation for this high-level consultation, said:

There is a movement for the transformation of food systems throughout the world. Livestock is an essential part of this equation. ILRI and the World Bank are key actors in seeing that science is applied for effective action for improved livestock systems. This meeting is important and happening when it should.

ILRI director general Jimmy Smith then gave an overview of the trends, opportunities and challenges of livestock development.

Feeding the world is possible, Smith concluded, as is sustaining our natural resource base and reducing absolute poverty.

Our challenges in achieving these, the livestock director said, include ‘improving our methodologies to develop more reliable assessments of the hard trade-offs involved in choosing ways forward for livestock development, managing those trade-offs at multiple scales, and ensuring institutional innovations, which will be as important as technological innovations—and perhaps harder to achieve’.
Watch and listen to Smith’s presentation.

The global livestock sector: Opportunities and challenges

Among the trends Smith highlighted are:

Demand for livestock products continues to rise
Livestock systems will continue to produce much of the world’s food
There remains a vast divide between developed and developing regions in kinds of livestock systems and their costs and benefits, but those different worlds are increasingly interconnected

Smith stressed the need for more reliable evidence-based assessments of the hard trade-offs implicit in our choices for the livestock sector, which will differ greatly in different regions and circumstances, especially in light of the fact that livestock impact so many important global development issues (e.g., human health, environmental protection, global food security)

An example of how critical livestock issues are for human well-being that Smith pointed out is the interface between livestock and human health.

Animal source foods are the biggest contributor to food-borne disease, Smith said. Diseases transmitted from livestock and livestock products kill more people each year than HIV or malaria. Indeed, one new human disease emerges every 2 months; and 20 percent of these are transmitted from livestock.

This consultation on a global livestock agenda comes at an appropriate time for Jimmy Smith, who started his tenure as director general of ILRI only late last year and who has instituted a task force, headed by ILRI’s director for institutional planning Shirley Tarawali, to refresh ILRI’s long-term strategy for livestock research for development. As several of the other institutions represented at this meeting are also in the thick of rethinking their strategies, this 1.5-day intense consultation is able to harvest the fruits of much recent hard thinking that has already been done in these global and regional institutions.

Renewing African agriculture

Posted on November 21, 2008 by ILRIComms

Making Africa's diversity and complexity work for, rather than against, its small farmers

As 2008 draws to a close, I and other colleagues of mine in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which supports my Africa-based institute, the International Livestock Research Institute, have been reflecting on a ‘New Deal’ for African farmers, who face special agricultural conditions that demand special attention.

Rural Africa remains largely hungry and poor despite decades of improved agricultural technologies, crop varieties and management and policy options generated by agricultural science to help solve the continent’s special agricultural challenges.

What’s been missing is an integrated approach to African agriculture that is radically collaborative, holistic and futuristic—an approach that embraces rather than ignores the complexity of small-scale African farming and marketing and the continent’s special agro-ecological and cultural diversity.

We need not only new and better adapted crop varieties and more productive and more efficiently managed livestock, fisheries, tree crops and forests, but also new ways of serving small farmers, new and more efficient market chains that encourage smallholder participation, and new ways of spurring innovation at all levels, from farms to communities to institutions.

We need an integrated approach to Africa’s special agricultural conditions that follows neither the highly intensified farming systems of the West, which now are also being rethought because of their high human and environmental costs, nor mere incremental improvements to Africa’s traditional subsistence mixed crop, tree, fish and livestock farming systems, which can merely lock people into farm poverty for generations.

Experts reckon that doing these things will require a doubling of current investments in science. Such augmented levels of investments would indeed enable the scientific community to advance developing-country agricultural research. And it still wouldn’t make a difference to most of Africa’s food producers and sellers.

We need a New Deal for African agricultural research that involves every major stakeholder in development of this vast sector. Central to the new deal is adequate support for national and regional research and the farm input services that enable the agricultural sector to perform.

We need to learn how to connect all the dots—how to integrate the work of science groups with that of the many other players in developing-country agriculture in ways that deliver all the given specific pieces needed to support, improve and sustain African farming in specific circumstances. Betting on a single farm component or group of actors, whether a new technology or a world body, to transform Africa’s agricultural sector is not going to work.

We’re not going to banish crises such as the fertilizer crisis, the food crisis, the fuel crisis and now the financial crises that we’ve experienced over the past year, but we can learn to prepare for and manage them faster and better. This will require all research institutions to start talking to development institutions, to start building new kinds of partnerships, and to start taking on some radical new ways of doing business. It’s bound to be a messy process. But a necessary one.

These new partnerships must embrace Africa’s diversity as a strength in revitalizing and reforming Africa’s food systems as a whole—from how we grow food to how we transport and process it to how we cook and eat it. With the era of cheap energy drawing to a close, old approaches will not work as before. We need new thinking, new systems, new diversification, new markets, new policies and new actors to build a 21st-century food system that works.

This will require not so much a new development pathway as an abundance of mix-and-match development pathways suiting Africa’s greatly diverse agro-eco- and socio-economic conditions. We need nuanced and differentiated solutions for Africa’s highly differentiated farming systems and household conditions.

To do this, we’ll need new skills and tools and to determine what options best suit which particular circumstances. Doing this should allow agricultural researchers, for the first time, to make Africa’s diversity and complexity work for Africa, as a wealth of resources, rather than against Africa, as a wealth of problems.

Many agree that major international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund require major overhauls to remain relevant in tackling our current and future global challenges. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which supports 15 centres working for sustainable agricultural development in poor countries, has been engaging in this throughout 2008. At its annual meeting, in Maputo, Mozambique, 1–5 December 2008, it furthered the process of reinventing itself by reorganizing its structure and processes to form a cohesive, coherent and—above all—collaborative foundation on which to build anew the international agricultural research for development enterprise.

Carlos Seré
Director General
International Livestock Research Institute

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Towards a more coherent narrative for the global livestock sector

Developing an enabling global livestock agenda for our lives, health and lands

Renewing African agriculture