Introduction

Pierre Gerber, Harold A. Mooney, Jeroen Dijkman, Shirley Tarawali, and Cees de Haan

The global livestock sector is undergoing major structural changes. Over the last century, livestock keeping evolved from a means to harness marginal or secondary resources to produce goods and services for local consumption, to a component of global food chains, which are driven primarily by consumer demands.

Today, animal food chains are reorganizing on a global scale to supply markets using increasingly standardized production technologies. Underlying this technical standardization is the globalization of the livestock sector and its institutions. Animal production companies and consortiums manage the whole food chain on a transcontinental scale. Trade liberalization, private and public standards, as well as transport infrastructure have enabled an increasing share of animal feed and products to enter global trade. Increasingly, producers located in various continents compete for the same markets. The term livestock revolution is generally used to embrace these trends.

These global trends are described in Livestock in a Changing Landscape: Drivers, Consequences, and Responses, which introduces the drivers and consequences of the livestock sector on a global scale, as well as the general principles in terms of institutional development and policy instruments dealing with these issues.

This companion volume provides regional overviews and draws experience from specific contexts and more detailed case studies. The chapters describe how drivers and consequences of livestock sector change play out in specific geographical areas and for different players, and how public and private responses are shaped and implemented. Some chapters in the volume also explore in greater detail some of the specific environmental and social issues analyzed in the Drivers, Consequences, and Responses volume.

Focus is on the responses to change and, in particular, on the environmental and social consequences of the sector's transformation. The volume investigates how the livestock sector is reorganizing on a regional scale and what consequences and responses this process generates. It addresses questions such as the following:

• What shape do global trends take at the regional scale and what remains from traditional forms of production and marketing?

• How do global food systems influence the development of local livestock sectors?

• What are the consequences on a local scale? Which are the communities involved and how are the issues understood and tackled?

• What is the effectiveness of current responses and what are the lessons learned?

It does so in an integrated way, analyzing how changes along the food chain connect to changes in the environmental, health, and social contexts. It provides both historical and analytical information for readers from the academic and research communities as well as for policy advisers and development professionals.

Seven different regions are included: Latin America, East Africa, West Africa, China, India, the EU (Denmark), and the United States. In four of the selected regions (East and West Africa, India, and China), drivers, consequences, and responses to livestock sector changes are analyzed, addressing environmental, public health, and social issues. The other three case studies focus on a specific issue—soil and water pollution in Denmark, deforestation in Brazil and Costa Rica, and nutrient issues in the US dairy industry—and describe how these issues are being addressed by the public and private sector as well as by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other civil society organizations.

This volume thus covers a wide range of livestock sector development scenarios, from pre–livestock revolution regions with slowly evolving traditional livestock systems in East and West Africa to one that is currently starting to experience the exploding demand, characteristic of the onset of the livestock revolution (e.g., India), to those with the livestock revolution in full swing (e.g., Latin America, China), and those that are in a postrevolution era (e.g., European Union, United States) where environmental and food safety issues are increasingly in focus. Regional level changes are, however, much more complex than such a broad classification of linear development stages would indicate. A wide diversity of local cultures, economic conditions, and environments shape the sector's changes. Global trade plays an even greater role in blurring the picture, bringing local and global products onto the same markets. This complex blend of long-term practices and recent trends makes each region, and thus each chapter in this volume, specific.

We conclude with an insider's look into one of the major private agrifood companies, both shaping and responding to the global market.

Evolving Traditional Livestock Systems: East and West Africa

A case study from the Horn of Africa opens the series of regional analyses and introduces the reader to the complexity of livestock sector change. Several patterns of change coexist in this region, determined by economic, demographic, and social conditions on the one hand and by agroecological contexts on the other. Although the pastoral production systems are well adapted to highly fluctuating environmental conditions and potentially compatible with wildlife conservation, their productivity is seriously constrained by decreasing resource access and increasing levels of civil strife and weather-related emergencies. Over the medium term, the fate of these pastoral populations is therefore uncertain. In some of the densely populated areas of the East African highlands, livestock are progressively disappearing from mixed crop–livestock systems because of population increase and limited land resources. In parallel, the expansion of urban markets fosters the development of relatively intensive systems, especially dairy, at the periphery of urban areas. The authors review and comment on past and present policies and development programs that have attempted to address these issues. They identify cross-cutting challenges for policy makers, including disease control, access to land, development of safe regional markets, and improvement of productivity.

West Africa is undergoing similar trends to those observed in the Horn of Africa. Growing and urbanizing populations, rampant poverty, and institutional weaknesses, including deterioration of animal health services, are among the common trends. There is increasing land degradation and expansion of cropping, which exacerbate conflicts over access to land and put increased pressure on pastoral systems. Relatively...