Averting "Livestock Meltdown": Biodiversity Key To Global Food Security
by Kimberley D. Mok, Montreal, Canada on 09. 7.07
In a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report released earlier this week at a conference held in Interlaken, Switzerland, agricultural scientists warned that more robust and better-adapted local livestock breeds in developing countries were losing out to imported animals from industrialized nations. The report suggests that there could be serious effects on future food security worldwide, while also emphasizing the need to determine ways to slow what one researcher is calling a "livestock meltdown".
In its assessment of farm animals in 169 countries, the report found that 90 percent of cattle in the developed world originate from six tightly defined breeds – like the famous Holstein-Friesian dairy cow.
Researchers such as Carlos Seré, director of the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), urged for the establishment of regional gene banks to preserve livestock biodiversity.
“[Already] in the US, Europe, China, India, and South America, there are well-established genebanks actively preserving regional livestock diversity,” Seré said. "Sadly, Africa has been left wanting and that absence is sorely felt right now because this is one of the regions with the richest remaining diversity and is likely to be a hotspot of breed losses in this century."
The report’s findings show that the developing world’s farmers are now turning to higher-yield animals from the U.S. and Europe – those ever-familiar Holstein cows for higher milk yields, White Leghorn chickens for quicker egg-laying, Large White pigs for bigger growth – all resulting in the average loss of one indigenous breed every month.
The report emphasized that while these imported breeds of industrialized countries give a higher yield of volume in milk, eggs and meat in the short term, they pose a higher risk in the long term as they are not well-adapted to increasingly unpredictable changes in climate, not to mention outbreaks of indigenous illnesses.
In addition to gene banks as a means to preserve global livestock biodiversity, an international effort could also begin to collaboratively map the “landscape genomics” of which breeds are best-adapted to different environments around the world.
In total, the FAO estimates that there are about one billion people involved somehow in animal farming. Around 70 percent of the world’s rural poor have much of their livelihoods hinging on their livestock. Seré rightly notes: "For the foreseeable future, farm animals will continue to create means for hundreds of millions of people to escape absolute poverty."
::FAO
Via::Planet Ark, BigNewsNetwork.com,
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If I could, I'd like all living species to stay that way. That said, come on! 'Maintaining a species' by breeding it for slaughter at 1/4 it's life expectancy has to raise a few flags. If not let's focus more on which plants to eat and less on which animal species to kill more (remember they also kill us more via GHG emissions/pollution/deforestation/etc.).
Who's cooking who's goose? or "Your burger broiled the world"
With "livestock" (aka slave beings raised for killing) we've got it backwards. The inmates are running the prison - 'livestock' is getting it's revenge on us by "killing us softly"/roasting the planet. According to the same UN FAO in Livestock's Long Shadow (2006), 'livestock' is pumping-up green house gases faster than ALL transportation (18% vs 13%).
BTW - The FAO also says that all non-livestock agriculture only contributes 1/4 of the GHG emissions of livestock!
Peace,
Andreas
Thanks for ignoring the entire content of the post, Andreas.
Developed nation vegans (are there any other kind?) have a cultural/economic blindness that comes from having the luxury to be able to make political decisions about one's food. Not eating animals simply isn't a universal possibility at this point, nor will ever likely come to be. So why fantasize about it? Focus on practical things, like the FAO does.
"livestock" (aka slave beings raised for killing)
That kind of rhetoric is both childish and offensive to people who are descended from human slaves.
According to the same UN FAO in Livestock's Long Shadow (2006), 'livestock' is pumping-up green house gases faster than ALL transportation (18% vs 13%).
A widely spread comparison that is apples (systemic) to oranges (direct), and which is global, yet has no national-level relevance (where the relative emissions of transportation completely dwarfs livestock).