The global livestock sector faces many challenges in sustainably meeting the growing demand for food while balancing trade-offs between efficiency, livelihoods, and the environment. Key issues include climate change, water and land scarcity, disease risks, and debates around large versus small-scale production systems. Addressing these complex challenges will require reliable assessments of hard trade-offs and achieving equity across scales from local to global.

1. The Global Livestock Sector
Production systems for the future:
Opportunities and Challenges
balancing trade-offs between food production,
efficiency, livelihoods and the environment
Jimmy Smith (ILRI)
M. Herrero and P.K. Thornton
WCCA/Nairobi Forum Presentation
ILRI-World Bank High Level Consultation on the Global st
Livestock Agenda by 2020
21 September 2010 | ILRI, Nairobi
Nairobi, 12- 13 March 2012

2. Overview
 The big picture–global drivers and trends
• Feeding the world
• Price fluctuations
• Population and urbanization
• Poverty
 Trends in the global livestock sector
• Consumption
• Food production
• Trade
 Pressing issues in the global livestock sector
• Climate change
• Water
• Land
• Human and animal diseases
• Over consumption
 Challenging issues–divergent views

3. The big picture –
global drivers and
trends

4. Feeding the world
2.5 billion more
1 billion hungry today to feed by 2050
?
FAO: SOFA2011

5. Additional food needed
1 billion tonnes of additional cereal grains to
2050 to meet food and feed demands (IAASTD 2009)
Additional grains
1048 million tonnes
more to 2050
Human
Livestock
consumption
430 million MT
Monogastrics mostly
458 million MT
Biofuels
160 million MT

6. Volatile prices
Impacts on livestock sector and the poor?
Blip or emerging trend?
FAO: SOFA2011

7. A growing–and urbanizing–
population
Photo by NYT

8. Population growth by region
1750−2050

9. Urbanization
Source: Economist

10. Changes in global
poverty indicators
 % of population
living on less than
$1.25/day
• 1990−41.7%
• 2005−25.2%
 Millions of people
living on less than
$1.25/day
• 1990−1,818
• 2005−1,374 http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home/

11. Percent of population living on
less than US$1.25/day−2010
> 80
60−80
40−60
20−40
< 20 11
http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home
no data

12. Trends in the
global livestock
sector

13. Consumption
of livestock products
 Consumption continues to rise with income and
urbanization
 Significant global differences in kilocalorie
consumption
 Highest rates of increase are in the developing world
 Livestock products contribute:
17% of global kilocalorie consumption
33% of global protein consumption (FAOSTAT 2008)
 Livestock provide food for at least 830 million
food-insecure people (Gerber et al. 2007)

14. Projected global consumption in 2050
Annual per capita Total consumption
consumption
Year Meat Milk (kg) Meat Milk (Mt)
(kg) (Mt)
Developing 2002 28 44 137 222
countries 2050 44 78 326 585
Developed 2002 78 202 102 265
countries 2050 94 216 126 295
Source: Rosegrant et al 2009

15. Global value of production
of all livestock products
Herrero et al. 2011

16. Where does the
world’s food come from?
Herrero et al. 2009

17. Growing trade in livestock commodities–
with impacts also at local level
FAO: SOFA 2009

18. Pressing global issues
in the livestock sector
ILRI Spearheading a
New Way Forward

19. Climate change
What will happen to feed resources?
diseases? productivity?
Average projected % change in suitability for 50 crops to 2050
Courtesy of Andy Jarvis

20. Global greenhouse gas efficiency
per kg of animal protein produced
Large inefficiencies in the developing world–
an opportunity?
Herrero et al PNAS (forthcoming)

21. A global water crisis
 2 billion people
lack access
 Demand is growing;
freshwater is getting
scarcer
 70% of total
freshwater use
is for agriculture,
of which 31%
is for livestock

22. Livestock and land use
 Land use
• 3.4 billion hectares (about 26% of emerged lands)
• low intensity in developing countries but growing in Latin America
(this accounts for 80% of deforestation in LAC)
• marginal land frontier exhausted
• 20% of rangelands are degraded (higher in the dry lands)
 Extent of feed-crops
• 470 million hectares (about 33% of arable land)
• cereals: production growth mainly based on intensification /
regional distribution of crops
• soybean: production growth based on expansion in a limited
number of countries (20% of deforestation in the neotropics)
22
Steinfeld et al 2006

23. What role for rangelands?
• Largest land use system
• Increasingly fragmented
• Potentially a
large C sink
• PES: important source of
income diversification
• Difficulties in:
 Measuring and
monitoring C stocks
 Establishment of
payment schemes
 Dealing with
mobile pastoralists
Potential for carbon sequestration in
rangelands (Conant and Paustian 2002)

24. World Land Acquisition

25. Livestock and human disease
 Animal source foods are the biggest
contributor to food-borne disease
 Diseases transmitted from livestock and
livestock
products kill more people
each year than HIV or malaria
 One new human disease emerges every 2
months−
20% of these from livestock
(Jones et al., 2008)

26. Projected global consumption in 2050
Enough?
Annual per capita Total
consumption consumption
Year Meat Milk Meat Milk
(kg) (kg) (Mt) (Mt)
Developing 2002 28 44 137 222
2050 44 78 326 585
Developed 2002 78 202 102 265
2050 94 216 126 295
Source: Rosegrant et al. 2009
Too much?

27. Animal welfare?

28. Challenging issues –
divergent views
ILRI Spearheading a
New Way Forward

29. Large or small farms?
Land consolidation vs growth and
intensification of the smallholder sector
 Large commercial farms pro-efficiency
(foreign capital investment)
 Smallholder development possibly more pro-poor
 Smallholders: Low opportunity cost of labour
 Do diversified smallholder farms promote
biodiversity and better management
of ecosystems services?
 Smallholder sector fragmented:
What actors are needed to support it?
 Trajectory of change?

30. Supermarkets or informal sector?
 ‘Supermarket revolution’
took off in 1990s
 Increases in market share
vary around the world
 General features
• Impacts the rich first
• Vertical integration of food markets
• Threat to smallholder participation
 Effects not same
for all products
• First in processed foods
(flour, oil, condiments)
• Last in fresh foods
(meat, dairy, fruits and veg)
Informal milk market ILRI/Mann
80% in India

31. Trade-offs:
Environment−livelihoods
 Use of biomass–
for soil or feed (or fuel)
 Reduction of
animal numbers–
implications for
livelihoods
 Producing
with smaller
environmental
footprint

32. To eat or not to eat . . .
meat, milk and fish
1 billion 2 billion
undernourished overweight

33. Main messages
 The big picture
• Feeding the world is possible
• Sustaining the natural resource base is possible
• Reducing absolute poverty is possible
 Trends
• Demand for livestock products continues to rise
• Livestock systems producing much of the World’s food
• Vast divide between regions and countries but increasingly interconnected
 Pressing issues
• Livestock impact on all global development issues
• Need for reliable evidence-based assessments of hard trade-offs
 Challenging issues
• Organization within the sector
• Managing trade offs at multiple scales
• Achieving equity