MEDIA RELEASE
13 August 2003

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ADDITIONAL STORIES FROM THE INTERNATIONAL LIVESTOCK RESEARCH INSTITUTE

• Need for African Barnyard Biodiversity
  • Help for Australia's Sheep Industry from Africa?
  • Cattle as Well as People Evolved in Africa
• Climate Change Threatens Tropical Maize Production
• Saving the East African Savannas
• The 'Livestock Revolution' in Asia

Need for African Barnyard Biodiversity

Thirty per cent of the world's domesticated animals are threatened with extinction. As modernisation loads many of these into the dustbin of history, genetic engineers are salvaging priceless relics.

ILRI research shows that Neolithic people in Africa as well as Asia domesticated cattle. African cattle carry unique genes that enable them to survive poor food, little water and tropical diseases. Research has also disclosed that one of Africa's many forgotten flocks, the Red Maasai 'hair' sheep, has unrivalled resistance to the billion-dollar problem of intestinal worms. And new ILRI research indicates that a wild salt-water-drinking camel discovered in 2001 in the Gobi Desert is a new species.

The hidden genetic value locked up in these humpless cattle, hairless sheep and salt-water-drinking with an estimated 4,000 other often obscure animal breeds round the world, is of growing importance as modern methods of fighting animal diseases falter. Saving these breeds will help feed as well as clothe the world.

Help for Australia's Sheep Industry from Africa?

One of the most damaging animal health issues facing the sheep industry in Australia and other First World countries is high and increasing worm resistance to anthelmintic drugs.

Worms on 80 to 90 per cent of Australian farms are now said to be resistant to drenches, and it's estimated that it costs the industry more than $220 million a year in Australia.

While an economic problem in countries like Australia, livestock losses to worms in developing countries is a serious food-supply and poverty issue. <29 December, 2004olution to this problem. A little known sheep breed kept by Maasai pastoralists in East Africa's Great Rift Valley, the red Maasai is genetically resistant to intestinal worm parasites. This resistance makes the distinctive Red Maasai breed, which produces red hair rather than wool, remarkably well adapted to a region where the worm challenge is high and access to chemical treatments to control worm infections scarce.

Geneticists working at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in Nairobi, Kenya, became aware of the resistance of the Red Maasai from a series of research studies carried out in Kenya since the 1970s. They believe a handful of genes could be controlling worm resistance in this breed and they now have new research tools of molecular biology to help them identify the genes.

Finding the genes will take many years of research', says Leyden Baker, a New Zealander who leads ILRI's sheep project. But once found, they could be transferred to produce worm-resistant woolly sheep. Or the genetic information may be used to develop vaccines or new drugs against the parasites.

Whatever ILRI discovers through research will benefit farmers and communities subsisting on scarce resources. Carlos Seré, director general of ILRI, explains that ILRI is bound by international law and agreements as well as humanitarian goals. 'All the genetic resources we work on', he says, 'are held in trust for farmers of the developing world.'

ILRI's researchers believe that combining the resistance genes of livestock from developing countries with the production genes of developed-country livestock could in future provide optimal animals for both tropical and temperate environments.

Cattle as Well as People Evolved in Africa

Africa is the cradle of humankind. Scientists have now demonstrated it is also a birthplace of cattle.

As reported in a paper published in 2002 in Science, today's indigenous African cattle were domesticated from local strains of the wild ox, the auroch, some 7,000 to 9,000 years ago-within Africa and long before the introduction on the continent of cattle breeds domesticated in Asia and the Near East.

Scientists at the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), a Futu29 December, 2004ntries, confirmed through DNA analyses that humpless, or taurine, cattle evolved with humans and Africa's big mammals and other indigenous wildlife.

Cattle are thus an integral part of the African landscape, possessing longstanding adaptation to African savannas rather than an 'alien species', as many wildlife conservationists have believed.

'This means that Africa's indigenous cattle are truly African, carrying unique genes. They also possess a genetic diversity much larger than that of cattle from Europe and western Asia', says Olivier Hanotte, a Belgian scientist at ILRI and one of the paper's authors.

Future food production in Africa and elsewhere in the tropics will rely on these African cattle. They are able to resist tropical diseases that kill imported cattle and to survive on poor food and little water. 'But some of these African breeds are disappearing', says Ed Rege, a Kenyan geneticist at ILRI and another author of the paper.

ILRI is providing this information to national agricultural research systems on the continent, which will use it to conserve and make better use of the genetic wealth of their indigenous cattle.

Others are using the information to help unravel the pattern of human evolution and migration in Africa.

'Our discovery shows that cattle are an obvious starting place for understanding human history', says Hanotte.

Archaeologists using these molecular data can now propose a coherent story of African pastoralism, and retrieve a record of human history stretching back to the Neolithic Age.

Climate Change Threatens Tropical Maize Production

Climate change poses a grave threat to the livelihoods and food security of poor farmers of the tropics. Scientists at the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Colombia-based International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) have recently mapped the impacts of climate change in Africa and Latin America on maize yields five decades from now.

This assessment, carried out at high resolution to disclose impacts at the household level, indicates profound changes for tens of millions of smallholder crop-and-livestock farmers who rely on rainfed maize production to feed their families and livestock.

In some regions, such as eastern Brazil, maize yields are predicted to decrease moderately, up to 25%, if there are no changes in current production practices. In this case, scientists think that farmers will be able to maintain if not increase their current production levels by applying different maize breeding and agronomy practices.

Elsewhere, such as in the Ethiopian highlands around Addis Ababa, smallholder rainfed maize production may benefit from climate change, with yields in some areas as much as doubling.

In other regions, maize yields may decline drastically, almost to zero. Such precipitous declines, which could displace human populations altogether, can be addressed only by making major changes to the current agricultural system.

Overall, maize yields in three-quarters of the countries of Africa and Central and South America, particularly in dry tropical environments, will decrease to 2055 as a result of a warming climate and changing rainfall patterns and levels. This future reduction is about 10% of the total maize production on these continents in 2000. Although serious, we can expect this decrease to be compensated for by plant breeding and farmer adoption of technological interventions in the intervening period.

However, this aggregate figure of 10% hides enormous variability. In many areas, the decrease in maize yields will be much greater and rural life will be considerably disrupted. Where subsistence agriculture is the norm-where, for example, maize stovers that remain after harvesting keep farm animals, and thus people, fed during the dry season-lives as well as livelihoods will be at stake.

ILRI systems analyst Philip Thornton says the big-picture projections hide the fact that the impacts of climate change on maize production could be disastrous for some poor households on the local level.

Ecologist Robin Reid from ILRI agrees. 'In parts of southern Africa, particularly in much of Zambia, farmers are so dependent on maize for survival that this projected drop in production would signify more than an 80 percent reduction of the calories now consumed in poor households', she says.

Alternative production systems need to be found for farmers in these most-affected areas, while maize production is shifted to wetter areas. Research on adaptive and ameliorative options for the farmers in these regions needs to begin immediately, as a matter of urgency.

Saving the East African Savannas

Notwithstanding 20 years of committed international wildlife conservation work and lobbying, more than half of the big mammals of the Masai Mara region in Kenya have disappeared in the last 20 years. Most will go in the next 20 years if something new isn't done.

Jeopardising work to conserve the Mara's priceless wildlife populations is neglect of the pastoral peoples living on lands adjacent to the Reserve.

A recent integrated stock-taking of the people, livestock and wildlife of the Mara region-unprecedented in scale and resolution-is helping to change this. The results are key to allowing pastoralism to continue to enhance landscapes for wildlife in Africa. The results are those of the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and a host of partners.

The great savannalands of eastern Africa-cradle of humankind, home to traditional nomadic pastoralists and their livestock, and last refuge of some of the most spectacular wildlife populations on earth-are in trouble.

Only 25% of the wildlife habitat in the Mara part of the ecosystem is protected (in the Mara Reserve); the rest lies within pastoral and agricultural areas north of the reserve. These lands outside the reserve are under more pressure than the rest of the ecosystem, with recent rapid human population growth, changing land use, expansion of wheat farming and expansion of tourism.

Since the mid-1970s, these pressures have caused a deepening of poverty in pastoral communities and a 70% decline in wildlife both inside and outside the Mara Reserve.

It is increasingly difficult for the Mara Maasai to make ends meet through pastoralism. Pastoralists in the Mara today meet only 25-35% of their household requirements from livestock. This means that pastoralists today are constantly searching for other options to support their families. Some of the options are compatible with wildlife (tourism) and others are not (leasing land for wheat farming, high density settlement).

It is crucially important that we make protected wildlife areas more effective and improve incentives for pastoral communities to maintain lifestyles compatible with wildlife by increasing returns from wildlife to pastoral people.

Contrary to traditional views, pastoral communities can enhance biodiversity, and have done so for millennia. People and livestock attract wildlife by creating short grazing lawns around Maasai settlements, where forage nutrients are high and predators are visible to grazers.

These findings support other evidence that integrated wildlife livestock-wildlife systems are more productive than either livestock or wildlife systems alone. Conservation policy that excludes low to moderate levels of traditional pastoral use may thus inadvertently impoverish the very lands it was instituted to protect.

Any positive effects of pastoralism on wildlife abundance, however, break down when the density of settlements passes a certain point. This threshold has been reached around the villages in the group ranches of the Mara. Establishment of more or a different distribution of bomas may have drastic consequences for the region's wildlife.

Results from the Mara Count 2002 are clarifying and accelerating efforts to protect the remaining wildlife populations of this rich ecosystem while alleviating poverty among local communities.

The 'Livestock Revolution' in Asia

In Asia, poverty is a fact of life for over 650 million people despite spectacular economic growth in several countries. The poor are found largely in rural areas and most keep livestock. In South East Asia, 60 million poor farmers keep livestock; in South Asia, 200 million poor keep livestock.

Livestock help provide food security because they play several vital roles in Asian farming systems. In addition, eating even a small amount of animal foods corrects micronutrient deficiencies of the poor, thus protecting their health and saving their lives.

Demand for milk and meat is expected to double from 2000 to 2020 in the developing countries of the Asia-Pacific region. The stakes in this global 'Livestock Revolution' for the poor are enormous. The Livestock Revolution could help relieve poverty and hunger. It could provide an engine for sustainable intensification of small-scale farming and marketing. It could also beget pollution, degradation and disease in Asia and other tropical regions as it stretches production in non-industrialised countries beyond capacities.

The Livestock Revolution offers Australia great opportunities. Strategic, research-based interventions in the livestock sector could enable many Asian countries to reduce their poverty significantly. Australia would benefit from better neighbouring trade partners demanding more livestock and other products. And more developed neighbours would export fewer disease, environmental and social problems to Australia and elsewhere.

The rising global demand for livestock products is first described in Livestock to 2020: The Next Food Revolution. This study was conducted jointly in 1999 by the International Food Policy Research Institute, a CGIAR think-tank in Washington, D.C.; the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; and ILRI.

The results of the study are the products of an IFPRI model built to predict world food trends. Founded on conservative assumptions, the model's predictions are as robust as they are startling.

From 1970 to 1995, poor countries increased their consumption of milk and meat by 175 million metric tons. That is more than twice the increase in developed countries and over half as large as the increased consumption of cereals made possible by the Green Revolution. The market value of the increase in milk and meat production in this period totalled US$153 billion-more than twice the value of the increased consumption of wheat, rice and maize.

Consumption of animal foods will grow even faster in future. The IFPRI model predicts meat production to grow four times as fast in developing countries as in developed. In response, developing-country demands for cereals to feed their livestock will double and cereal shipments from North to South will expand to fulfill the new demands. By 2020, developing countries will produce 63 percent of the world's meat and 50 percent of the world's milk.

The IFPRI model shows that the rapidly expanding demand for animal foods can be met by a series of price-driven adjustments. The model also shows we can grow enough grain to feed livestock without taking food from the mouths of people. The model predicts world cereal prices to remain stable or, at worst, to rise no more than 20 percent-still below historical highs.

The Livestock Revolution is making increased livestock production inevitable and arguments against it academic. Unlike the supply-led Green Revolution that precedes it, this revolution is being driven not by new technology but by rising demand.

'That means it won't go away', says Chris Delgado, senior research fellow at IFPRI and co-author of the study.

Farm income could rise dramatically with the rising demand for livestock products, but whether that gain will be shared by those who need it most-smallholders and landless agricultural workers-is not clear. Handled correctly, this rising demand could improve the well-being of millions of poor. Handled incorrectly, or not handled at all, it could hurt those millions.

The good news is the benefits of livestock-keeping for the poor and the environment can grow with the market. The livestock revolution is replete with public goods issues. It offers international development and 'green' commercial organisations a way to unite concerns for the poor and the environment.

What will largely determine whether the Livestock Revolution is more blessing or curse for the poor and rich alike is publicly funded research. The knowledge, policies and technologies produced by research are helping to create a dynamic livestock sector able simultaneously to increase food, economic and environmental security in today's poorest communities.

The ATSE Crawford Fund wishes to thank its sponsors and supporters for this event including: AFFA, AusAID, Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, ACIAR, CRC for Innovative Dairy Products, CSIRO Livestock Industries, Dairy Australia, GRDC, IFPRI, ILRI, Meat and Livestock Australia, and University of Sydney Orange

The ATSE Crawford Fund
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