# Industrial livestock systems & the environment

Previous section Environmental challenges

Conclusions

The key policy challenge is to charge the industrial system with the environmental costs it creates, i.e. to fully apply the “polluter-pays” principle. Besides the difficulty of accurately measuring the costs, such a policy would raise consumer prices for livestock products, particularly affecting urban consumers who are an important policy group in many countries. Furthermore, a high degree of self-sufficiency in livestock products through the development of a modern livestock industry is a primary policy objective in many developing countries and this would most likely not be achieved, if the principle is strictly applied. By incorporating all environmental costs, many countries would lose their comparative advantage.

On the other hand, stricter environmental standards and corresponding incentives to better balance land and animal distribution could be a powerful tool to promote rural and agricultural development: prices for animal products would increase, providing land-based production incentives to intensify; and development would be more decentralised, creating employment and marketing opportunities outside the large urban centres. Such a process will have to be monitored carefully in order not to lose the technological edge by removing economies of scale and functioning infrastructure and needs to be seen in a regional development context. As has been shown, the industrial system obtains its advantage in efficiency through a combination of factors:

- the use of capital intensive and advanced technologies and resultant economies of scale;
- the exploitation of market opportunities, both at input and product level; and
- a shift to pigs and poultry as better feed converters.

This has important implications for the future. The analysis shows that most expansion and productivity growth in the livestock sector will have to be sustained through the provision of concentrate feed, which normally would require additional land. The establishment of proper controls for the industrial system would then lead to intensifying livestock production through better feed conversions, and intensifying crop production aiming at higher yields. Both will reduce the land requirements for given volumes of final product and alleviate pressures on habitats and biodiversity.

Following this line of argument, measures to foster biodiversity and protection of natural resources would encourage improvements in feed conversion by removing obstacles and providing incentives for more efficient feed use. Large opportunities lie in astute pricing of concentrate feed and in providing access to related technologies. A practical difficulty lies in the cross-country nature of measures and effects when feed is imported, traded and international agreements will need to be found.

In conclusion, the industrial system poses most of the environmental problems and offers most of the possible solutions. The world's human population will increase from today's 5.5 billion to around 10 billion by the year 2030, i.e. almost double. With increasing incomes, urbanization and ageing populations, the world demand for livestock products is likely to triple, perhaps quadruple. Neither the grazing system nor the mixed farming system, as we know it, will be able to satisfy this increase in demand. The greatest part of the additional demand will have to be supplied by the industrial type of production. For this to happen, two requirements must be met:

- Industrial systems and high potential cropping must be integrated in an area-wide crop-livestock integration. Mixed farming needs to be practised in a wider land use concept, where crop and livestock production are specialized but maintain their bio-physical links. This would allow for environmentally beneficial interaction, while giving enterprises the opportunity to specialize and to fully exploit economies of scale. It entails a new type of regional planning that takes into account nutrient balances and input and product markets, infrastructure and services. Ultimately, such concepts will find application, not only at the regional or watershed level, but also at country and international scales. Livestock production will increasingly need to be relocated to the resource base and, with a combination of efficient infrastructure, appropriate incentives and enforced regulations, this will be the mainstream “animal agriculture” on the horizon.
- The striving for increasing efficiencies must continue in order to alleviate the resource requirements for livestock production. Already, there could be a massive reduction of resource requirements, if appropriate technologies were applied, and if policies were conducive to higher efficiencies. New technologies, which promise continuous advances in efficiency are on the horizon.

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