Where & how it happens

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Underlying causes

A growing imbalance between livestock and the environment has little to do with livestock per se, but with the changing expectations that people carry for both livestock and the environment.

Strong human population growth is fueling demand for livestock products while at the same time limiting the traditional resources for livestock production. Increase in per capita income and urbanization is raising the demand for livestock products and changing the geographical distribution of production, essentially breaking its balance with the land. This is further aggravated by social inequality allowing for different motivations for degradation, the greed of the rich and the desperation of the poor. Different levels of income, between and within countries, lead to different valuation of environmental resources and willingness to pay for their conservation.

Ignorance about ecosystems and their links with livestock leads to wrong decisions, particularly at the policy level. Lack of know-how in understanding the importance of ecosystem dynamics, such as those of the arid lands, has led to wrong interventions. The result of this incomplete understanding can only be corrected by a re-invigorated research, training and extension effort. Lack of information on the consumer side also plays a role in explaining why certain modes of production continue and more stable systems are placed at an economic disadvantage in the developed countries.

Institutional weaknesses result in ill-defined and un-enforced property rights, which deny access to essential resources in many extensive grazing systems. Poorly defined and enforced regulations fail to protect environmental resources, such as forest areas, surface waters or cropland, and poorly developed instruments to value and allocate costs and benefits of environmental goods pose practical difficulties to designing feedback mechanisms for environmental degradation.

Lack of infrastructure reduces the incentives to develop land-based livestock production and encourages the establishment of industrial systems and the concentration of large amounts of waste. Infrastructure development, on the other hand, has paved the way for reckless exploitation and destruction of valuable ecosystems in humid forest areas, with livestock being used as a means of claiming land titles. However, in all other areas, infrastructure development and marketing infrastructure are powerful instruments to mitigate environmental impact, clearly shown in the case of Machakos (Box 2.3).

Price policies and incentives affect productivity by influencing decisions about input use, technology adoption and investments in research and development. Policies have misguided livestock development through the pricing of inputs and products and have induced wasteful use of natural resources. Subsidized concentrate feed and free artificial insemination services are some prominent examples. Economy-wide and sector price policies often pursue social or economic objectives outside the sector and usually fail to address the environmental dimension altogether. The challenge is to design policies that direct technologies and resource use towards environmental objectives while meeting the social and economic targets.

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