Contribution of livestock to Sudanese economy

In the report “The contribution of livestock to the Sudanese economy” (2012, 56pp) commissioned by Inter-Governmental Authority on Development’s Livestock Policy Initiative (IGAD LPI), Roy Behnke & Hala Mohamed Osman assess the contribution of livestock to Sudan’s national economy. Conventional GDP accounting ignores some benefits that people derive from livestock in subsistence-oriented economies, when households directly provision themselves, when economic exchanges are not calculated in monetary terms or when these exchanges go unrecorded.

The report assigns monetary values to the non-marketed goods and services provided by livestock, and estimates the contribution of livestock to the wider national economy – as exports, as inputs into manufacturing industries, and as a component of household consumption. It reveals that livestock are the largest subsector of the Sudanese domestic economy and are a growing contributor to exports. Possibly 90% of all livestock production comes from smallholder and mobile pastoral systems.

Posted on 21 February 2021 in Pastoralist Livelihoods & Nutrition, Value of Pastoralism