This activity focuses on livestock in pastoral areas as a national economic resource, disconnected from pastoral systems.

It consists of:

• selecting indigenous livestock breeds based on productivity traits;
• introducing crossbreeding aimed at increasing productivity;

• preserve ‘ex situ’ (i.e. outside the pastoral systems that produce them, usually in dedicated facilities) the genes of the best-adapted indigenous breeds (‘the most productive animals on an ecological basis’).

COMMENTARY

1. Not protecting indigenous livestock breeds. In the same breath, the strategy aims at ‘protecting indigenous livestock species and cross-breeding … to ensure increases in productivity’. Presumably the statement refers to indigenous breeds, not species. The apparent contradiction recommending both protecting indigenous breeds and cross-breeding is not acknowledged and there is no explanation of how the latter can be done while guaranteeing the former.
2. Not on the basis of pastoral systems. The description of this activity does not actually refer explicitly to pastoral breeds. There is no reference to in situ conservation of local breeds, which would be ‘on the basis of pastoral systems’. Nor is there mention of pastoral mobility, the management strategy most crucial to both creating and maintaining pastoral breeds. On the other hand, there is a clear focus on selection and crossbreeding for higher productivity, which rather than being based on pastoralism remains squarely within the traditional approach to crossbreeding in pastoral development. For example, in pastoral systems ‘higher productivity’ is not an absolute value but rather relates to seasonality and other environmental conditions. The animals that are more productive during the rainy season are often the least productive during the dry season and the first to die during a drought. Pastoralists value them, but also make sure to have in their herds a functional proportion of other animals, also the result of selection, not because they are productive during the rainy season but because they are the best producers during the dry season and even capable of ensuring continuity in production in case of drought.[1]
3. Overlooking key functional traits in pastoral livestock. Higher productivity in pastoral systems is not only a consequence of how an animal is (its genetic traits), but also of how an animal behaves in relation to its environment (including the ecosystem, the other animals in a herd, and the herders themselves). Complex learned behaviors, from feeding selectively to managing heat stress and difficult terrain, and ‘social’ behaviors such as social organization within the herd (important in stress management) or the mechanisms for the transmission of knowledge from animal to animal and across generations – to mention just a few examples – are key to the performance of a herd.[2]
4. Overlooking the crucial role of the environment in the productivity of pastoral systems. The only reference to the environment in the description of this activity is in the intention ‘to identify the most productive animals on an ecological basis’. But this seems to be only in order to ‘preserve and protect their genes in centers’ rather than in relation to the functioning of the pastoral system itself.
5. Pastoral breeds as national property rights? Also of concern is the idea that indigenous breeds of livestock are to be identified in order to ‘acquire national property rights’. Pastoral breeds are the result of the work of the communities of breeders who select them and continuously adapt them within pastoral systems. Why therefore plan to acquire national property rights rather than securing property rights to the pastoral groups who have developed and are developing the breeds? This approach to treating pastoral resources as natural resources recalls the perspective from which, at different times in the history of modern Ethiopia, all pastoral rangelands became ‘State Domain’ with the Revised Constitution of 1955.

[1] UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Pastoralism: Making Variability Work (Rome: FAO, in print); S. Krätli and N. Schareika, ‘Living off Uncertainty: The Intelligent Animal Production of Dryland Pastoralists’, European Journal of Development Research 22, 5 (2010): 605–622; B.A. Kaufmann, Cybernetic Analysis of Socio-Biological Systems: The Case of Livestock Management in Resource-Poor Environments (Weikersheim, Germany: Margraf Publishers, 2007).

[2] For a brief entry point into this issue, see S. Krätli and F. Provenza, ‘Crossbreeding or Not Crossbreeding? That Is Not the Question’(contribution to the Domestic Animal Diversity forum of FAO DAD-Net, January 12, 2021).

c. Expansion of animal feed production and range development (p.35) »