Promising interventions for livestock production and productivity improvement in smallholder systems in developing countries

In this report, we highlight the global importance of animal food sources, presenting measures of production, consumption and international trade of meat, milk and eggs, and emphasizing effects of these on developing countries. Our discussion points out the implications for smallholder producers, of a ‘livestock revolution’ that is evident in developing regions of the world. Next, we present candidate promising livestock systems interventions that hold much potential for improving livestock productivity and production in smallholder low input systems in developing countries. The technicalities, costs and timelines involved in the development of the interventions are presented in some detail, as well as the processes for transferring the new technologies to the end users. The mandate of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in the current Global Futures Project prioritizes modifying of the specification of the livestock sector in the IMPACT model. An ‘IMPACT‐livestock’ quantification
improvement exercise ‐ that includes characterization of region and production system‐specific global livestock production systems ‐ is underway, so that cost benefit analysis and technology adoption runs cannot yet be implemented for livestock commodities in the IMPACT model. As such, a single promising livestock technology has not been identified based on uniform investment and returns analysis. For the same reasons, we in lieu of presenting IMPACT‐generated results on the economic and social value of the promising technologies, discuss other results and present the progress made on the livestock systems characterization and other improvements of livestock sector quantification in IMPACT. The final section discusses important issues coming out of the current work.