In South Asia, ILRI has offices in India and Pakistan with the Delhi office in India serving as the regional hub. For this region, ILRI’s activities are clustered in two main areas:
Sustainable intensification of crop-livestock systems
- Crop livestock system integration and productivity enhancement program with a focus on forages and crop residues, promotion of locally relevant feeds and forage system, dual-purpose crops, biofortification of feeds and forage, formulation of low-cost feed and promotion of flood and drought-resistant forages.
- Genomic studies to assist in framing breeding policies for the region/country/state and work with local partners for promotion/conservation of indigenous livestock breeds and genetic resources.
- Participatory action research for transformation of smallholder dairy, pig and goat value chains for increased productivity, economic efficiency and market access. Also exploring innovative options for institutional transformation to comply with changing production environment and market demand.
- Livestock value chain assessment and economic impact assessment of livestock diseases.
- Contributing to improvement of extension and livestock service delivery systems that is extremely poor in the region.
- Effort on gender mainstreaming and integration in livestock value chain. Adoption of participatory approaches for increasing peoples participation, especially of women, in decision-making process.
- Customized capacity strengthening of all the relevant actors involved in livestock system development including farmers, market actors, researchers, development professionals and policymakers.
- Increasing collaboration and communication with key local, national and international partners to strengthen coordination among different relevant departments/ organizations/institutions for collective action to address complex problems.
- Contributing to policy strategy framing and policy dialogue.
Mitigating risks in rapidly changing agricultural systems
- The main theme that emerges in the region relates to the range of risks that are seen to be associated with agricultural system changes, including industrialization of production and supply chains, increased specialization of production, and risk related to both contributing and adapting to climate change threats. The main elements of this theme will include:
- Studying the prioritizing zoonotic diseases including emerging infectious disease that are locally relevant and are posing challenge to human and animal health. In doing so, effort would be made to follow the multidisciplinary integrated One Health/Ecohealth approach. Also, efforts are made to address disease risks both in production systems and through product supply chains.
- Risk assessment in livestock product value chains, especially in informal value chains which are predominant in the region. This approach would include risk prioritization, risk communication and risk mitigation in the livestock value chain. Emphasis will be on multi-stakeholder engagement for improving food quality and food safety and influencing policy for regulating informal markets. Priorities will be both on biological risks and chemical hazards (including drug residues).
- Risk to human and animal health, productivity, ecosystem and environment from climate change, system intensification, over exploitation of common property resources and industrialization. These will include modelling of expected climate change and livestock hotspots, options for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and for livestock-crop systems adaptation to climate change and managing environmental impacts of large-scale livestock production.
- Carrying out epidemiological studies on transboundary animal diseases for assessing effects and economic losses.
