Livestock In Africa: Policy Making

Over 350 million Africans, or roughly one-third of the continent's population, rely directly on livestock for their wages and livelihoods. This sector accounts for 30-50% of agricultural GDP. According to FAO, around 10% of the human population in Sub-Saharan Africa is primarily dependent on livestock, while the remaining 58 percent is at least partially dependent on livestock.?As a result, agricultural growth has the potential to greatly contribute to poverty reduction and economic development. In consequence, the development of the livestock sector may help to agricultural growth and poverty alleviation.?

However, African policymakers have not fully capitalised on the livestock sector's poverty-reduction potential. Meat and milk production in nations such as Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Tanzania have been unable to keep up with rising demand for animal products, and in certain cases, per capita consumption has fallen. Meat and milk imports, in particular, have increased dramatically (FAO, 2005a). African policymakers should consequently rethink livestock policies in order to steer the sector's development in the right direction and reap the benefits of growing demand for animal feed. Although macroeconomic and agricultural sector policies have been studied in the socioeconomic literature, there is a scarcity of livestock subsector policy studies.?

Livestock policies are either largely overlooked or viewed as a combination of macroeconomic and agricultural sector governmental activities, with a few ad hoc technical interventions in the livestock sector (for example, animal vaccination). However, livestock development necessitates not just strong macroeconomic, institutional, and agricultural sector policies, but also public policies that address the unique characteristics of livestock production, which are connected with special market flaws and public benefits.

According to Dorward et al. (2004), given a good macroeconomic and institutional context, governments should create and implement livestock policies with three key goals for impoverished livestock-holders.:?

(1) Protecting assets/reducing vulnerability; . Asset protection and vulnerability policies are intended to provide impoverished livestock owners with appropriate and secure access to basic production inputs. This goal is subdivided into two subgoals: (a) ensuring access to land, water, and feed; and (b) offering risk management and coping strategies for natural disasters and price shocks. Smallholder farmers are unable to obtain secure access to these inputs due to uncertainty and market flaws, which is a crucial prerequisite for efficient resource allocation.

(2) Creating circumstances for growth; Policies aimed at creating growth circumstances try to move markets away from inefficient equilibria by allowing all economic agents, especially the poor, to fully capture advantages from increased demand. In fact, access to the "basics" would not be enough to lift livestock keepers out of poverty because livestock production is associated with investments with high indivisible components, which, when combined with imperfect intertemporal markets and limited access to output markets, forces the poor into portfolios with low returns.?

(3) Sustaining growth policies include all long-term public actions that promote and support the production of high-quality commodities, with three main contributory goals: ensuring food safety and quality of livestock products in accordance with national, regional, and international standards; promoting research activities in animal feeding and breeding to support the production of high-quality commodities; and ensuring environmental sustainability. These are largely public goods that are required for governments to be competitive in international markets while also preventing smallholders from being pushed out of home markets by foreign rivals.

Ref:

1. Aklilu, J. 2002. An audit of the livestock marketing status in Kenya, Ethiopia and Sudan. Nairobi, Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources.

2. FAO. 2005a. FAOSTAT database (available at https://faostat.fao.org/).

3. Dorward, A., Kydd, J., Morrison, J. & Urey, I. 2004. A policy agenda for pro-poor agricultural growth. World Development, 32(1): 73–89.

4. Ugo Pica-Ciamarra, Joachim Otte and Pius Chilonda