Year: 2014
Type: editorial
Abstract: Africa's human population is growing at an estimated rate of approximately 2% per year and is predicted to reach 1.9 billion in 2050. At the same time, urbanization is advancing in Africa with growth rates of 3.5% in the last two decades. In 2010, the share of the African urban population was approximately 36% and is projected to increase to 50% and 60% by 2030 and 2050, respectively. Urbanization goes hand in hand with a shift in diet towards more meat and dairy products. Both factors, population growth and urbanization, lead to a higher consumption of meat with growth rates over 2.7% per year, and milk and dairy products at 3.5–4.0% per year. To satisfy this, growing demand is considered a big opportunity for the large number of smallholder farmers in Africa to escape poverty and to participate in a growing market. At the same time, livestock production systems are confronted with several challenges. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report 2014 predicts an increase in temperature and a simultaneous decrease in precipitation for many African regions, which will increase vulnerability of livestock-keeping communities. Possible consequences are a higher prevalence of diseases and parasites and more and longer droughts. Therefore, disease and parasite tolerance need to be included in future breeding programmes. Heat stress and tolerance of salty water might be other traits to be considered. Other stressors for livestock production are rangeland degradation, increased variability in access to water, fragmentation of grazing areas, changes in land tenure from communal towards private ownership and hence restricted mobility, in-migration of non-pastoralists into grazing areas, lack of opportunities to diversify livelihoods, conflict and political crisis, weak social safety nets, and insecure access to land, markets, and other resources. One quarter of the world's estimated 752 million poor livestock keepers live in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA), where more than 85% of them live in extreme poverty. However, in much of the SSA, areas well suited to livestock production are restricted to the semi-arid zones by the presence of tsetse fly and trypanosomiasis in more humid areas. Therefore, the research agenda set for animal scientists is challenging and requires enormous investments in the area. But, recent data show that in most African countries, investment levels are well below the levels required to sustain agricultural research and development (R&D) needs. In 2011, SSA as a whole invested 0.51% of AgGDP on average (AgGDP = total public agricultural R&D spending as a percentage of agricultural output), which is below the set target of 1%. Consensus exists that improved livestock production can significantly change the livelihoods of many families, but the commitment by governments seems to be still weak. Given the diverse production systems in Africa, there is no 'blueprint' set of interventions. This is reflected in one of the papers of this issue (Marshall, 2014). The author suggests different key research areas to be addressed. One of these is to identify production systems where breed-change interventions for intensification might be feasible. For a long time, cross-breeding with often exotic breeds from temperate climates has been considered a taboo by scientists and the international community based on worries about loss of genetic diversity. Despite the scientific criticism of indiscriminate cross-breeding, many farmers in favourable environments and with market opportunities at hand go for this option. It has been shown that farmers are aware of higher requirements of crossbred animals, but they are willing to invest in animal nutrition and animal health and accept higher work load as the higher input pays off. Research looking into sustainable cross-breeding strategies is required. Best composites, both in terms of breeds involved and blood levels of the constituent breeds, need to be determined for many regions of the continent. While genomic data are extremely useful in determining levels of admixture at a comparatively low price, phenotyping of many animals for many traits under farmer conditions is a key task. Establishment of functional breeding programmes under smallholder conditions remains a challenge. Past genetic improvement efforts mostly failed, among other things, due to these reasons: (i) dependence on breed replacement and/or indiscriminate cross-breeding of native with exotic breeds with no plan on how to maintain suitable exotic blood levels and no selection on the dam line; (ii) incompatibility of introduced genotypes with producers' breeding objectives, management practices and environmental conditions; (iii) lack of comprehensive approach to design simple but effective breeding strategies instead of adopting complex breeding programmes that require many logistics and technologies; and (iv) insufficient or no systematic breed evaluation studies ensuring fair comparison of the relative merit of indigenous and exotic breeds under typical environment considering the role of G × E interaction. Moreover, smallholder production systems are characterized by small animal numbers per household, single-sire herds/flocks, lack of systematic animal identification, absence of performance and pedigree recording, illiteracy, poor infrastructure and ill-functioning institutions. The mobility of pastoral flocks poses additional difficulties in recording and selection. Two papers of this issue (Gizaw et al.) present possible solutions by implementing village-based (also called community-based) breeding programmes. This approach has been tested with sheep and goats in several regions of Ethiopia, and there are indications that it can successfully work. Currently, there are initiatives to expand village breeding programmes to wider areas of the country and to other regions of Africa. The African Goat Improvement Network, a 'Feed the Future' initiative, is about to explore the potential utility of suing low-cost genomic marker panels in the context of village breeding programmes. It is also clear that genetic improvement, whatever strategy is chosen, has to be developed together with other interventions at farm level. This system perspective means that research has to be performed in interdisciplinary teams. Researchers also have to engage more in a dialogue with farmers and other stakeholders to be able to address the needs of the livestock sector.
DOI: 10.1111/jbg.12116
Authors: M. Wurzinger, T. Mirkena, J. Sölkner
Institutions: BOKU University, Hawassa University
Language: English
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1967243752