Without Livestock, I Would Never Have Gone to School, with Professor Appolinaire Djikeng

This is one of the biggest conversations in food systems today is like, how do we go about this? So when we talk about livestock, What do people misunderstand about livestock and climate? Because this is often a nexus which comes up in global debates.

When we talk about livestock, people actually take the conversation where it doesn't belong.

So we should not see livestock system globally as homogeneous.

The livestock system or sector in advanced economy is very different from what we are talking about in low and middle income countries.

Secondly, the connection between livestock and climate and environment is there.

You know, there is pollution and things like that.

But where we sit in the global south, livestock is actually the top solution that we can bring for mitigating climate, you know, for reducing emission and things like that.

Why do I say this? The issue that we have is a productivity gap.

If we have dairy animals producing only one-tenth of the production level in advanced economies, just closing that gap can limit or reduce the number of animals that you'll be using.

We are also here where we have very diverse and adapted animal genetic resources.

It means some of the breeds that we have here are already adapted.

And our work is already showing that you can select for low-emitting animals.

So you have the double benefits.

One, you reduce the productivity, you close the productivity gap.

And secondly, you rely on animals that will be emitting much less.

And third, you have a real incentive for farmers to actually, you know, go for fewer animals and then get into production system that are not just connected to historical practices, but practices of today that can really create circular economy and things like that.

So really excited because our work here at ILRI with some of our partners is demonstrating that we can turn the livestock sector into solution.

One of the things that we don't talk about is really the segmentation of production systems in this part of the world.

We have broadly three production systems.

We have the small mixed crop livestock systems that, you know, we can make them really, really resilient, very efficient, and we can even manage emission there very effectively.

We have the commercial system where you can manage manure coming out of the system and things like that.

And we have the pastoral systems.

We have really not maximized on opportunities that the pastoral systems bring.

So I'm just flagging this so that we know where its solutions belong.

The pastoral system has enormous opportunity for carbon sequestration, maintenance of biodiversity, and also driving economic, social economic development in those production systems.