Poverty, as both a cause and an effect of food insecurity, continues to be a major challenge in Asia and the Pacific where the bulk of the poor in developing countries - approximately 75 percent are located. In this region, as elsewhere in the developing regions of the world, poverty is mainly a rural phenomenon: nearly three-fourths of the poor live in rural areas, with the large majority of them dependent on agriculture for employment and income. Agricultural growth thus offers a potentially enormous source of poverty reduction, particularly when the growth is broadly based.
The Asian economic crisis has heightened the critical role that the agricultural sector plays in the way to economic recovery. More than ever, the sector has been called upon to absorb unemployed people forced out of the industrial and services sectors (as well as new entrants to the labour force unable to find work in urban areas), produce more export crops for foreign exchange, increase domestic food supply to mitigate upward pressure in wages and prices, and generate domestic sources of investment.
At the same time, the crisis has the potential of obscuring lessons from recent decades of Asian experience vis-à-vis poverty alleviation and economic development. For example, it has become fashionable, at least in popular discussions, to belittle the importance of economic growth - especially one resembling the recent East Asian experience - in poverty alleviation. The crisis has also given an opportune window to supporters of status quo to question or even be more skeptical about the benefits of economic liberalisation and globalisation, i.e., the opening up of goods, labour, capital, and services markets to world trade. Indeed calls for reversal - or slowdown - of liberalisation efforts have intensified in developed and developing countries alike, especially as the same East Asian economies that openly welcomed globalisation were the first to tumble in the wake of the regional crisis. But as Amartya Sen aptly put it, it would be a great mistake to underestimate what East Asia did achieve.
Beyond the Asian crisis, enormous development problems and policy challenges await the developing countries of the region. Rising population, shrinking agricultural land, increasing demands on limited water resources from the expanding urban and industrial sector, widespread land degradation, and inadequacy of governance infrastructure appear to be more pressing now than ever before, especially as they mount efforts to recover lost grounds arising from the crisis and deepen their integration with the world economy. As recent experience suggests, these issues cannot be divorced from policy concerns impinging on poverty and food security.
This report on livestock is part of a series of supporting documents accompanying the main volume, Poverty Alleviation and Food Security in Asia: Lessons and Challenges which was published earlier and which assessed recent experiences, policies, and select issues on poverty alleviation in Asian developing countries.
The present report aims to inform interested readers particularly high-level policy makers that livestock indeed contributes significantly towards alleviating poverty and improving food security. Its contributory roles can be direct as in providing a life-line for a large proportion of the 95 percent of the world's rural population, who live in the developing world and cultivate 64 percent of the world's arable land. People in these areas have access to less than 20 percent of the world's machinery and 40 percent of the world's chemical fertiliser. It is the draught power, and nutrient recycling inputs of the farm animals that compensate for the lack of access to these modern inputs, and help to maintain the viability and environmental sustainability of farms. Furthermore, livestock are intricately interwoven with the social fabric of many societies. In many situations, livestock constitute the main, if not the only, capital reserve of farming households, serving as a strategic reserve that reduces risk to the farmer and adds stability to the overall farming system.
Contributions from the livestock sub-sector to the economy have been largely underestimated in the past although the sub-sector is providing for a wide range of human needs. The challenge now is to increase the productivity of livestock and improve the quality of livestock products and provide access to markets to assist in maintaining food security and relieving poverty while maintaining the physical environment and protecting human health from zoonotic diseases.
PREM NATH
Assistant Director-General and
Regional Representative for
Asia and the
Pacific
This report was prepared by Gavin Ramsay and Leith Andrews under the technical guidance of D. Hoffmann, Senior Animal Production and Health Officer, FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (FAO/RAP). The work was a part of the upstream activity led by D. B. Antiporta, Chief, and S. L. Kang, Policy Officer, Policy Assistance Branch (RAP) and carried out under UNDP/FAO RAS/95/01T, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in Asia and the Pacific: Issues and Challenges.
Companion volumes of this report have also been produced. The main volume, Poverty Alleviation and Food Security in Asia: Lessons and Challenges, was prepared with the assistance of A. M. Balisacan. In other agriculture sub-sectors, concerned FAO/RAP officers provided respective technical guidance as follows: F.J. Dent, Senior Soil Management and Fertilizer Use Officer, for Land Resources by M.G. Douglas; M.K. Papademetriou, Senior Plant Production and Protection Officer, for Crop Production by R.B. Singh and Edward M. Herath; P. C. Choudhury, Senior Aquaculture Officer, for Sustainable Contribution of Fisheries by M. Hatta, Yong-Ja Cho, Song Zhiwen, R. Gillet and K. Sivasubramaniam; and P. Durst, Senior Forestry Officer, for Enhancing Forestry and Agroforestry Contributions by Chun K. Lai and Napoleon T. Vergara. Their technical contributions are greatly appreciated.