It is becoming increasingly evident that the future demand for food in sub-Saharan Africa will far exceed production levels. Already the sub-Saharan African market for animal products - meat and milk - is largely unsatisfied, and all forecasts indicate that the present trends towards increases in these markets will accelerate as human populations grow and urbanisation spreads.
Clearly, livestock production in sub-Saharan Africa needs to be increased substantially. But animals need to be fed too, and in many parts of the region, for many months of the year, there is simply not enough feed available. Thus animals are malnourished, often dramatically so. Hungry animals are unproductive animals. The problem, therefore, is how to ensure that livestock are adequately fed all year round.
The problem is not peculiar to sub-Saharan Africa. Seasonal feed shortages also exist in many other parts of the world: for instance, in the higher latitudes feed is scarce during the long, harsh winters. But considerable progress in improving animal nutrition has been made in such countries over the past 20 years. Some examples are the introduction of well-preserved winter silage in Finland; fodder feed in Denmark; supplemented high-dry-matter silage in The Netherlands; and preserved clover pastures in New Zealand.
Comparable progress is now urgently needed in sub-Saharan Africa. This will require excellent national agricultural programmes with well-trained and dedicated scientists and well-developed research facilities. But success is more likely to be achieved if the national programmes and scientists cooperate with each other in working towards common goats especially in the present climate of limited resources. Such cooperation is the principal aim of a multidisciplinary collaborative research network. Three such networks have already been operating in the area of animal feed resources in Africa: the African Research Network for Agricultural Byproducts (ARNAB); the Pasture Network for Eastern and Southern Africa (PANESA); and the West and Central Africa Forage Network (WECAFNET). However, these three networks had several aims and activities in common, and it was felt by many network participants that it would be more efficient to amalgamate them into one pan-African network. This has now been done, and one of the functions of this workshop was to inaugurate the African Feeds Research Network.
The other function of the meeting was to provide scientists with an opportunity to present and discuss their individual research results and activities. As many of the papers in this Proceedings show, there is now a very considerable range of options available to the feed resources scientist; a wide range of forage germplasm, multipurpose trees, fertiliser, irrigation, agricultural and industrial byproducts, feed processing and conservation techniques, etc. But there is still much work to be done to alleviate what is the greatest constraint on animal production in sub-Saharan Africa - nutritional insufficiency.
This workshop was a most important occasion. It represented the start of a new phase in animal production in sub-Saharan Africa and its effects will, I believe, be felt for many years to come.
Finally I wish to thank the organising committee for planning the programme, the Government of Botswana for facilitating the meeting and Dr Martin Kyomo of SACCAR [Southern African Centre for Cooperation in Agricultural Research], whose work, over a long period of time, has greatly facilitated ILCA's development in southern Africa. I wish also to recognise the commitment of the International Development Research Centre of Canada to work on feed resources for the past number of years.
John Walsh, Director General ILCA
