Milk production in the tropics has some continent-specific characteristics: in sub-Saharan Africa, three quarters of the milk is produced by cattle, with common property natural pastures providing most of the feed; by contrast in Asia, where cattle produce half of the milk, and most of the remainder comes from buffaloes, crop residues are the major feed source; whereas in Latin America, most milk comes from cows grazing privately-owned planted pastures. Over-riding these characteristics of production systems are the effects of the market; throughout the tropics, with the exception of India and parts of Latin America, market-oriented smallholder (and large scale) dairy farms are concentrated near or within-urban consumption centres. Less proximate production occurs only in those regions where there is an efficient market infrastructure. Therefore, the potential to increase dairy production depends largely on the unit costs of collection and transport. Those in urban periferies are doubly advantaged, because with better access to markets, the unit costs of the support services (input supply; animal health services; milk marketing) decrease as production increases (Walshe et al., 1991)
The advantages of integrating dairy production into crop systems, however, also offer potential. Compared to pastoralists and agro-pastoralists, crop-livestock farmers have more control over teed inputs, and are able to capture complementarities in teed resource use and nutrient cycling, which increase overall term efficiency and reduce vulnerability to market shifts. As these crop-livestock systems generally support high rural population densities, intensification is characterized by declining farm sizes, the upgrading to dairy breeds (whether cattle or buffalo) and an increasing reliance on purchased fodders and concentrates. As a result, lactation yields have increased up to five-fold (de Jong, 1996).
In these smallholder dairy production systems, especially those close to urban centres, informal raw milk marketing is often the general rule. Such markets are particularly susceptible to distance. As infrastructure develops, markets become more efficient and urban consumers develop stronger preferences for pasteurized milk, the advantages of proximity will be reduced and production may well move away from intensive pert-urban systems and shift to more extensive systems (as the New Zealand dairy industry illustrates on a global scale). Until these infra-structural improvements occur, and because of the advantages of mixed crop-livestock production, the industrialized model of dairy production and processing is likely to remain a minor contributor to dairying in the tropics.
In the meantime, dairy production will contribute significantly to the sustainable intensification of smallholder agriculture in the tropics, thereby enhancing the welfare of millions of poor households, whether through their participation in milk production, processing or marketing. These benefits of dairy production are especially important to the land-less poor, who, during the next 20 years, will increase significantly not only in Asia, but throughout the tropics.
