There are already over 1 billion (about 15% of the human population) people hungry and living in poverty, and 75% of them as well as other less poor but vulnerable people live in rural areas and depend on farming for their livelihoods, with the majority relying on small scale crop-livestock systems. Food (primary and secondary), feed, fibre and fuel needs must be met from agriculture of a still expanding population that is expected to grow from the current 6.7 billion to some 9.1 billion by 2050 while available land for expansion of agriculture will become economically and environmentally unattractive. To meet the food needs of the population in 2050, production will have to expand by 70% compared to what it was in 2005. It is expected that 90% of the expansion will be through production intensification (i.e., increase in output per unit area), and 10% will be from area expansion mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. At the same time the environmental footprint of crop as well as of livestock production has to be reduced to improve sustainability. This poses both a development challenge as well as opportunities for livestock producers in crop-livestock systems to contribute to both overall food security and alleviation of their poverty as well as of non-agricultural rural population due to increasing employment opportunities in the input supply and output value chains.

An electronic consultation on crop-livestock was held by in 2010, co-organized by FAO, Embrapa, IFAD and IICA. The consultation  was focused on four is complementary and inter-connected topics across a range of types (on-farm or area-wide) and scales of crop-livestock integration in different agro-ecologies in the developing regions: 

1. Promising integrated crop-livestock systems and innovations that merit mainstreaming and scaling, and the tactics for implementation;
2. Input and output market linkage development for promising crop-livestock systems and associated input and output supply chain processes and public-private service providers for different production systems and diverse markets;
3. Political will, and policy and institutional support for the adoption and enabling the spread of innovations and practices associated with promising crop-livestock systems for food and nutritional security; and
4. Research needed to generate knowledge and innovative practices to underpin farmer adoption and scaling of promising crop-livestock systems for sustainable production intensification.

Click here for the consultation documents.