AGA welcome the opportunity to provide comments to the HLPE report’s scope on “Sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition, including the role of livestock”. The livestock sector has been often poorly understood and absent from the global policy debate, and this report could provide a good opportunity to highlight the discussion about the role of livestock as a critical component of sustainable agricultural development. However previous reports have also addressed similar concerns, therefore it will be important that this report carefully identify the key aspects that will add value to the discussion.
I. General Comments:
a. Build on forthcoming revisions of the sustainability concept. The report should address the sustainability concept taking into account, the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda, and the coming SOFA 2016 on “Enhancing the sustainability of food and agriculture”.
b. Not to over-emphasize the relationship between sustainable development and food markets projections. Although the expected increase in the demand for food will be a main driver, the factors that are threatening the sustainability of the system go beyond how food markets will behave in the future, including governance issues, inequality, the presence of market and policy distortions, the gender perspective of poverty, and unemployment among others. Contextualizing the sustainable development discussion solely on future trends might jeopardize the identification of key factors threatening the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of the agricultural sector for food security and nutrition.
c. Some important general features related to livestock to be consider. The economic importance of livestock (contributing a growing share of agricultural GDP, in developed countries more than half) and economic opportunities; The social dimension (incidence of poverty and importance for livelihoods) but also diets; The resource and climate dimension (resource requirements, climate gas emissions and exposure to climate change, food-feed competition); The health dimension (contribution to healthy diets, but also food safety and zoonoses), The narrative developed by the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock (under livestockdialogue.org) could serve as an important reference.
d. Provide an integrated sectorial perspective. Although the report will particularly focuses on livestock it should link the role of fisheries/aquaculture and forestry.
II. Specific Comments
A. Context: drivers and challenges
A1a. Address food projections and drivers from the demand and supply side. Section A1 should not only deal with demand drivers but also include supply drivers such as growing resource scarcity (land, water, energy, nutrients) and climate change, and drivers outside the agricultural sector (e.g. competition for resources), paying particular attention to the demand and supply of animal feeds.
A1b. Special attention should be given to the analysis of livestock projections. Previous projections have been criticized for not sufficiently address the complexity of the livestock sector. This report should look not only livestock commodities, but pay particular attention to different types of productions systems, discussing their response capacity of the sub-sector by production system, the technological boundaries of intensification, the role of grasslands and the potential changes in land use, what regions and type of producers are likely to benefit or lose.
A2. Specific section that looks at livestock’s markets concentration trends. The report should include another item under A2 to raise the attention of the increasing concentration in livestock markets, assessing the potential consequences and implications for smallholders and pastoralists and their effects on equality.
A2b. Trade-offs and externalities. The trade off and internalization of environmental and other externalities and their impacts on prices and markets should be addressed for different production systems.
B. Achieving sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition.
B2. Describe sustainability as continuous improvement. Contrary as what the terms “achieving sustainable development” and “transition to sustainable systems” would suggest, this session should describe sustainability as a continuous improvement and not as an end point.
B2a. Although the title mentions nutrition, the nutrition aspects are not evident. In the preparation for the CGRFA special event on genetic diversity and food security it appeared that modern crop varieties have less protein and nutrients than traditional ones; same seems to be the case in aquaculture. The report could look at nutrition composition of animal sources of food from different production systems and breeds.
B.5 Employ the principles developed within the SFA framework. This section could usefully employ the “five principles” developed within the SFA, namely improve efficiency, protect resources, improve livelihoods and social well-being, enhance resilience, and improve governance.
B.5e Specific section that looks at feeds and feeding practices. Generally the production of feed for livestock production should be addressed in more depth than the current outline may suggest.
B.6 Conclusions and recommendations for policies and actions. This section could make use of the “four action areas” (evidence, dialogue, tools, practice change) developed by SFA
III. List of Experts
Some possible experts are: Mario Herero, CSIRO Thornton, ILRI/CCAFS, Samuel Jutzi, SWI, Brian Perry, Elizabeth Parker, Alberto Valdes, Carlos Pomareda, Carlos Seré, Neil Fraser, Frik Schneider .
Animal Production and Health DivisionBerhe G. Tekola