Pork handling at Wambizzi Pig Cooperative Society, Uganda’s only centralized pig abattoir (photo credit: ILRI/Danilo Pezo).

Liam Taylor, a reporter for The Economist, recently interviewed Uganda-based food safety experts at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and at Uganda’s premiere university, Makerere, in development of an article about whether wet markets will be banned in the wake of COVID-19. . . Excerpts from the published article follow.

‘. . . Bustling markets selling live wild animals, often piled one atop the other . . . give virologists the heebie-jeebies. Poor hygiene, animals kept in stressful conditions (which may affect their immune systems, making them more susceptible to disease) and traders and customers packed cheek-by-jowl can easily result in a “spillover” event, when a virus jumps from an animal into a human, causing a new disease, says Olivier Restif, a virologist at the University of Cambridge.

‘. . . [M]any virologists think SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, originated in bats and then may have infected an intermediate species, possibly a pangolin, a scaly anteater prized for its meat and medicinal properties. What is undeniable is that Wuhan, in which live pangolins, civets and other wild species were sold, is exactly the sort of place where a new zoonotic disease might originate. . . .

‘Wild animals are particularly dangerous because humans have not grown accustomed to—or conquered—their bugs, as they have with many domesticated species. Because viruses and the like are nearly always passed on via the faeces or urine of the infected creature, markets with scant hygiene—for example where animals are poorly butchered and the bladder is contaminated—pose the greatest risk.

Yet many virologists, including Mr Restif, do not want to see a blanket ban on wet markets.

Rather, they prefer a more nuanced approach and more narrow regulation to control their most dangerous aspects.

To understand why, it helps to unpick what wet markets are, and their role in the feeding of billions of people.

‘The term “wet markets” . . . is, at its most basic, any grouping of vendors selling fresh goods. Markets are often watery because they are sluiced down, or because of the melting of the ice used to stop food from spoiling. . . . Wet markets come in many forms. They encompass both Tomohon and, for example, Chun Yeung Street in Hong Kong, which must adhere to stringent health guidelines and where the only live goods available are aquatic (fish are not considered a viable vector of such nasty diseases as COVID-19, in part because they lack respiratory systems comparable to those of humans, which many viruses attack).

‘Between those extremes lies somewhere such as Kalerwe market in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. At first sight, it presents many of the risks associated with wildlife markets. Live chickens can spend three weeks in cramped cages before being sold, says Clovice Kankya, a biosecurity expert at Makerere University. . . .

‘But the risks from the market can be overstated. With the exception of chickens, which are sold live, most animals in Kampala’s market have been slaughtered in abattoirs, rather than freshly killed in the market. Cases of animal-to-human disease transmission in Uganda have happened “mainly in the village”, where animals are slaughtered in homes without any inspections . . . .

‘Closing down wet markets would have wider implications. A study of 350 such markets in Nanjing, an urban area of 8m people in eastern China, found that they accounted for 80% of the city’s vegetable sales. Across the whole country it has been estimated that such places handle 73% of all the fresh vegetables and meat that is bought. In contrast, the study found that supermarkets tended to be where Nanjing’s households went to buy processed food.

Were markets closed and locals pushed into supermarkets, . . . their health would inevitably suffer, as they would be more likely to pick processed meals over fresh produce. . . .

Wet markets in China owe their popularity to their several virtues. Compared with supermarkets, they are more likely to be within walking distance of people’s homes. They also tend to be cheaper . . . [and] prices also tend to be negotiable . . .

All of which means that rather than pushing for the wholesale banning of wet markets, many scientists are calling for a more subtle approach.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is working on a proposal to recommend suspending the sale of live wild mammals in marketplaces for food, but not live farmed creatures such as poultry and fish, which pose a lower risk and where controls can be introduced. . . .

Plenty of people will continue to call for outright closures. A lot of non-Westerners view this as cultural deafness. . . .

A full ban would also threaten to throw up an unintended consequence. By forbidding the selling of live meat in places where it is a “strong part of its source of food or a cultural pull,” says Mr Restif, “it will just go to the black market, where there can be no regulation.” . . .

No matter how well-regulated wet markets are, it will not end the threat of zoonotic diseases. Their danger lurks wherever humans encroach on wild animals, whether through logging, the building of settlements or the hunting and selling of meat.

But tighter oversight would at least go some way to reducing a big source of risk.

With the stakes so high, both for those vulnerable to a future pandemic, and the billions who rely on markets for nutrition, a measured response will be welcome.

Among Liam Taylor’s background notes for this published article in The Economist are the following, unpublished, observations and quotes.

‘Mohammed Juma is standing in a tin box in a roadside market in Kampala, the Uganda capital, swinging a machete at a slab of beef. Around three-quarters of all beef sales in the country are at small butcheries like his. One survey found that just 7% of them had soap for handwashing and 26% had receptacles for waste. But Mr Juma has no fears about hygiene. He points to a health inspector’s stamp on the goat’s leg hanging behind him. Anyway, his meat is cheaper and fresher than the shrink-wrapped sausages in the supermarket close by. The customers keep coming.

‘Anxieties about food and disease are understandable. . . . But the risks can be overstated. “We may know the hazards, but what is most important is the risk of exposure,” says Jolly Hoona, who is in charge of veterinary public health in the agriculture ministry. Pork sold from a butcher’s stall is roughly the same quality as that in the supermarket, says Kristina Roesel, who researches food safety in east Africa for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). And consumption habits reduce the danger. Although most milk is sold raw, Ugandans usually boil it before drinking. They like their meat extremely well-done. . . .

Read the whole article, Curbing zoonotic diseases: Will wet markets be hung out to dry after the pandemic? They can breed new diseases, but banning them entirely might not be the best response, Economist, 26 May 2020.

For more information, read Wildlife markets in the pandemic: Prohibit or preserve them? Ban or promote them?, on ILRI.ORG, 2 Sep 2020.

Or contact ILRI research partner Clovice Kankya, a professor at Makerere University and a co-investigator in a food safety component of an ILRI project called Boosting Uganda’s Investment in Livestock Development (BUILD), at clokankya [at] gmail.com, or ILRI scientist and project leader Kristina Roesel at k.roesel [at] cgiar.org.

A wet market in Shanghai (via Global Times).

The following article by Christos Lynteris, University of St Andrews, and Lyle Fearnley, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD, is republished from The Conversation.

In late 2019, a new coronavirus—now formally known as Covid-19—emerged in the city of Wuhan, China. Despite a quarantine established by Chinese authorities, it subsequently spread to South Korea and Japan, and then Iran and Italy. So far, at least 80,000 people have been infected, with nearly 2,700 deaths.

As anthropologists who have worked for a long time on diseases that spread from animals to humans (zoonotic diseases) in China, our research can provide insights into the unfolding crisis. It is highly probable that this new form of coronavirus, which causes pneumonia—in some cases lethal—emerged through a zoonotic spillover, a ‘jump’ of the virus from non-human animals to humans, in early December 2019. Chinese scientists have traced the potential source of the virus to Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which 27 of the initial cluster of 41 admitted hospital patients (but not the first recorded patient) had visited.

The market sold much more than seafood, including a range of wild animals. And scientists suspect that the virus ‘jumped’ to humans from one of the wild animal species sold at the market. Contrary to the earlier hypothesis that the virus originated in snakes, current genetic evidence suggests an emergence in bats, which are less frequently sold in Chinese markets, but are widely believed to constitute the animal reservoir of many infectious diseases transmissible to humans. Wuhan closed and disinfected the market on January 1, and China issued a temporary ban on all trade in wild animal products on January 22.

In the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, global media accounts of China’s live animal markets have themselves gone viral. A New York Times article, for example, consciously described China’s ‘omnivorous’ markets in a way that would be aesthetically unacceptable to its western audience (whole plucked chickens—with heads and beaks attached), as well as an assortment of wild animals, selected to shock the reader:

‘Live snakes, turtles and cicadas, guinea pigs, bamboo rats, badgers, hedgehogs, otters, palm civets, even wolf cubs.’

But the focus on exotic food consumption in China often relies on Orientalisation, and is in some cases tinged with anti-Chinese sentiment.

Creating moral panic
The epidemiological need to be specific about what species the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market actually contained, and in what frequency, is undermined by media reports urging for a permanent ban or abolition of these ‘wet markets’. Such reports often lean heavily on a montage of images from different markets across China with little information on the where and when these were taken, and no acknowledgement of the significant variations in cuisine across different regions of the country.

These images communicate a sense of disgust toward the eating habits of the Chinese and at the same time reflect a fear of the interconnectedness of two types of ’emergence’ in China: viral emergence and economic emergence.

Anthropologists have discussed in some detail how the Chinese model of development (the economic emergence of China in the 21st century) has been perceived in the West as a threat, both in political and cultural terms: China’s economic development because of its rapid nature and the competition this might pose to the US or EU economies; and culturally, because reforms seem incompatible with western expectations of modernisation. In short, rather than China adapting to capitalism, capitalism (in China) is adapting to China.

China’s food consumption is iconic in this process. While Chinese consumers have embraced supermarkets and pre-packaged foods, China’s economic development has not led to a demise in Chinese forms of consumption, such as the desire for ‘warm meat”’, and has not ushered in European and American cultural norms of what is eatable and what is not.

In western media, ‘wet markets’ are portrayed as emblems of Chinese otherness: chaotic versions of oriental bazaars, lawless areas where animals that should not be eaten are sold as food, and where what should not be mingled comes together (seafood and poultry, serpents and cattle). This fuels Sinophobia and anxieties of what anthropologists have long identified as ‘matter out of place’: a symbolic system of pollution through which proscriptions and prescriptions of what foods or foodstuffs may be combined is held up.

This image is highly flawed, not only because it relies on western sensitivities of what is eatable and what is not, and which portrays a modern form of Chinese food trade and consumption as ‘traditional’, but more practically, because it misrepresents the material and economic reality of these markets.

Diversity of the markets
In reality, most seafood, live animal and wholesale markets in China contain far less exotic fare. An enormous variety of different kinds of market are confusingly lumped within the term ‘wet market, a term that originated in Hong Kong and Singapore English to distinguish markets selling fresh meat and produce from “dry” markets selling packaged and durable goods such as textiles.

Today, several kinds of “wet markets” can be distinguished, with differences that are often crucial for accurately assessing the risks they pose for the emergence of viruses: scale (wholesale or retail), produce (live animals, only slaughtered meat and fresh vegetables, only live seafood; animals (domestic only or wild). Where markets do contain what many western media portray as ‘wild animals’, the majority of these are actually bred and farmed in captivity, such as mallard ducks, frogs, or snakes. Only a smaller proportion of animals are actually poached from the wild for sale.

The struggle of Chinese farmers
What is perhaps most omitted in the discussion of Chinese wet markets is the perspective of farmers, producers, and vendors. Although media reports often marvel at the consumption of wild animals, little is said about why farmers produce them. As Lyle Fearnley learned during fieldwork research with wild swan goose (dayan) farmers in Jiangxi Province, two factors brought most farmers into the breeding of wild geese during the late 1990s: an opportunity to meet consumer demand without illegal poaching from the wild, and as a path toward higher-value production, at a time when rural smallholder farmers faced increasing economic pressure from large-scale industrial food producers.

During China’s post-Mao market reforms which began in 1978, collective farmland was redistributed to individual households, leading to an explosion in smallholder farmers, known as ‘specialised’ (zhuanyehu) because they focused on particular cash crops or livestock, including chickens, ducks or pigs. But in the 1990s, China embarked on a ‘second leap’ to expand the scale of agricultural production. Heavily capitalised ‘dragonhead enterprises'(longtou qiye)—industrial food production conglomerates—built integrated supply chains, often centred on slaughterhouses and processing facilities, and contracted livestock out to household-scale farmers.

After the livestock revolution
An enormous consolidation followed, as independent smallholders were progressively driven out of livestock farming, especially in sectors such as pork or poultry, because prices dropped too low and the cost of inputs went up. Livestock diseases, such as Newcastle disease and Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, also played a role in driving smallholders out of these sectors. Unable to survive as independent smallholders, many farmers faced a drastic choice: take up farming under contract to an industrial food conglomerate, or get out of farming pork or poultry altogether.

Some farmers discovered a third way, opting to raise local breeds and wild animals that could be sold for higher returns in niche markets. Many of these species were less afflicted with diseases than mainstream livestock, often simply an effect of the smaller number being farmed. Although the higher price of wild animals compared to domesticated has led to the belief that its consumption ‘is a dietary choice and not driven by low income’, for farmers the story is different: breeding wild animals can be a path toward a steady income when it remains a struggle to live off the land in rural China.

The variety of markets grouped under the term ‘wet markets’, much like the farming of wild animals, have provided important livelihoods to independent smallholder farmers. These markets often also have informal supply chains that enable smallholders to transport animals to market without the involvement of large-scale food processing firms that own slaughterhouses and control contracts with supermarkets. But although informal, it’s not to say such markets are unregulated. Research by Christos Lynteris recorded regular inspections of ‘wet markets’ markets by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and by municipal sanitary authorities that begin after the SARS epidemic in 2003.

‘Wet markets’ form an integral part of the Chinese market and of Chinese social life. And based on the latest data suggesting a significant number of early cases of coronavirus without links to the Huanan Seafood Market, several infectious disease experts have raised doubts about whether the market was the source of the novel coronavirus at all. Whatever the case, while shutting them down temporarily and curbing wild-animal trade has advantages when it comes to preventing disease, a permanent shut down or abolition of ‘wet markets’ would have an immense and unpredictable impact on everyday life and well-being in China.

A permanent shutdown of ‘wet markets’ would affect patterns of food consumption in ways that are unknowable but potentially harmful to public health. It would deprive Chinese consumers of a food sector that accounts for 30-59% of their food supplies. Due to the large number of farmers, traders and consumers involved, the abolition of ‘wet markets’ is also likely to lead to an explosion of an uncontrollable black market, as it did when such a ban was attempted in 2003, in response to SARS, as well as in 2013–14, in response to avian influenza H7N9.

This would involve enormously greater risk to public and global health than the legal and regulated live animal markets in China today. And live poultry and animal markets have long served as a crucial ‘early warning’ site for viral surveillance, including in the United States.

What ‘wet markets’ in China require is more scientific and evidence-based regulation, rather than being abolished and driven underground.

Christos Lynteris, Senior Lecturer, anthropologist, University of St Andrews and Lyle Fearnley, Assistant Professor, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A slaughterhouse in Maputo, Mozambique (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann).

The Economist reports that the future of food lies in Africa. And why that’s a good thing. Read on to find out why.

As Africans get richer, they will eat more meat and live longer, healthier lives

‘. . . Between 1961 and 2013 the average Chinese person went from eating 4kg of meat a year to 62kg. Half of the world’s pork is eaten in the country. More liberal agricultural policies have allowed farms to produce more—in 1961 China was suffering under the awful experiment in collectivisation known as the “great leap forward”. But the main reason the Chinese are eating more meat is simply that they are wealthier.

In rich countries people go vegan for January and pour oat milk over their breakfast cereal. In the world as a whole, the trend is the other way.

‘In the decade to 2017 global meat consumption rose by an average of 1.9% a year and fresh dairy consumption by 2.1%—both about twice as fast as population growth. Almost four-fifths of all agricultural land is dedicated to feeding livestock, if you count not just pasture but also cropland used to grow animal feed. Humans have bred so many animals for food that Earth’s mammalian biomass is thought to have quadrupled since the stone age (see chart).

‘Barring a big leap forward in laboratory-grown meat, this is likely to continue. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (fao), an agency of the un, estimates that the global number of ruminant livestock (that is, cattle, buffalo, sheep and goats) will rise from 4.1bn to 5.8bn between 2015 and 2050 under a business-as-usual scenario. The population of chickens is expected to grow even faster.

The chicken is already by far the most common bird in the world, with about 23bn alive at the moment compared with 500m house sparrows.

Meanwhile the geography of meat-eating is changing.

The countries that drove the global rise in the consumption of animal products over the past few decades are not the ones that will do so in future.

‘. . . On a planetary scale, the rise of meat- and dairy-eating is a giant environmental problem. Locally, however, it can be a boon. . . .

‘It is largely through eating more pork and dairy that Chinese diets have come to resemble Western ones, rich in protein and fat. . . .

‘Last year China overtook Brazil to become the world’s second-biggest beef market after America, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. . . . [E]ven as the Chinese develop the taste for beef, Americans are losing it. Consumption per head peaked in 1976; around 1990 beef was overtaken by chicken as America’s favourite meat. . . .

Despite eager predictions of a ‘second nutrition transition’ to diets lower in meat and higher in grains and vegetables, Western diets are so far changing only in the details.

‘Beef is a little less popular in some countries, but chicken is more so; people are drinking less milk but eating more cheese. The EU expects only a tiny decline in meat-eating, from 69.3kg per person to 68.7kg, between 2018 and 2030. Collectively, Europeans and Americans seem to desire neither more animal proteins nor fewer.

‘If the West is sated, and China is getting there, where is the growth coming from? One answer is India. Although Indians still eat astonishingly little meat—just 4kg a year—they are drinking far more milk, eating more cheese and cooking with more ghee (clarified butter) than before. In the 1970s India embarked on a top-down “white revolution” to match the green one. Dairy farmers were organised into co-operatives and encouraged to bring their milk to collection centres with refrigerated tanks. Milk production shot up from 20m tonnes in 1970 to 174m tonnes in 2018, making India the world’s biggest milk producer. The OECD expects India will produce 244m tonnes of milk in 2027. . . .

But neither an Indian milk co-operative nor a large Chinese pig farm really represents the future of food.

Look instead to a small, scruffy chicken farm just east of Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

‘Some 2,000 birds squeeze into a simple concrete shed with large openings in the walls, which are covered with wire mesh. . . . The chickens in the shed hardly resemble the variegated brown birds that can be seen pecking at the ground in any number of villages. They are commercial broilers—white creatures with big appetites that grow to 2kg in weight after just 35 days. All have been vaccinated against two widespread chicken-killers—Newcastle disease and infectious bursal disease. . . .

Official statistics suggest that the number of chickens in Senegal has increased from 24m to 60m since 2000. . . .

Many sub-Saharan Africans still eat almost no meat, dairy or fish. . . . This is seldom the result of religious or cultural prohibitions. If animal foods were cheaper, or if people had more money, they would eat more of them. . . .

Yet this frugal continent is beginning to sway the global food system.

The UN thinks that the population of sub-Saharan Africa will reach 2bn in the mid-2040s, up from 1.1bn today. That would lead to a huge increase in meat- and dairy-eating even if people’s diets stayed the same. But they will not. The population of Kenya has grown by 58% since 2000, while the output of beef has more than doubled.

‘Africa already imports more meat each year than does China, and the OECD’s forecasters expect imports to keep growing by more than 3% a year. But most of the continent’s meat will probably be home-grown. The FAO predicts that in 2050 almost two out of every five ruminant livestock animals in the world will be African. The number of chickens in Africa is projected to quadruple, to 7bn.

‘This will strain the environment. . . . Sub-Saharan Africans currently have tiny carbon footprints because they use so little energy—excluding South Africa, the entire continent produces about as much electricity as France. The armies of cattle, goats and sheep will raise Africans’ collective contribution to global climate change, though not to near Western or Chinese levels.

People will probably become healthier, though.

Many African children are stunted (notably small for their age) partly because they do not get enough micronutrients such as Vitamin A. Iron deficiency is startlingly common. . . .

Poor nutrition stunts brains as well as bodies.

‘Animal products are excellent sources of essential vitamins and minerals. Studies in several developing countries have shown that giving milk to schoolchildren makes them taller. Recent research in rural western Kenya found that children who regularly ate eggs grew 5% faster than children who did not; cow’s milk had a smaller effect. . . .

‘Africans’ changing diets also create opportunities for local businesses. . . .

‘It is often said that sub-Saharan Africa lacks an industrial base, and this is true. . . . But to look only for high-tech, export-oriented industries risks overlooking the continent’s increasingly sophisticated food-producers, who are responding to urban demand. Ideally, Africa would learn to fill shipping containers with clothes and gadgets. For now, there are some jobs to be had filling bellies with meat.’

Read the whole article at The Economist: The way of more flesh: Global meat-eating is on the rise, bringing surprising benefits, 2 May 2019.

Broken Record Alert:

People WILL NOT change their diets for environmental reasons.

No matter how often we hear “EAT LESS MEAT”

we eat more meat when we can afford it, because we like it.

@HannahRitchie02 reports.

—@TamarHaspel on Twitter, 4 Feb 2019

The following excerpts are taken from a BBC analysis piece published yesterday that was commissioned by the BBC from Hannah Ritchie, an expert from the Oxford Martin School and the non-profit organization Global Change Data Lab.

‘Rising incomes
‘. . . [G]lobal meat consumption has increased rapidly over the past 50 years. Meat production today is nearly five times higher than in the early 1960s—from 70 million tonnes to more than 330 million tonnes in 2017.

‘A big reason for this is that there are many more people to feed. Over that period the world population more than doubled. In the early 1960s there were around three billion of us, and today there are more than 7.6 billion.

‘While population is part of the story, it doesn’t entirely account for why meat production increased five-fold. Another key factor is rising incomes.

‘Around the world, people have become richer, with the global average income more than tripling in half a century. When we compare consumption across different countries we see that, typically, the richer we are the more meat we eat.

‘There are not just more people in the world—there are more people who can afford to eat meat.

‘Who eats the most meat?
‘We see a clear link with wealth when looking at patterns of meat consumption across the world.

‘In 2013, the most recent year available, the US and Australia topped the tables for annual meat consumption. Alongside New Zealand and Argentina, both countries topped more than 100kg per person, the equivalent to about 50 chickens or half a cow each.

In fact, high levels of meat consumption can be seen across the West, with most countries in Western Europe consuming between 80 and 90 kilograms of meat per person.

At the other end of the spectrum, many of the world’s poorest countries eat very little meat.

The average Ethiopian consumes just 7kg, Rwandans 8kg and Nigerians 9kg. This is 10 times less than the average European.

‘For those in low-income countries, meat is still very much a luxury. . . .

‘Middle-income countries driving the demand for meat
‘It is clear that the richest countries eat a lot of meat, and those on low incomes eat little. This has been the case for 50 years or more. So why are we collectively eating so much more meat?

‘This trend has been largely driven from a growing band of middle-income countries. Rapidly growing nations like China and Brazil have seen significant economic growth in recent decades, and a large rise in meat consumption.

‘In Kenya, meat consumption has changed little since 1960. By contrast, the average person in 1960s China consumed less than 5kg a year. By the late 1980s this had risen to 20kg, and in the last few decades this has more than tripled to over 60kg.

‘The same thing happened in Brazil, where meat consumption has almost doubled since 1990—overtaking almost all Western countries in the process. . . .

‘Is meat consumption falling in the West?
Many in Europe and North America say they are trying to cut down on meat, but is it working?

Not really, according to statistics.

Recent data from the United States Department for Agriculture (USDA) suggests meat consumption per head has actually increased over the last few years.

While we may think that meat is becoming less popular, US consumption in 2018 was close to its highest in decades.

It’s a similar picture with meat consumption in the EU.

Read the whole article by Hannah Ritchie: Which countries eat the most meat?, BBC News, 4 Feb 2019.

Related posts on the ILRI blogs

Where nutrients and protein sourced from livestock remain vital—Crawford Fund, 4 Feb 2019
Climate change policy must distinguish (long-lived) carbon dioxide from (short-lived) methane–Oxford study, 29 Jan 2019
FAO sets the record straight–86% of livestock feed is inedible by humans, 28 Jan 2018
FAO sets the record straight on flawed livestock emission comparisons–and the livestock livelihoods on the line, 27 Jan 2019.
IFPRI’s Shenggen Fan on the ‘differentiated approach’ needed to navigate today’s food systems, 26 Jan 2019.
With huge variations in meat consumption, we’re ‘all in this existential crisis together’,—Vox, 25 Jan 2019.
Should we eat red meat? Depends on who’s eating—New York Times, 22 Jan 2019.
African livestock: A terrible thing to waste,22 Dec 2018.
A move away from ‘grain fundamentalism’ to higher quality milk, meat and egg calories to fight malnutrition,15 Nov 2018.
Yes, eating meat affects the environment, but cows are not killing the climate, 30 Oct 2018.
Greenhouse gas emissions from dung patches in developing countries are ‘likely highly overestimated’—New report, 3 Oct 2018.
IFPRI, ILRI leaders: Sustainable small-scale livestock farming is essential to meeting the 21st-century’s protein needs, 26 Sep 2018.
‘High-yield’ farming costs the environment less than previously thought—and could help spare habitats, 20 Sep 2018.
FAO on the common but flawed comparisons of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock and transport, 19 Sep 2018.
Squaring the meat vs veganism circle, 6 Sep 2019.
One-size-fits-all ‘livestock less’ measures will not serve some one billion smallholder livestock farmers and herders, 2 Aug 2018.
Why livestock belong on the table—whether we eat meat or not, 26 Jun 2018.
Is promoting vegetarianism for all the world’s people a form of colonialism? just Euro-centric?, 26 Jun 2018.
A better way for vegans, vegetarians, meat eaters and livestock herders alike—By ecologist Ian Scoones, 22 Jun 2018.
Livestock-enhanced diets in the first 1,000 days of life: Pathways to better futures in low-income countries, 19 Jun 2018.
It’s not enough to go vegetarian to fight climate change, 11 Jun 2018.
Checking the facts behind the ‘livestock facts’ we think we know, 6 Jun 2018.
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘the single biggest way’ to harm poor livestock herders, 5 Jun 2018.
New studies provide the first accurate estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from East African livestock, 3 Jun 2018.
Shirley Tarawali on convergence in consumption of milk, meat, eggs at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, 26 Mar 2018.
Mobile pastoralism—A 10,000-year-old practice still robust, if threatened, in the Mediterranean today, 19 Mar 2018.
Cleaning up assessments of livestock-environment systems in developing countries with CLEANED, 16 Mar 2018.
Lora Iannotti on livestock and animal-source foods at Berlin’s Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, 6 Mar 2018.
BMZ’s Stefan Schmitz on sustainable solutions for the livestock sector, 5 Mar 2018
Beef cattle grazing on American rangelands—not feedlots—could be net carbon sink, 27 Feb 2018.
Cereal straws and stovers for sustainable livestock futures: When crop biomass becomes livestock gold, 27 Feb 2018.
Towards a sustainable, responsible and efficient livestock sector—Jimmy Smith at the Berlin Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, 22 Feb 2018
​’If you care about agriculture, you care about livestock’—Bill Gates, 30 Jan 2018.
Jimmy Smith speaks in Australia on the pursuit of a ‘low-emissions cow’ and other livestock matters, 3 Jan 2018.
Livestock in developing countries—Misperceptions, facts and consequences, 5 Oct 2017.

Standing Child (Stehendes Kind) by Erich Heckel, 1910.

‘Coinciding with the launch of the EAT-Lancet “Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems” report, Dr Colin Chartres, the [Crawford] Fund’s CEO, . . . discusses the importance of ‘smart foods’ and smart people for a healthy population and planet.

‘In late January the Eat-Lancet Foundation released its Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems report. Its headline message is:

“Transformation to healthy diets by 2050 will require substantial dietary shifts. Global consumption of fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes will have to double, and consumption of foods such as red meat and sugar will have to be reduced by more than 50%. A diet rich in plant-based foods and with fewer animal source foods confers both improved health and environmental benefits.”

‘Whilst this message is not exactly new—the late Professor Tony McMichael from ANU [Australian National University] had been a long-time advocate of the environmental benefits of healthier dietary habits for over four decade—in my mind the growing effects on individuals’ health from obesity related diseases perhaps make the current arguments even more compelling given the fact that there are now about 2 billion over-nourished individuals worldwide, not just in the developed countries. . . .

‘So just what is the EAT-Lancet Commission’s Healthy diet? To improve the health of people and the planet, they have developed a “planetary health diet” which they say is globally applicable—irrespective of your geographic, economic or cultural background—and locally adaptable. . . .

‘If adopted by 2050 it would mean a doubling of the intake of cereals, fruits, legumes and nuts and a 50% reduction in global consumption of less healthy foods such as added sugars and red meat, particularly in western countries. The Eat-Lancet Commission argues that by adoption of a healthy diet, combined with halving food waste globally and more sustainable production practices we can reduce CO2 emissions by half to almost 100%, and reduce pressure from agriculture on land, water resources and biodiversity.

To a considerable extent the report ignores the significant role that income and protein from livestock plays for hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers.

In many developing countries consumption of animal protein is already very limited due to cost and many women suffer from mild or moderate anaemia, and stunting in children is still common.

Red meat, eggs and dairy products are a vital source of iron and other critical nutrients in their diets.

The diets of the bottom billion of global society clearly need enhancing nutritionally and diversifying, and protein sourced from livestock is vital to them.

‘. . . Having read the EAT-Lancet Commission report and attended the ICRISAT workshop set me thinking about the daunting challenges of both saving the planet and preventing obesity related diseases. Whilst changing human behaviour is difficult, it can be done based on sound continuing education from an early age. In comparison, researching the improvements required in specific crops, sustainable intensification and developing value chains is somewhat easier, but does require ongoing public and private funding.

‘Recent cutbacks to the CG[IAR] system and public sector, agricultural R&D across the world are an indication that policy makers have not yet grasped the seriousness of the food and associated planetary challenges ahead. These challenges to the planet are daunting. The challenges to public sector health budgets are only just beginning to be understood.

‘We need to foster a new generation willing to take these on. Consequently, one area that the Crawford Fund will be focusing even more on in the next couple of years is demonstrating to the next generation that not only are careers in the agriculture- food continuum exciting, but that the work is vital to saving the planet!

‘So in answer to my question in the article title—smart foods are vital, but smart people even more so, if we are going to stay healthy and save the planet!’

Read the whole opinion piece by Colin Chartres: How smart are ‘smart foods’?, Crawford Fund News, Jan 2019.

Related posts on the ILRI blogs

Climate change policy must distinguish (long-lived) carbon dioxide from (short-lived) methane–Oxford study, 29 Jan 2019
FAO sets the record straight–86% of livestock feed is inedible by humans, 28 Jan 2018
FAO sets the record straight on flawed livestock emission comparisons–and the livestock livelihoods on the line, 27 Jan 2019.
IFPRI’s Shenggen Fan on the ‘differentiated approach’ needed to navigate today’s food systems, 26 Jan 2019.
With huge variations in meat consumption, we’re ‘all in this existential crisis together’,—Vox, 25 Jan 2019.
Should we eat red meat? Depends on who’s eating—New York Times, 22 Jan 2019.
African livestock: A terrible thing to waste,22 Dec 2018.
A move away from ‘grain fundamentalism’ to higher quality milk, meat and egg calories to fight malnutrition,15 Nov 2018.
Yes, eating meat affects the environment, but cows are not killing the climate, 30 Oct 2018.
Greenhouse gas emissions from dung patches in developing countries are ‘likely highly overestimated’—New report, 3 Oct 2018.
IFPRI, ILRI leaders: Sustainable small-scale livestock farming is essential to meeting the 21st-century’s protein needs, 26 Sep 2018.
‘High-yield’ farming costs the environment less than previously thought—and could help spare habitats, 20 Sep 2018.
FAO on the common but flawed comparisons of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock and transport, 19 Sep 2018.
Squaring the meat vs veganism circle, 6 Sep 2019.
One-size-fits-all ‘livestock less’ measures will not serve some one billion smallholder livestock farmers and herders, 2 Aug 2018.
Why livestock belong on the table—whether we eat meat or not, 26 Jun 2018.
Is promoting vegetarianism for all the world’s people a form of colonialism? just Euro-centric?, 26 Jun 2018.
A better way for vegans, vegetarians, meat eaters and livestock herders alike—By ecologist Ian Scoones, 22 Jun 2018.
Livestock-enhanced diets in the first 1,000 days of life: Pathways to better futures in low-income countries, 19 Jun 2018.
It’s not enough to go vegetarian to fight climate change, 11 Jun 2018.
Checking the facts behind the ‘livestock facts’ we think we know, 6 Jun 2018.
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘the single biggest way’ to harm poor livestock herders, 5 Jun 2018.
New studies provide the first accurate estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from East African livestock, 3 Jun 2018.
Shirley Tarawali on convergence in consumption of milk, meat, eggs at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, 26 Mar 2018.
Mobile pastoralism—A 10,000-year-old practice still robust, if threatened, in the Mediterranean today, 19 Mar 2018.
Cleaning up assessments of livestock-environment systems in developing countries with CLEANED, 16 Mar 2018.
Lora Iannotti on livestock and animal-source foods at Berlin’s Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, 6 Mar 2018.
BMZ’s Stefan Schmitz on sustainable solutions for the livestock sector, 5 Mar 2018
Beef cattle grazing on American rangelands—not feedlots—could be net carbon sink, 27 Feb 2018.
Cereal straws and stovers for sustainable livestock futures: When crop biomass becomes livestock gold, 27 Feb 2018.
Towards a sustainable, responsible and efficient livestock sector—Jimmy Smith at the Berlin Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, 22 Feb 2018
​’If you care about agriculture, you care about livestock’—Bill Gates, 30 Jan 2018.
Jimmy Smith speaks in Australia on the pursuit of a ‘low-emissions cow’ and other livestock matters, 3 Jan 2018.
Livestock in developing countries—Misperceptions, facts and consequences, 5 Oct 2017.

Goat herds returning home at sunset in Namunyak Conservancy of the Northern Rangelands Trust. Kenya’s exceptional biological riches lure visitors from around the world, making wildlife tourism one of the top two earners of foreign exchange. USAID/Kenya support ensures that wildlife, livestock, and people can thrive as neighbours. Community conservancies protect wildlife habitat and provide emergency dry-season forage and livelihoods (photo credit: USAID/Donatella Lorch).

Agricultural ecologist Ian Scoones has some important and thoughtful things to say about the science and media publications promoting the recent ‘vegan craze’ in rich countries and the impacts of those publications on millions of livestock herders in poor countries.

‘There’s a vegan craze in full swing in Brighton in the UK—and it seems more broadly. . . . I have nothing against veganism, and I see its potential health, welfare and environmental benefits, certainly for consumers in northern Europe.

But what would a mass shift from livestock products mean for poor pastoralists living in marginal areas?

‘The argument to change diets to save the planet appears regularly in the UK press. A flurry of articles is usually prompted by a new study that “proves” that giving up meat and milk is a good thing. And so it was the case with the publication of an article in Science by J Poore and T Nemecek, titled “Reducing food’s environmental impact by producers and consumers”. The media bombardment was intense; perhaps even more so than previous rounds (see earlier blog).

‘In the Guardian, George Monbiot announced rather dramatically that “farming livestock for food threatens all life on earth”, while the Independent argued that not consuming meat and dairy could “reduce your carbon footprint by nearly three-quarters”. Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor, quoted the authors as saying that avoiding meat and dairy is the “single biggest” way to reduce the impact on the earth. Newsweek was more direct, with the headline: “Want to save the planet? Go vegan, says study”.

‘The narrative of these journalistic pieces is clear: changing your diet (ideally to veganism, but with vegetarianism a second-best) is the most important thing you can do for the environment and reducing your carbon footprint. And in reducing the use of land by livestock you can help a process of re-wilding, improving biodiversity too.

Sounds incontrovertible; but is it?

‘A closer look at the article (6 pages) and, more importantly, its supplementary material (76 pages plus the dataset) shows the argument (not surprisingly) is more subtle. It’s actually a useful paper, rather distorted by the press coverage. . . .

‘Inevitably, given the data requirements for their meta-analysis, the number of studies was restricted, both in number but crucially in location. Nearly all were from Europe, North America, Brazil, China and Australia, with very few from Africa and much of Asia . . . .

In other words, the study focuses in particular on mostly northern, industrial-style farming systems. Fine, but let’s not extrapolate too far.

‘Interestingly though, even with this limited sample, there were huge ranges in impact along production-consumption chains. This was their main point, and the one that the measured Oxford university press release emphasised.

There were very clearly high- and low-impact systems, each producing the same product.

The differences were dramatic, often orders of magnitude. This, the study argues, has major implications for what might be labelled, and how.

It’s not just the product, but the process of its production and its delivery to a consumer that needs a labelling system. One piece of meat or one kg of grain can have very different impacts. . . .

‘We also have to ask, what is the alternative use? The rewilding advocates assert that a rangeland emptied of livestock and pastoralists is a good one, because wild animals can roam freely once more, and (other) people can enjoy the wilderness. This, as argued before on this blog, is often an elitist romanticism with colonial echoes, particularly in Africa. . . .

The bottom line is that extensive livestock production on open rangeland is a livelihood that supports people in some of the most marginal areas of the planet.

In most cases there is no alternative. Growing vegetables and soy beans is simply not feasible.

And in many respects (despite all the biased, negative imagery), pastoralism is probably the most sustainable, low impact use of such environments.

There are impacts for sure, but there are also impacts from dispossessing pastoralists of land and livelihoods too (a facet ignored in the Science article and associated media commentary).

‘. . . Rather than reading the piece as a “livestock production must stop” (as Monbiot and co would have it), pastoral producers and their advocates (including businesses along the value chain and consumers of livestock products from pastoral areas) need to be more assertive in marketing, and counter the rhetoric of a singular pathway for changing diets that closes down, excludes and potentially impoverishes through an ideologically-driven, narrow framing of the issue, often selectively using available evidence.’

Why instead not have branded products . . . that demonstrate . . . lower impact products that support people and their livelihoods in poor and marginal areas, based on arguments for environmental justice, not rather selective interpretations of a limited sample of life cycle analyses.

As VSF International points out, a one-size-fits-all approach to dietary change potentially excludes 3.1 billion small-scale livestock producers across the world, where multiple opportunities lie for more sustainable livestock production; a point echoed in CELEP’s earlier response to The Economist’s rant about meat and pastoralism. . . .

Read the whole thoughtful article by Ian Scoones: The vegan craze: what does it mean for pastoralists?, PASTRES blog, 22 Jun 2018.

Agricultural ecologist Ian Scoones, co-director of the Economic and Social Research Council STEPS Centre at Sussex and joint convenor of the Future Agricultures Consortium hosted by the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, has worked for 25 years on pastoralism and rangeland management, soil and water conservation, biodiversity and conservation, as well as dryland agricultural systems, largely in eastern and southern Africa. Most recently he has been working on the governance of agricultural biotechnology in India and veterinary/animal health science and policy in Africa.

PASTRES—Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins—is a research project that aims to learn from the ways that pastoralists respond to uncertainty, applying such ‘lessons from the margins’ to global challenges. It is supported by the European Research Council and runs from 2018–2022.

Goats being herded near Wajir, northern Kenya (photo credit: ILRI/Riccardo Gangale).

‘. . . [R]inderpest, a cattle disease similar to measles, which was eradicated in 2011 . . . has plagued Africa and other parts of the world ever since cattle were domesticated. In the 1980s an outbreak, originating in Sudan, killed millions of bovines across the continent. Eradication was a triumph of veterinary medicine, as rinderpest became only the second disease, either animal or human, to be wiped out, the first being smallpox.

An Ethiopian boy carries one of his family’s prized chickens (photo credit: ILRI/Barbara Wieland).

The idea that the humble chicken could become a savior of wildlife will seem improbable to many environmentalists.

‘. . . A study last year identified bushmeat hunting as the primary threat pushing 301 mammal species worldwide toward extinction. . . .

So what do chickens have to do with this gruesome business?

‘Assuming you could persuade governments to enforce laws against the hunting and selling of bushmeat, said David Wilkie of the Wildlife Conservation Society, you could not possibly make it work without providing an alternative source of protein. In many rural areas, particularly in Central and West Africa, wildlife is what there is to eat, accounting for up to 80 percent of protein in the diet—and 100 percent of the animal protein. Abruptly cutting off access to bushmeat could mean starvation. . . .

Chickens, though, have been subject to intensive domestication efforts over roughly 8,000 years, Mr. Wilkie said, and we know how to rear them cheaply and in quantity.

The trick is to translate that knowledge to the small backyard flocks, generally kept by women, in rural villages everywhere.

An Ethiopian farmer holds one of the chickens she raises (photo credit: ILRI/Apollo Habtamu).

‘Such an effort is already underway, largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The focus, said Donald Nkrumah, a program officer there, is on providing more protein for chronically malnourished people and a means of economic independence for village women. It’s not about saving gorillas. But those goals are not mutually exclusive. “I grew up in West Africa. I know they are eating most of the wildlife,” he said.

‘The reason they are not eating chickens or eggs instead, Mr. Nkrumah said, “is that African chickens don’t grow very fast and don’t lay many eggs”—30 or 40 a year, rather than the 150 that would be possible with improved breeds. The chickens are also vulnerable to diseases like Newcastle virus, which can periodically kill off 90 percent of a village’s flocks. Better breeds and a suitable Newcastle vaccine already exist to fix such problems. But big agriculture companies have little commercial incentive to push their products out to remote rural markets. . . .

‘Chickens alone won’t stop bushmeat hunting if countries are unwilling to discourage open sale of endangered animals in the marketplace. But in the 1980s, India combined enforcement of anti-hunting law with a program to make chicken far more widely available in rural villages. . . . [T]he eventual result was that hunting was no longer worth the risk of arrest in much of the country.’

Will it also work in Africa, Asia and other regions now eating their way down the food chain?

As the human population grows at a rate that rapidly outpaces the ability of natural habitats to feed it, a better backyard chicken could be a real hope for people and wildlife alike.

Read the whole article by Richard Conniff in the New York Times: Chickens can help save wildlife, 18 Mar 2017.

Read about the African Chicken Genetic Gains project, which is also funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). African Chicken Genetic Gains is an Africa-wide collaboration with partners from Ethiopia, the Netherlands, Nigeria and Tanzania that is testing and making available high-producing, farmer-preferred chicken genotypes that increase smallholder chicken productivity in Africa.

Milk (via Flickr/EADD).

‘[O]nly seven out of 19 developing Asian countries are now on track to reach the UN FAO’s bold goal of “zero hunger”.

‘However, changing tastes for food means Asians are drinking more milk, traditionally absent from many Asian kitchens but which now flies off the shelves from Bangkok to Beijing.

[Milk] production has almost tripled, from about 110 million tons in 1990 to nearly 300 million tons in 2013—accounting for more than 80 percent of the world’s increase in milk supplies during that time.

Nutritious and cheap, the dairy boom has encouraged governments to bring cartons to classrooms. Studies have found Thailand’s National Milk Program, which brings milk to schools, causes students to grow taller and take in more protein and calcium. Similar programs were rolled out from India to China to the Philippines.

‘The main beneficiaries have been small farmers, who produce nearly 80 percent of the milk in Asia, because of low costs and a more equal distribution of cows and goats—in contrast to farmland, which can be dominated by big landowners. In Thailand, the top 1 percent owns nearly a quarter of Thai land, and the top 10 percent nearly two thirds.

The result is that the dairy industry is a potential ‘engine of poverty-alleviating growth’, as the report puts it—so long as things remain egalitarian.

‘”Policy-makers need to ensure that the region’s small-holder dairy farmers—the largest segment of dairy producers—can have fair access to, and compete in, the marketplace,” Kadiresan said.

‘More dairy cattle also means more manure, a potential threat to water supplies—meaning good policy is needed in the decades ahead, says FAO officials. . . .’

Read the whole article by Dake Kang in the Associated Press: UN says dairy a potential ally in Asia nutrition challenges, 5 Dec 2016.

Read about ILRI smallholder dairy research in Asia.

She introduces three approaches in the meat and dairy sector in Africa and Asia with their respective potentials and limitations – and also warns against possible negative effects.

She concludes: “There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to link livestock keepers to the market in a manner that is inclusive and sustainable. Women’s and men’s needs have to be taken into account for a value chain transformation to happen. There are still many unknowns, in particular regarding the effect of increased market orientation on the household nutritional status. In fact, the effect can be negative when more livestock products (like milk) are sold rather than consumed at home, extra income is spent on items not beneficial to children health and nutrition, and women’s workload increases and less time is available to care for their children. Concerted efforts by researchers, development partners, public and the private sector are needed for inclusive value chains to become a reality so that poor livestock keepers can take advantage of the Livestock Revolution to improve their livelihoods in a sustainable manner.”

Read the full article

Recent articles by Klaus Butterbach-Bahl