| Improving Small holder Farming through Animal Agriculture |
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ILRI works to alleviate the severe problems of tropical animal agri-culture in a holistic way, tackling constraints in both production and health, addressing socio-economic and environmental as well as pro-duction concerns, and conducting work across the full spectrum of upstream-to-downstream and laboratory-to-field research. Sup-port for ILRI’s comprehensive research portfolio is a sound investment: the Centre’s ex ante impact assessments indicate that every $1 invested returns $26.
Opportunities for improving livestock production are great in terms both of increasing produc-tion efficiencies (developing countries have nearly two-thirds of the world’s livestock but produce only about a quarter to a third of the world’s meat and a fifth of its milk) and of increasing demand (every zone in sub-Saharan Africa has a milk and meat deficit ). Word-wide, demand for livestock products is expected to rise faster than that for cereal grains over the next twenty years, with demand for milk and meat predicted to rise by 170 and 260 per cent, respectively. The major constraints to improving livestock productivity in developing countries include a devastating animal disease burden, a near-ubiquitous shortage of good-quality livestock feeds, rapidly diminishing forage and animal biodiversity, poor access to markets and unre-sponsive policy environments. Research can help. Livestock research helps farmers exploit the potential of their ruminant animals to turn the nutrient crank on their smallholdings a little faster, a little more efficiently and a lot more sustainably. INTERNATIONAL LIVESTOCK RESEARCH INSTITUTE Tags: News Livestock Improving Small holder Farming through Animal Agriculture Newer news items
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