AGA’s Comments On:
“Sustainable agricultural development for food security and nutrition,
Including the role of livestock”
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.
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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 .
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