Livestock

This study focuses on pastoralism's current and future potential for securing sustainable managment and green economy outcomes from the world's rangelands. It synthesises existing evidence and uses practical examples from mobile pastoralism in Europe, Latin America, North America, Central, Western and Southern Asia, Australia and throughout Africa to both demonstrate the system's inherent characteristics for adaptive sustainability and some of the key opportunities and challenges for promoting development in rangelands.

Conservation of animal genetic resources -- ensuring that these valuable resources remain available for future use by livestock breeders -- is one of the four strategic priority areas of the Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources, which was adopted in 2007 and is the first internationally agreed framework for the management of biodiversity in the livestock sector. These guidelines focus on conservation "in vivo", i.e. maintaining live populations rather than storing frozen genetic material.

As renewed international efforts are needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the livestock sector can contribute its part. An important emitter of greenhouse gas, it also has the potential to significantly reduce its emissions. This report provides a unique global assessment of the magnitude, the sources and pathways of emissions from different livestock production systems and supply chains. Relying on life cycle assessment, statistical analysis and scenario building, it also provides estimates of the sector’s mitigation potential and identifies concrete options to reduce emissions.

This publication provides a glimpse into the often intricate knowledge systems that pastoralists and smallholder farmers have developed for the management of their breeds in specific production systems. It also describes the multitude of threats and challenges these often marginalized communities have to cope with and suggests interventions that can sustain valuable human-animal-environment relationships and combine conservation of breeds and their ecosystems with poverty alleviation.

Genetic improvement is an essential component of the management of animal genetic resources and can make important contributions to food security and rural development. Yet, the majority of developing countries have not been successful in sustaining breed development programmes. The objective of these guidelines is to help countries plan and develop effective genetic improvement programmes and to maximize the chances that such programmes will be sustained. They are intended for use by policy-makers and organizations involved in livestock development.

The State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture is the first global assessment of livestock biodiversity.

This publication includes 23 strategic priorities for action to promote the wise management of animal genetic resources and is the outcome of a country-driven process of reporting, analysis and discussion, which also resulted in the preparation of The State of the World's Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, the first comprehensive global assessment of livestock diversity and its management.

Overall, this thesis contributes to the understanding how marketing can help to solve sustainability problems in pastoral areas, in particular the Horn of Africa. It also contributes to the extension of marketing theories from high income countries to informal economies in emerging markets. This research therefore informs marketing researchers that marketing theory is generalizable to the informal economies such as pastoralists in emerging markets. The research also suggests to policy makers that creation of customer value can help to strengthen sustainability.