Introduction

Livestock in developing countries contribute up to 80% of agricultural GDP. 600 million rural poor people rely on livestock for their livelihoods.

Two-thirds of the world's domestic animals are kept in developing countries, where over 90 percent are owned by rural small holders. These farmers depend on ruminant animals -camels and water buffaloes - as well as cattle, sheep and goats, for food, livelihoods, and an efficient means for preserving natural resources.

The major constraints to improving livestock productivity in the tropics and subtropics, where production efficiency is only one-quarter that in developed regions, 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 unresponsive policy environments.

The CGIAR investment in livestock for 2005 was approximately US $ 45 million. This represents about 11 percent of the CGIAR's sector and commodity investment.

International Livestock Research Institute

Disease and inadequate feed are the biggest constraints to improving animal agriculture in the developing world. One of the CGIAR research centers, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) based in Kenya and Ethiopia, works to improve the well-being of people in developing countries by enhancing the contribution livestock makes to small holder farming. ILRI scientists work with a wide consortium of partners in the South and North to develop technological interventions and other research-based products that increase and sustain whole-farm productivity. ILRI transfers these products, which include high-quality information and training, to the national agricultural research systems of developing countries.

Most of ILRI's work therefore focuses on improving livestock health and nutrition, which allows farmers to increase their production of milk, meat, crops, forages, manure and traction. ILRI also works to help sustain farm intensification by determining optimal methods to integrate crop-and-livestock production systems. These include such methods as 'precision' manuring, 'patchy' grazing, forage legume rotations and grazing animals on particular crop residues.

Other ILRI research is working to:

• refine management systems to enhance the positive and minimize the negative environ-mental impacts due to the intensification of livestock-dominated systems (pastoral, agropastoral and mixed crop-livestock)
• characterize and conserve the genetic diversity of indigenous tropical livestock and the forages and crop residues that feed them
• select and improve tropical livestock, forages and microbes to increase food production efficiencies, to allow for better adaptation to harsh production environments, and to take advantage of changes in demand, production or marketing systems
• provide policy options that support equitable and sustainable development of livelihoods that depend on livestock resources, encouraging in particular policies designed to reduce hunger and poverty, improve food security and protect the environment

The major scientific fields represented at the CGIAR institute are cell and molecular biology; molecular and quantitative genetics; immunoparasitology; bovine immunology; epidemiology; animal science, nutrition and breeding; farming systems, ecology and socioeconomics.

ILRI is the convening centre for the System-wide Livestock Programme which involves 10 other centres in a collaborative effort to improve feed utilization and natural resource management in crop-livestock systems.

ILRI's research products include maps of bovine and protozoan genomes, improved vaccines and diagnostics, integrated disease-control strategies, economic and systems models, policy analyses, GIS-based decision-support systems, a tropical forage genebank, technologies for incorporating forages onto small--holder farms, systems that improve feed supplies for small-holder dairy producers, feeding strategies for multiple purpose livestock (dairy-draught cows), and animal traction technologies that improve the productivity of heavy clay soils.

This research addresses primarily small holder crop-livestock systems in arid, humid, and highland agroecological zones and in transition from subsistence to a market economy. ILRI's research products and related outputs are disseminated through an outreach programme that works to strengthen collaborations with and capacities within the national agricultural research systems of developing countries.

Multipurpose Tropical Grasses and Legumes: The Tropical Forages Project at CIAT

The steep, erosion-proned hillsides, forest margins, and low fertility savannah soils in tropical Latin America, South East Asia, and Africa have long constrained productivity in smallholder crop-livestock systems. In Latin America, as much as 70 percent of agricultural land in the tropics is pasture, and nearly 80 percent of livestock production and 40 percent of milk production takes place on small farms.

An estimated one half of this pasture land is in an advanced state of environmental degradation. Traditional means of regenerating soil fertility through shifting cultivation have become progressively less sustainable, as fallow periods become shorter in the face of population growth and other pressures. The same pressures have displaced livestock toward less fertile pasture areas characterized by native forage species of low nutritional value and very limited potential for intensification.

The Tropical Forages Project at the Center for International Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) works on environmentally sound meat and dairy production based on combinations of highly productive, highly nutritious grasses and legumes. The product of decades of research at CIAT, these forage hybrids are designed to be multi-purpose - delivering superior, highly digestable protein for increased animal production while contributing to sustainable land use by regenerating degraded soils, replenishing nitrogen, and improving soil's capacity to retain water.They are highly tolerant of acid soils, which frees up more optimal lands for crop production, and enables producers to intensify livestock production in marginal conditions.

CIAT holds a global mandate for tropical forages research with focus on
humid and subhumid environments in the CGIAR, and its genetic resources
collection includes some 22,000 entries on which researchers can draw in designing combinations of plants for specific environmental niches and types of livestock in prevailing crop-livestock systems. Superior forage plants are obtained through direct selection among germplasm accessions and, in specific cases, through plant breeding. In addition to traits that improve livestock nutrition and rehabilitate degraded soils, CIAT scientists and their partners engage in strategic research on plant resistance to pests, diseases, and tolerance to infertile soils and drought conditions. They are also investigating the potential benefits of a recently discovered relationship between fungal endophyets with tropical grasses. CIAT's development of forage databases, geographic information system-based targeting tools, and new participatory methods is geared to making forage technology more accessible to farmers.

Sources:

Getting the Better of Global Change: CIAT in Perspective
2000-2001

Tropical Forages: A Multipurpose Genetic Resource
CIAT in Focus

Pathways Out of Poverty: CIAT in Perspective 1998 - 1999

Technical Advisory Committee. CGIAR Priorities and
Strategies for Resource Allocation during 1998-2000. 1997.

International Livestock Research Institute.
Fact Sheets, 1998.