Livestock: A key contributor to global livelihoods and nutrition

The contribution livestock makes to global economy, nutrition and livelihoods simply cannot be overstated.

Across both developed and developing countries, the livestock sector accounts for a staggering 40 percent of agricultural GDP. It provides 34 percent of worldwide protein intake and 18 percent of dietary energy, in addition to the provision of micronutrients which often aren’t easily available in plant-based diets, such as iron. Crucially, 1.3 billion people, including over 600 million among the world’s poorest and most vulnerable farmers and pastoralists, keep livestock and rely on it as an essential source of income.

Livestock is also an important element in crop production: it provides energy through draught animal power, while manure improves soil structure and fertility, as well as water retention.

As such, countries’ livestock policies play a key role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and delivering a Zero Hunger world. 

An innovative tool

Teams from FAO, the World Bank, and the Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) have pooled their experience and expertise to design a flexible, evidence-based data-driven tool to assist countries in their efforts to sustainably enhance their livestock sectors.

The Livestock sector investment and policy toolkit (LSIPT) aims to increase public and private investment in the livestock sector by equipping decision-makers with the evidence they need to make strategic choices and design better and more efficient and attractive climate-smart livestock policies and projects.

How it works

The LSIPT guides users through six interconnected modules. At each step, the user is asked to input data, which the toolkit feeds into Excel-based algorithms. After each module is completed, the toolkit provides intermediate results, both technical and financial, relevant to each specific production system and household typology.

These results include technical and financial performance and output such as the offtake rate and numbers (proportion and quantity of animals sold or consumed per year), the internal rate of return (a metric used to assess the potential profitability of the production system), as well as estimates of the livestock sector’s contribution to poverty reduction, food security and nutrition, and country’s GDP.   

Empowering decision-makers

Users can benefit from a variety of the toolkit’s powerful features: LSIPT can make projections of the production system’s performance over the next 15 years, simulate a variety of scenarios, such as a drought or disease outbreak, and assess their impact on the livestock sector, while quantifying the investment required, as well as the expected increase in livestock productivity for each livestock value chain.

This information can provide valuable insights supporting decision-makers in designing livestock development strategies and supporting policies to create an enabling environment, and in charting new, effective strategies and approaches.

Household-centred approach

The LSIPT was designed with a close focus on households, to ensure the toolkit could facilitate informed decisions benefitting family farmers and small-scale livestock keepers. As such, the tool covers factors such as household vulnerability, food security, and nutrition information.

By combining insights and information relevant to production systems and countries’ overall livestock sector with household-level data, LSIPT delivers a holistic perspective that is mindful of the needs of vulnerable communities.

Benefits to decision-makers

The toolkit can provide a broad range of benefits to its users. Governments, for example, can leverage LSIPT to:

• Evaluate and estimate actual and potential contributions of livestock to economic growth, poverty reduction, food security and nutrition;
• When combined with the Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model interactive (GLEAM-i), a tool developed by FAO to assess Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and mitigation potential in the livestock sector, it allows to estimate the impact of different scenarios on GHG emissions;
• Conduct prospective analyses to optimize synergies and manage trade-offs between these areas; and
• Develop Livestock Master Plans.

This translates into increased capacity and knowledge, with the toolkit enhancing the ability to conduct socio-economic, technical and environmental analysesof livestock at household, regional and national levels. LSIPT also provides a step-by-step process supporting decision-making to understand policy trade-offs. Furthermore, it enables evidence-based scenarios to give national authorities greater knowledge for acting on investment opportunities in the livestock sector.

Delivering results

The toolkit is already being used extensively by the FAO Investment Centre and the World Bank, among others, to inform the preparation and implementation of investment projects and sector studies, and, alongside GLEAM-i, to bolster the response to GHG emissions’ impacts.

Crucially, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has used the toolkit to inform the preparation of countries’ Livestock Master Plans, evidence-based roadmaps and investment plans aimed at driving sustainable and productive livestock management, as well as increasing the value addition of key livestock value chains.

The toolkit is already available as a set of interconnected Excel sheets, and will soon be provided as a user-friendly, web-based application.