Integrating Livestock into Agricultural Statistics
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The growing demand for food of animal origin developing countries, stimulated by population growth, gains in real per capita income and urbanization, represents an opportunity for some livestock dependent poor to escape poverty. However, because of the dearth of livestock-related data, the linkages between livestock, economic development and poverty reduction remain to a large extent unclear, which constrains the design, implementation and monitoring of pro-poor livestockrelated polici es and investments. This paper provides an introduction to the Gates-funded Livestock in Africa: Improving Data for Better Policies Project being implemented by AU-IBAR, FAO, ILRI and WB. This project has the overarching objective to assist African governments in better collecting and analyzing data which support public and private investments in the livestock sector that benefit the less well-to-do. A variety of livestock-related data can be collected at country level, but the current limited understanding of the livestock-poverty interface makes it difficult to identify priority data to gather and process for formulating policies and investments which promote equitable growth of the livestock sector. In addition, the role and mandate of the public sector in providing specific information is often unclear, and stakeholders tend to look for data and indicators which support specific investments or government objectives – such as, for example, the number of livestock to be vaccinated or prices for live animals in major regional markets – often disregarding the broader livestock-poverty interface. There are also technical difficulties associated with ‘measuring livestock’, due to the existence of hundreds of breeds; regular and irregular herd mortality and reproduction rate; livestock movements; impact of livestock age and animal diseases on productivity; and others.