APRIL 2014 FOCUS www.atse.org.au 34 FOOD / AGRICULTURE A TSE Focus has featured the continuing challenge of feeding the world’s growing numbers and appetite for wealthy diets. Livestock products are the major group of such wealthy or high-input foods, now soaring in demand. At present, I find the question whether such diets are ‘good for the planet’ moot, since market demand has consistently proved itself the dominant force. In addition, and much more important than tender steaks and probiotic yogurts, is the role that livestock products play in maintaining useful lives in poor countries. In our imbalanced world, a billion or so people are hungry, two billion are food-insecure and a billion have specific nutrient deficiencies – while a billion are victims of excessive food consumption. is note focuses on those suffering from under-nutrition, rather than over-nutrition. Livestock provide nutrient-dense foods that efficiently underpin sound physical and mental development and income streams for up to a billion of the world’s poorest to buy staple foods while also enhancing soil nutrition and crop Technology, livestock and feeding the world yields. Producing meat, milk, eggs and other livestock goods in a manner that minimises environmental and zoonotic disease impact, especially for those whose existence depends of livestock, relies of continuous technological innovation, such as is conducted by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). As ILRI approaches its 40th anniversary, it is timely to highlight its critical role as the sole centre among the international research centres of the CGIAR that focuses on livestock and its contribution to the Millennium Development Goals of eradicating of poverty and hunger by 2015, which in this case are linked because the poor expend most of their income on food. In this real world, livestock products are not a luxury – as is oſten erroneously stated in Western reports – they are the difference between life and death, or at least a means of obtaining a diet that allows children to become functioning adults. It is well-known that protein and energy malnutrition, iron-deficiency anaemia and vitamin A deficiency can be prevented by inclusion of livestock products in a diet, and that even tiny amounts can improve cognitive development, growth and physical activity. e serious moral imperative to provide such nutrients may be too easily ignored in many idealistic notions about meat and livestock in wealthy nations that in turn influence agencies charged with remediating such imbalances. Even at the macro statistical level, indications of the importance of livestock are stark. FAO advises that livestock provides 17 per cent of dietary global energy and 33 per cent of protein. Mixed crop-livestock systems rely on livestock for power and for manure that provides between 12 and 23 per cent of total global nitrogen used on crops, to produce almost half of global cereal – which for the developing world is represented by 41 per cent of maize, 74 per cent of millet, 66 per cent of sorghum and 86 per cent of rice. e criticism of livestock heard in wealthy countries might be better directed at home, as it is wealthy nations produce 50 per cent of world beef, 41 per cent of milk, 72 per cent of lamb, 59 per cent of pork and 53 per cent of poultry, and feed up to half of the world’s grain to livestock. And of the some 1.3 million employed in livestock food production, most are in poor countries where it is a major and essential human activity, especially where livestock survive and produce milk, meat and eggs on feeds not directly consumable by humans. Livestock are central to survival in many such dire circumstances through such means as:  transforming un-arable and waste lands into food;  providing food and income to the landless;  nutrient recycling on the majority of the world’s farms;  supporting pastoral and nomadic herders; and  providing fertiliser for crops and power and traction for small farms. And as I have argued in Small Farmers Secure Food (my 2010 ebook, available from Amazon), it is these small farms that feed almost half the world, including the farmers’ families, and are extremely resource efficient. For example, 70 per cent of India’s dairy production – and India PHOTO: ISTOCK A donkey provides transport power in Tibet. By Lindsay Falvey lindsay.falvey@gmail.com