Search

Trees in dryland forests and wooded areas provide key ecosystem services such as animal feed, timber, fruits and, regulation of soil and water cycles. Equally, the presence of livestock in dryland woody areas can also play an important role in the local ecosystem; not only are they a source of income for local communities, but they also help vegetation and mobilise stored biomass. When both of these ecosystem elements are wisely combined – livestock and trees – it creates an integrated agricultural system that can boost the local ecosystem, representing a welcome agro-ecological transition in livestock farming. The ‘Grazing with Trees’ report gives a thorough assessment of the positive role that optimized extensive grazing livestock farming can play in the management and restoration of drylands’ forests and lands with trees. It assesses and provides sound evidence on the benefits of applying an integrated landscape approach and utilizing farmers and pastoralists’ knowledge to halt desertification, increase resilience, and enhance food security under the actual changing scenario. The report confirms the importance of agroforestry as a primary pathway for forest restoration in dryland areas as recommended by FAO’s State of Forests 2022, and its recommendations encourage landscape planners and decision makers to consider livestock as allies, carefully restore tree cover and accelerate action to promote healthy ecosystems.

Human and animal mobility—especially ruminants for the latter—is a key factor in the Sahelian region. Animals are kept mobile to look for better grazing areas and water resources, to be sold at international markets and to escape insecure areas. The demographic growth of the western African coastal countries (and northern Africa for eastern Sahel) is changing the mobility pattern in the area. Old and new problems are faced by pastoralists and traders. As it is, mobility is a complex phenomenon. Here we describe livestock mobility in the region, showing some of the benefits and challenges that it faces nowadays. In West Africa, mobility is a complex phenomenon. It involves different spatial (from few kilometres to international journeys) and temporal (movements can take few days till several months) scales and it is contributing to local and regional economy in different ways: Through livestock trades and the creation of jobs around the commercial circuits. A major issue is the scarcity of available data. In the absence of a centralised system, volumes of traded animal are mostly guessed: Quantitative information is rarely available. A clearer and more quantitative knowledge of the livestock mobility network could greatly help veterinary officers to improve control and surveillance of animal diseases. In this chapter, we focus on the movements of cattle and small ruminants.

The livestock sector contributes around 14.5 percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Developing mitigation strategies is a serious challenge, especially if we anticipate a rapid growth in the consumption of animal products in Low-Income (LI) and Lower Middle-Income (LMI) countries. Across the planet, livestock systems are highly diverse and the livestock sector offers many possibilities for carbon sinking that can help to reduce emissions. In particular, carbon sequestration in grasslands, rangelands and feed crop fields and manure recycling are crucial in the assessment of the carbon efficiency of livestock value chains. Supporting sustainable livestock production systems, together with sustainable animal product market chains and consumption, requires the completion of GHG inventories based on landscape carbon balances.

International audience; The feeding behavior and fodder intake of cattle, sheep and goats grazing semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa rangelands in Senegal was studied over a one-year cycle. The objective of the study was to improve the assessment of fodder intake by livestock grazing rangelands in semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa, The study was conducted in the service area of a borehole that includes 354 pastoral settlements and a total of 11,000 cattle and 1800 small ruminants. The grazing behavior of five steers was monitored monthly. Their forage intake was estimated every month from hand plucking simulations of all the bites of forage taken by the steers 24 h out of 48. The feces they excreted during the day were collected in fecal bags. Near infrared spectrum (NIRS) images were used to analyze 80 samples of these feces, and the data were then added to an existing reference data set to predict fodder intake and digestibility using NIBS. The complete and contextualized data base was then used to predict the daily fodder intake and its digestibility by cattle, sheep and goats whose fresh feces were systematically and randomly sampled every month in the study area (768 samples). Annual means of the daily dry matter fodder intake were 68.4 +/- 6.4 g/kg LW0.75 or 17.2 +/- 1.7 g/kg LW for cattle, 73.1 +/- 5.3 g/kg LW07.5 or 34.3 +/- 2.8 g/kg LW for sheep, and 74.7 +/- 8.7 g/kg LW0.75 or 37.1 +/- 4.4 g/kg LW for goats. The annual mean organic matter digestibility of grazed fodder was higher for goats (67.4 +/- 3.9%) than for sheep (64.1 +/- 3.2%) and cattle (59.3 +/- 3.8%). The seasonal variations in diet digestibility were bigger for cattle than for sheep, and smaller for goats. The standard reference used to assess livestock fodder intake in tropical Africa relies on a fixed daily intake rate per unit live weight of 25 g/kg LW. Our results show that this method overestimates (+ 45%) intake by cattle, especially in the dry season, and underestimates intake by small ruminants (-24%). Alternative assessment methods are proposed either relying on a single standard annual intake per metabolic weight unit for all ruminant species, 73 g/kg LW0.75 per day, or on separate annual intake norms per live weight unit for cattle (18 g/kg LW per day) and small ruminants (34 g/kg LW per day). In both cases, modulations (+/- 12%) of the norm are proposed for use in the wet and dry season.

International audience; Nowadays, livestock producers in Sahel have to deal not only with climate variability but also with changes in land use and policies that restrict access to pasture and increase their vulnerability. At the same time, the growth of urban livestock markets both nationwide and in neighbouring countries is creating opportunities for producers. However, few studies have examined the role of markets in the adaptive strategies of livestock producers in West Africa, the changes in strategies for capturing market opportunities and the social interactions that lead to changes in market access and functioning. This paper addresses the question of how livestock producers and traders have transformed their producing and marketing strategies in response to climate variability and land access constraints. Our proposed conceptual framework on markets, vulnerability and adaptation considers that adaptive strategies include the social construction of markets through which market access is based on social networks and follows the norms and rules embedded in the complexity of these networks. This proactive strategy of stakeholders, through a socially constructed market access, allows traders to harness opportunities and livestock producers to adapt to climatic and land access constraints. We apply the framework in a case study in the region of Niono and Segou in the Niger Inner delta in Mali. Results show that livestock producers and traders have changed their livestock-raising and marketing strategies in response to the challenges faced by livestock producers and the emerging market opportunities. This study highlights the importance of considering the social construction of livestock market systems and marketing behaviours as adaptive strategies of livestock producers to multiple changes. Although livestock markets can support the adaptive strategies of several types of producers, their functioning as institutions has been understudied and scantily addressed in policy.

Cette etude, realisee sur 45 especes arbustives recoltees en Nouvelle Caledonie, a permis de mettre en evidence six groupes de ligneux fourragers caracterises par leurs teneurs en elements bruts et leurs degradabilites enzymatiques et in vitro. Les especes presentant des teneurs en matieres azotees degradables et des degradabilites de la matiere organique elevees sont les plus interessantes sur le plan nutritionnel. Il s'agit notamment de Gliricidia septim, de Leucaena leucocephala, d'Acalypha grandis, de Samanea saman, d'Albizia lebbeck, d'Erythrina sp., d'Acacia farnesiana et de Sesbania grandiflora. En revanche, les donnees pour Desmanthus virgatus et, dans une moindre mesure, Acacia ampliceps sont decevantes. (Resume d'auteur)

International audience; Dynamics of cattle populations in arid and semi-arid tropical Africa are highly influenced by droughts, which can create dramatic drops in herd sizes as well as disturbances in sex-and-age structures. The Sahel region is particularly affected by such climate shocks. Successive major droughts are assumed to have effectively decreased the cattle stock and strongly influenced the evolution of pastoral and agro-pastoral systems in the past 40 years and probably before. Demographic resilience, i.e. the ability to recover from significant losses, is a key parameter for the sustainability of livestock populations in systems regularly perturbed by demographic shocks, and thus for prospective studies of the livestock sector, in particular for cattle that are more vulnerable to feed shortage than small ruminants and have a slower biological turnover. Here, a simple mathematical herd growth model is used to simulate the post-drought dynamics of a hypothetical Sahelian cattle population taken as example. A set of scenarios describing the drought severity, herd performances and management practices was considered in a global sensitivity analysis. The resilience was measured by the probability to recover, the recovery time of the population and its annual growth rate during the recovery period. An important finding of the study was the extreme variability of the recovery time. This variability challenges the common postulate according to which 10-15 years are needed for a cattle population to recover after a 'severe' drought. This also emphasizes the difficulty of obtaining reliable recovery predictions from inaccurate estimates of demographic parameters. Simulations showed that the proportion of population size decline due to the shock, the calving rate and farmers' offtake strategy after the drought are overall the most influential factors for recovery dynamics. Simulations also showed that the recovery time can be highly influenced by the transient regime of the herd growth model when the post-drought sex-and-age structure is non-equilibrated. In particular, the sensitivity analysis confirmed that large losses of breeding females during shocks considerably delay herd regeneration.

Summary The difficulty of valuation of livestock outputs has strong political and economic implications for farmers because policies require metrics. Based on a case study in Mali, this paper gives different estimations of the contribution of livestock to reducing poverty using different methods, from the most common measure-based approaches, that is, a financial approach, to an asset-based approach. The results show that the asset-based approach reflects the roles of livestock in terms of security (money cash) and vulnerability. But only a dynamic approach to indicators can account for the complex role of livestock in reducing poverty.

En milieu sahélien, la concession est une organisation sociale commune mais complexe. L’illustration en est donnée pour la gestion des produits laitiers en milieu pastoral et agropastoral. Sur la base d’un travail de terrain mené auprès d’éleveurs du delta du fleuve Sénégal, une schématisation de l’organisation sociale et zootechnique de cette gestion a été établie. La traite est le moment crucial de la gestion du lait. Elle permet de déterminer les contours de la sphère laitière qui regroupe à la fois les animaux en production et les individus qui les gèrent. Le modèle proposé permet de distinguer différents niveaux décisionnels : celui du berger-trayeur qui décide des quantités traites (production) et celui des collectrices qui décident individuellement du devenir du lait trait (autoconsommation, don, commercialisation). En outre, le présent modèle permet d’éviter le piège qui consiste à assimiler le gestionnaire du troupeau ou le chef de concession à un pilote d’une exploitation laitière.

Le document est disponible en ligne : http://www.pastoralismjournal.com/content/4/1/3; International audience; Reducing vulnerability to hazards is a major challenge for pastoral settlements in the dry lands of sub-Saharan Africa. Accumulation of a stock of living animals is a major means of livelihood security that pastoralists use to cope with their constraints, amongst which is high environmental variability. Diversification and long-distance mobility are other means of livelihood security, implying specific family organization. We analysed the combination of these means in ensuring the livelihood security of 508 familial settlements in the rural community of Ferlo, Tessekre (Senegal). At least 40% of the settlements surveyed were small pastoral families, composed of one or two households with small herds (less than 50 cows and 50 sheep). Herds were the major means of livelihood security, but due to lack of a sufficient labour and other assets, the situation of these impoverished families was very precarious. In 28% of the settlements, families combined livestock, crops and non-farming activities as livelihood means. The remaining 32% of the settlements were pastoral settlements supported by large cattle herds and, in many cases, the production of Aïd el Kebir rams (for the major Muslim religious event). Non-farming activities were also present in these settlements with large herds, especially activities in the livestock trade. Diversification can reinforce the function of herds as savings accounts and might also enable the pastoralists to invest in livestock activities. There were three groups of settlements based on the characterization of livelihood security strategies used by pastoral herders. Over time, pastoralists have to utilize several means of security to cope with climatic shocks such as droughts, and familial events such as the death of the familial chief. Family organization (dispersal or grouping), diversification and mobility are important means used to recover after major losses of animals. (Résumé d'auteur)