For the millions of people in African countries who are reliant on their herds and flocks of livestock for their household sustenance, their identities and their cultural reproduction, the coming decades will be riven with uncertainties and crises, but also with opportunities to be grasped.<\/p>\n
In the 21st century, the pressures on African livestock keepers from a number of sources are multiplying rapidly: soaring temperatures and more extreme weather events, significant biodiversity losses, the enclosure of rangelands for the purposes of ‘nature conservation’, for speculation in land and for mineral extraction, along with the spread of animal diseases, including zoonotic diseases, all pose serious, systemic threats. Within the global agri-food\/climate system, the political focus on the methane produced by ruminant animals is unlikely to dissipate. All this while the economics, gender dynamics, and the animal welfare aspects of livestock production attract greater scrutiny.<\/p>\n
African institutions are not uniformly well prepared for the compounding ‘conveyor belt’ nature of these crises, given at times weak local economies, political meltdowns and heightened conflicts in some of the continent’s most populous countries and regions. Twenty-first century technology fixes are certainly part of how these challenges will be met, but what needs constant consideration is how and where to invest in these and other market-driven ‘efficiency’ gains, while also prioritising the complex human-animal knowledge systems of livestock-owning peoples, and valorising and foregrounding the ingenuity that is rooted in local knowledges and decades of resilient, adaptive responses to uncertainty.<\/p>\n
This conference will explore the compounding drivers of change in specific contexts and will pay particular attention to those instances and opportunities where reasoned, collective action is being turned into more just, more equitable and ‘net-positive’ practices that can be shared through policies adopted across different jurisdictions on the African continent and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"