The FAO partnered with the Ethiopian Society of Animal Production (ESAP) to understand and document the various business models along the cattle dairy value chain nodes in Ada’a and Sululta districts. Dairy businesses are highly heterogeneous in Ethiopia and, even though most are profitable, milk production, marketing, service, input and other support are not well organized and integrated. Investments to make the dairy value chain more effective should target more institutional than the technical dimensions, which entails a novel approach for veterinary and animal production services.

Meat, Milk & More: Policy Innovations to Shepherd Inclusive and Sustainable Livestock Systems in Africa highlights options for sustainably promoting growth in the livestock sector, drawing from what four African countries—Ethiopia, Mali, South Africa, and Uganda—have done successfully in terms of institutional and policy innovation as well as programmatic interventions. By adapting these lessons to countries’ specific contexts and scaling them up across the continent, African governments can meet their national and international commitments to agricultural growth and transformation.

In light of projected increases in demand for animal source foods in Africa, this report presents the consensus reached at the ASL2050 meeting to gather qualitative and quantitative data on livestock systems and ensure sustainable livestock development.

In Kenya, to satisfy the rapidly increasing demand for animal source food (ASFs) of growing urbann populations, livestock holdings and value chains in and around peri-urban and urban areas are transforming more rapidly than elsewhere in the country, risking to exacerbate the negative impacts of livestock keeping on the environment and public health. The extent to which livestock-associated pathogens pose risks to public health is determined by the broader context in which livestock stakeholders operate and behave, both collectively and individually. Understanding stakeholders' behaviour as they perform various functions along the various livestock value chains is therefore crucial to inform, revise, and update policies. In order to identify major public health hazards associated with the particularly rapidly expanding poultry value chain(s), FAO, in collaboration with the veterinary service directorates of urban and peri-urban counties of Kiambu and Nairobi, surveyed the poultry value chain actors to assess their business practices and extent to which they comply with recommended biosecurity and public health practices.

In the transformation of agri-food systems in developing countries, we usually see rapid changes in the livestock sector. However, good data for clearly understanding this transformation are often lacking, especially so in Africa. Relying on a combination of diverse large-scale datasets and methods, we analyze transformation patterns in the dairy value chain supplying Addis Ababa, the capital and biggest city of Ethiopia. Over the last decade, we note a rapid increase in expenditures on dairy products by urban consumers, especially among the better-off. Relatedly, the number of dairy processing firms in Ethiopia tripled over the same period, supplying a significant part of these dairy products, especially pasteurized milk, to the city’s residents. The number of dairy traders increased rapidly as well, with competition between them becoming more intense over time. Upstream at the production level, we find improved access to livestock services, higher adoption of cross-bred cows, a shift from grazing to commercial feeds, an increase in milk yields, expanding liquid milk markets, a sizable urban farm sector supplying almost one-third of all liquid milk consumed in the city, and an upscaling process with larger commercial dairy farms becoming more prevalent. However, average milk yields are still low and not all dairy farmers are included in this transformation process. Small farms with dairy animals as well as those in more remote areas benefit less from access to services and adopt less these modern practices. For these more disadvantaged farmers, stagnation in milk yields and even declines – depending on the data source used – are observed.

In the last decade, there has been major progress in designing One Health policies aimed at reducing public health threats along the livestock value chain. Stakeholders in the livestock sector, however, often point out that inadequate finance and human resources limit the capacity of the government to implement the existing One Health policies framework. The extent to which these constraints limit the capacity of the government to deliver services and goods on the ground is however rarely quantified. In this report, we present data on available financial and human resources allocated to animal health services at the central and local level in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. We find that the resources allocated by the government on animal health are particularly low in all three countries, with broad negative cost for society. Allocating more resources to prevent, detect and control animal diseases could generate major benefits for society as increase in production of animal source foods and by-products generates income and contributes to food security, while healthier livestock systems improve food safety and reduce significantly public health risks coming from zoonoses.