Last week  in Florham Park, New Jersey, Zoetis, the largest animal health provider in the world (it was spun off from Pfizer Animal Health last year), hosted a conference on Mega trends in livestock production: The state of animal agriculture 2025–2050.

A keynote presentation at this mega trends conference was given by Jimmy Smith, director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which works to relieve poverty and hunger, and to improve human and environmental health, through livestock science in developing countries.

Smith spoke on the Evolution of animal production in emerging markets: China, Russia, India, Brazil, Africa.

This is the second of a two-part article. Part one is here.

Jimmy Smith followed his presentation on global livestock trends with a discussion of plausible future livestock sector trajectories.

Smallholder production of monogastics (pigs and poultry) remains dominant today in Africa and the Middle East, Smith said, and will continue to be significant even at mid-century.

Regarding production of ruminant meat (from cattle, sheep, goats), Smith said that mixed crop-and-livestock farming systems will remain an important source of beef, sheep and goat meat in temperate, humid and arid regions alike. The mixed systems also produce more than half the world’s milk, regardless of the region, and the big increases in milk production that are expected will continue to come from mixed systems, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

Dispelling the notion that smallholders are mainly subsistence farmers, Smith presented cases where small-scale mixed crop-livestock keepers are highly competitive.

Smith went on to describe three trajectories of livestock sector growth that his institute is focusing on: strong, fragile and industrial.

And he listed the main issues and opportunities of each trajectory.

The world’s rapidly growing mixed systems, Smith said, are ripe for novel animal health solutions, which, by improving animal health in developing and emerging economies, will help close their big productivity gaps.

Of particular importance, he said, are a ‘deadly dozen’ zoonotic diseases, spread from animals to people.

With the greatest burden of these diseases falling on some one billion poor livestock keepers.

A case in point, Smith said, is African swine fever, which spread from Africa to Russia a few years ago and has recently been reported in eastern Europe.

For these and other reasons, animal health markets are big and growing, particularly in countries of the developing world.

And it is in developing countries where the biggest opportunities lie for public and private animal health agencies.

Smith concluded with a discussion of plausible future scenarios for the world’s livestock sector (both good and bad; see the ‘good’ scenario in the slide at the top of this article).

And he ended by reiterating his three main messages.

This is the second of a two-part article. Part one is here.

View or download the whole presentation of 55 slides here:
Evolution of animal production in emerging markets: China, Russia, India, Brazil, Africa
Keynote by Jimmy Smith at a Zoetis conference on ‘Mega trends in livestock production: The state of animal agriculture 2025–2050’, 11−13 Mar 2014.