It is time that working horses, donkeys and mules received the recognition that they deserve. Without it, decision-makers cannot fully claim they are listening to the 500 million smallholder farmers that feed and secure livelihoods for some of the poorest communities around the world. Continue reading
U.S resolution recognises that One Health is ‘essential to combating and strengthening the surveillance of emerging and reemerging disease’ and calls for integrating efforts by professionals from several disciplines—including health, science, technology and engineering—to address increasing threats posed by emerging diseases at the human-animal-environmental interface. Continue reading
Lawrence Haddad, the executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and 2018 World Food Prize co-winner, gave two presentations at the International Tropical Agriculture Conference held 11-13 November in Brisbane, Australia. The first, titled Let them eat meat, was covered in an earlier blog post. His second presentation, titled Why animal source foods … Continue reading
The world is just eleven harvests away from 2030, but for hundreds of millions of people the goal of ending hunger set forth in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) remains as loftily elusive as ever. What can be done to put the developing world on the right track? Continue reading
Today, the International Livestock Research Institute’s (ILRI) Iain Wright, deputy director general for research and development–Integrated Sciences, gave a short intervention at the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) held at the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) headquarters in Rome. Continue reading
Tad Friend’s largely laudatory profile of Pat Brown’s Impossible Burger enterprise (‘Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?’ September 30, 2019) raises important points about the environmental footprint of animal farming while passing along some questionable statistics. My concern is with its failure to recognize the essential contributions of sustainable livestock to development. Continue reading
More than 820 million people in the world are hungry today and an additional 1.3 billion suffer from moderate food insecurity, meaning they do not have regular access to nutritious food. Alarmingly, for the third straight year those numbers have risen, despite massive global commitments to reduce or end hunger and the harms, such as stunting and perilously low birthweight, associated with it. Continue reading
