WINDHOEK – Some 1.7 billion people worldwide depend on livestock for a living, among which a billion are poor.
In Namibia, more than 70 percent of its 2.2 million inhabitants are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture, especially livestock farming. A large proportion of poor livestock keepers are highly exposed to climate change, as is the case in Namibia who has the most erratic rainfall pattern south of the Sahara. Speaking on tackling climate change through livestock farming at last week’s 2014 Agricultural Outlook Forum in Windhoek, Dr Henning Steinfeld of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations highlighted the role of livestock in the global battle against climate change. He says climate mitigation efforts often have productivity and food security co-benefits
“Livestock are natural adapters to climate change and conservation is key to extensive grazing -unique biodiversity resources. Production systems need to be highly integrated into natural context, social and economic factors and flexibility is key,” he stresses. He adds that the focus must be on land productivity since “Wild Namibia” provides unique marketing opportunities. Mitigation potential exists for all species, systems and regions, without system change and there is a strong correlation between mitigation and productivity gains, especially among ruminant systems operating at low productivity.
“Namibia has win-win options to reduce emissions and increase food security at the same time but short term trade-offs require enabling policies: innovation and incentives.” Steinfeld says evidence on soil carbon is not conclusive because of methodological and institutional challenges. “Adaptation and mitigation need to be one to build resilience to cope for variability,” he says identifying the following barriers in achieving this:
- Investment and cost barriers, such as upfront costs in costs of investment in
equipment, machinery, materials and labour; transaction costs, credit constraints,etc.
- Technology and capacity barriers such as lack of access to information and human capital, low access to GHG-efficient technology, risk adversity of producer, knowledge gaps of extension services, etc.
- Institutional barriers, such as insecure land tenure, policy uncertainty, imperfect markets, limited access to technical extension services, or lack of institutions to support collective action.
- Policy barriers e.g. low incentives to capital investment and process innovation.
Other challenges include extreme climatic events, droughts and floods, decreased productivity of land and animals, water availability and quality, disease and pest distribution and high input prices (feed, housing, energy). Dr Steinfeld notes that livestock uses 30 percent of land, some 15 percent of fresh water and 25 percent of total nitrogen fertiliser.