What is the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock? Basically it is a partnership of livestock sector stakeholders committed to the sustainable development of the sector.

With global population projected to reach 9.6 billion in 2050, the livestock sector’s role in sustainable food and agriculture will continue to increase.

To be sustainable, livestock sector growth needs to simultaneously address key environmental, social, and economic challenges: growing natural resources scarcity, climate change, widespread poverty, food insecurity and global threats to animal and human health.

The Agenda builds consensus on the path towards sustainability and catalyzes coherent and collective practice change through dialogue, consultation and joint analysis.

The partnership unites the forces of the public and private sectors, producers, research and academic institutions, NGOs, social movements and community-based organizations, and foundations.

It simultaneously addresses the following issues:

Global food security and health: The sector is critical to human health and global food and nutritional security. The Agenda promotes an inclusive approach to managing disease threats at the animal-human-environment interface that involves all sector stakeholders at every level in the development and implementation of animal-disease and food-safety programmes.

Equity and growth: Livestock is essential to the livelihoods of an estimated one billion poor. The Agenda supports a viable growth in value chains that have access to all necessary resources and services, and in which the poor can find secure livelihoods and participate in growing markets or take up other opportunities outside the sector.

Resources and climate: Livestock production based mainly on materials not competing with direct use as human food, and incentives and rewards for environmental stewardship will allow the sector to transition to existing and new resource use efficient ways of production and a greater contribution to climate change mitigation.

Source: Livestockdialogue.org