From Long-Horns to Short-Horns, a Threat to Africa’s Livestock Diversity

In West and Central Africa there are breeds known as humpless longhorn and shorthorn cattle that have been in the region for thousands of years. During this time they have evolved ways to survive many diseases, including trypanosomiasis, which each year kills an estimated three to seven million cattle.

Moreover, these hardy animals have the ability to withstand harsh climates. Despite their drawbacks—the shorthorn and longhorn breeds are not as productive as their European counterparts—their loss would be a major blow to the future of African livestock productivity. But they are among a wide variety of indigenous African livestock whose valuable genetic diversity is at risk of being lost.

“We have seen in the short-horn humpless breeds native to West and Central African indiscriminate slaughter and an inattention to careful breeding that has put them on a path to extinction,” said said Abdou Fall, leader of the livestock diversity project for West Africa at the International Livestock Research Institute.

Fall and other ILRI experts were at FARA’s 5th Annual Science Week where they were participating in discussions focused on the risks and opportunities relevant to Africa’s agricultural biodiversity.

“We must at the very least preserve these breeds either on the farm or in livestock genebanks because their genetic traits could be decisive in the fight against trypanosomiasis, while their hardiness could be enormously valuable to farmers trying to adapt to climate change,” he said.

Other African cattle breeds at risk include the Kuri cattle of southern Chad and northeastern Nigeria. The large bulbous-horned Kuri, in addition to being unfazed by insect bites, are excellent swimmers, having evolved in the Lake Chad region, and are ideally suited to wet conditions in very hot climates.

“What we see too often is an effort to improve livestock productivity on African farms by supplanting indigenous breeds with imported animals that over the long-term will prove a poor match for local conditions and require a level of attention that is simply too costly for most smallholder farmers,” said Carlos Seré, ILRI’s Director General. “What marginalized livestock-keeping communities need are investments in genetics and genomics that allow them to boost productivity with their African animals, which are best suited to their environments.”

The Stove-top Pot Emerges as New Weapon to Protect Crop Diversity

By Matthew Davis

As Director General of Bioversity International, Emile Frison is a tireless advocate of the need to preserve Africa’s rich array of crop varieties both in the field and in national and international crop genebanks.

But at the 5th Annual African Agriculture Science Week and Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, now underway in Ouagadougou, Frisson said the campaign needs to move into the kitchen as well.

He said part of the loss of crop varieties is attributable to a more narrow selection of foods appearing on many African dinner tables, and that one way to maintain crop diversity is to rekindle an interest in a wider array of traditional foods, particularly among women who do the majority of cooking.

“They are the ones you want to target because they will choose what goes into the cooking pot and on the table,” he said.

Frison said the fight to protect crop diversity needs to enter the “nutritional domain.” He said the “simplification” of the diet in many African regions, its focus on a smaller set of food crops, is linked to a rise in diet-related afflictions across the region such as heart disease and type-2 diabetes. But Frison said there is a natural link between policies that seek to improve nutrition and policies that seek to encourage wider cultivation of native African crops, such as traditional, healthy varieties of leafy green vegetables.

He pointed to a partnership in Kenya with a major supermarket chain, which agreed to carry locally-grown greens and saw sales of the vegetable increase by 1100 percent in just two years.

He said the success of the program shows that it is possible to push against the negative stigma increasingly associated with native foods and use nutrition as a force to “re-diversify" African agriculture.