Food security risks that could come from scaling up animal agriculture in LMICs
Food security risks that could come from scaling up animal agriculture in LMICs
MFA Livestock and Food security finished
We have seen that in some cases, livestock and animal products are making positive contributions to food security for the global poor. However, this does not necessarily mean that more livestock will improve food security further. This section outlines the risks.
Many advantages of small-scale livestock farming are not found in larger systems
The argument that livestock increase food security has been used to justify calls for the intensification and industrialisation of animal agriculture. However, many advantages of small scale animal farming disappear in industrial animal agriculture.
Some researchers argue a key benefit of livestock over crop farming for eliminating poverty is that livestock ownership is more egalitarian than cropland ownership; even those too poor to have significant land may still have some backyard livestock. Industrialisation results in the polar opposite; extreme consolidation of livestock production. When livestock production becomes concentrated on large farms in distant regions, livestock can no longer serve as community stores of wealth or assets to act as collateral. They also lose currency as cultural status symbols. Worse, evidence from high income countries shows that industrialized animal agriculture reduces wealth and destabilizes local communities through the creation of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). This is detailed in the section below. This reduces food access and stability. Rather than manure production being distributed among thousands of farms across a country, a much smaller number of CAFOs produce so much manure that local environments are poisoned, along with rural communities (see the section on CAFOs and rural communities)
Diseases in farm animals cause economic and food shocks
Animal agriculture is in a constant battle with disease. Diseases that have historically caused high levels of damage are: Classical Swine Fever (CSF), African Swine Fever (ASF), Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, known as "Mad Cow Disease"), Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, (HPAI, known as "bird flu").
At the time of writing (May 2024) the US is battling a HPAI outbreak that began in California more than 2 years ago. In the months following the outbreak, egg prices skyrocketed to an average retail price of
Intensively farmed livestock are particularly prone to creating disease outbreaks. They are densely packed, so disease spreads quickly. Selective breeding for higher output can impair health and reduce genetic diversity, so a disease that is deadly to one animal may be deadly to all animals in a farm. Finally, the low welfare conditions that intensively farmed animals are kept in are highly stressful, which can impair their immune systems (see Mace and Knight, 2023 for a review). As a result, industrial animal agriculture poses unique threats to food stability.
Whilst industrial livestock systems are prone to creating disease outbreaks, smallholder systems have a relatively greater difficulty in fighting them once they emerge. Industrial systems often have better access to veterinarians and well informed procedures on tackling disease. They can also cull their entire herds/flocks if necessary (though this creates its own food security problems, see below). It is considerably harder for a government to cull all animals in a region when they live in thousands of back yards and gardens. Indeed, the 2004 HPAI outbreak in Thailand and the 2006 outbreak in Egypt likely took longer to eradicate because of the difficulty of culling infected chickens across a large number of smallholder farms, many of whom resisted having their animals killed. Additionally when small-holders lose their animals it may impact their food security more directly. In countries with a mixture of small and industrial systems, there can be a “worst of both worlds'' scenario. Industrial farms produce diseases more frequently, which then break out into surrounding smallholder flocks and herds, where they become much harder to totally eradicate.
Another disease that has caused large food security disruptions is the massive ASF outbreak that hit China starting in 2018. This epidemic led to the deaths or culling of over 40% of the country's 143 million pigs. As with HPAI outbreaks, this caused large increases in food prices; pork prices doubled over the course of a year, but there were also spillover effects, with beef and chicken prices increasing as millions of consumers tried to substitute.
However terrible the effects are for wealthier countries like the USA and China, effects on domestic food security are limited, as families are able to substitute diseased products for other products to maintain adequate nutrition. Moreover, the governments of high income countries are able to compensate affected producers to protect them from poverty, and increase imports to ensure that food shocks are temporary. However, the governments of poorer nations are far less able to take any of these measures. Testing for animal disease is often non-existent and institutions are slow to react. This is a significant cause for concern as animal disease outbreaks can result in the deaths of up to 90% of the farm animals in a region in a matter of months, causing the collapse of food availability. In 2004, a HPAI outbreak in Thailand led to the death or culling of 62M birds in 3 months. These deaths were highly localized: the Thai government mandated that if 10% or more of a flock died of the disease then the entire flock, and all flocks within 5km were culled. Moreover farmers could not re establish flocks until they had deep cleaned their facilities and until 60-90 days had passed. Failure to contain outbreaks can also put neighboring countries at risk. A 2006 outbreak of HPAI in Nigeria quickly spread across North and Central Africa, to Niger, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Togo and even as far as Djibouti and Egypt. Intensively farming livestock in low and middle income countries thus carries significant, unique food stability risks.
When animal diseases cause lost income and high food prices, food access suffers as a result. Governments in LMICs are unlikely to have the funding to compensate farmers, so disease outbreaks can result in the collapse of their income, and make outbreaks harder to control. In 2006, The Egyptian Government carried out mass culling of backyard chickens to contain a HPAI outbreak, but did not compensate affected small-scale farmers. As a result these farmers avoided reporting HPAI cases fearing their livelihoods. This undoubtedly made the outbreak worse. Sometimes, even the threat of these diseases can cause economic damage: the 2006 HPAI outbreak in North and Central Africa triggered consumer panic as far away as Kenya, even though no cases were confirmed. Kenyan poultry farmers saw income losses of 65% on average. One study projected that if HPAI had reached Kenya, it could have increased stunting in Kenyan children by as much as 3.9 percentage points due to lost income and food.
The global nature of modern animal agriculture means that outbreaks in a single country destabilize food security around the world. A 2020 paper in Nature estimated that as a result of the 2018 African Swine Flu epidemic in China, global swine production decreased 9–34%. Global pork prices increased by 17-85%, depending on the country. These shocks impact the food availability of poorer countries more severely, as non-diseased meat gets bought up by richer countries. As many LMICs grow wealthier and become more connected to global markets, the food security risks of disease from industrial livestock production will increase rapidly. To protect the food availability, food access and food stability of their population, governments of developing nations will likely have to invest increasing amounts of their newfound wealth in the constant monitoring and fighting of farmed animal diseases, in a battle they can never fully win.
Crop diseases
Of course, this is not to say animal agriculture is the only food system that is vulnerable to disease outbreaks. Some 20-40% of crops produced worldwide are lost to plant disease and pests.
This can threaten food security. For example, the cassava mosaic virus has reduced cassava yields in East Africa by as much as 13 million tons annually and resulted in over $1 billion in losses, making it one of the most damaging crop diseases in the world. This presents severe food availability and food stability threats, as Cassava is the third largest source of carbohydrates worldwide. As cassava is increasingly grown commercially (not just as a subsistence crop), this also threatens food access, as it damages farmer’s livelihoods.
![][image2]
How crop diseases can impact food security. Taken from Ristaino et al., (2021)
More than half of the world’s calories come from a limited number of varieties of three ‘mega-crops’: rice, wheat, and maize. This means that food security in a world where most people consume primarily plant-based diets could be alarmingly vulnerable to diseases in these crops. This might lead some to conclude that consumption of animal products diversifies the human diet and so reduces the food security risks associated with crop disease. However, this is not accurate.
On the contrary, consuming large numbers of animal products often magnifies the risks of crop disease. A key driver of increased crop disease and pests is climate change (which increases the geographic range of pests), of which animal agriculture is a key contributor. As detailed in the section of feed-food competition, a large proportion of crops are fed to industrially farmed animals. This creates demand for large amounts of genetically similar monocrops, which like the animals they are fed to, are more vulnerable to disease. Moreoever, when disease outbreaks reduce the amount of crop available, livestock farmers compete with humans for the remaining crops, driving up prices and reducing food access. As noted in the section on small scale livestock, families may lose food security and go hungry if they have to feed limited crops to farm animals. Additionally, feeding industrial livestock requires humanity to grow more crops than they would if they ate them directly. If producing vast quantities of wheat, soy and maize increases the risks from crop disease, this risk is made worse by the animal feed trade. In sum, the food stability risks of crop disease are exacerbated by industrial livestock farming.
Additionally, there are several issues faced by animal agriculture that are not found in crops. For example, crops do not contribute to the development of antibiotic resistance, zoonoses or global pandemics as industrially farmed animals do. Diseases in crops cannot spread to humans, unlike Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), HIV or Ebola.
Nonetheless, the real risks of crop diseases underscore that ensuring food security requires a diverse human diet that does not rely on a small number of foods. One initiative that may help in this regard is the Future Smart Foods initiative.
Scaling extensive animal agriculture often results in environmental damage
Rather than industrial animal agriculture, some have championed scaling extensive/pastoralist systems to meet growing demand for animal products. Notably, the FAO seems to prefer pastoralist farming to industrial farming (see here, here and here). Though the organization has not explicitly endorsed it, it gave support to the Mongolian Government's (successful) proposal that 2026 be named "The international year of Rangelands and Pastoralists".
Pastoralism underpins the food security of many communities worldwide. For example, according to the African Union, pastoralism contributes 10-44% of African GDP supporting hundreds of millions of households. In 2021, it was estimated that 77% of India's pigs, cattle, sheep and goats came from extensive systems. This contributed 74% of India’s meat, and 53% of its milk, as well as 2/3rds of agriculture’s contribution to the Indian GDP. More practically, pastoralism is often the only possible agriculture in the areas where it is practiced. As such, it can be very important to ensure food access.
Pastoralist systems have several advantages over industrial systems when it comes to food security. In theory, they are more flexible; livestock migration can be dictated by land fertility. They can be moved to fallow lands to eat crop residues, moved to areas in need of fertilizer to contribute manure, and moved away from grazing land and waterways if they are at risk of degradation. They are not at the whims of international grain and feed prices, nor do they directly contribute to feed-food competition by eating crops that could be given to humans (see section below). Lastly, they often draw heavily on indigenous knowledge and locally adapted breeds which reduce the odds of failure. Taken together, pastoralist systems create systems that are robust in the short and long term, bringing strong food stability.
However, pastoralism is not a silver bullet that can sustainably meet the world's growing demands for animal products. Firstly, pastoralists systems primarily farm ruminants such as goats, sheep and cattle, and are less suited to farming monogastrics such as chickens.A fundamental issue with pastoralism is that it takes unsustainable amounts of land. Currently, over ⅔ thirds of agricultural land is used for grazing, which represents ⅓ of all habitable land on the planet. Most of this is used for beef, which only accounts for 26.5% of meat produced globally in 2022, but less than 5% of protein and 2% of calories worldwide. Even this is an overestimate, because the 26.5% of meat that comes from beef includes grain fed industrial farmed cows and grass-fed cows that are fed grains to fatten them before slaughter. ⅓ of all habitable land we have available to produce 26.5% of current meat demand is clearly not scalable, especially as the best grazing land is already in use. This strongly suggests that if we want to ensure food availability and meet future demand for animal products, we do not have nearly enough land to do this with pastoralist-farmed cows, goats and sheep.
A common defense of pastoralist systems is that they have often persisted for hundreds of years, and so by definition must be sustainable and positive for food security. However, simply because they have persisted for hundreds of years sustainably does not mean they will be sustainable for hundreds of years into the future. In fact, we might expect that most pastoralist systems are unable to grow significantly, because if they were able to, they would have long ago. If pastoralist systems have achieved 'balance with nature' as argued by many proponents, that means scaling them will upset that balance. When scaled up to meet historically unprecedented demands for animal products, pastoralist systems can be strained to breaking point. The strong food stability of pastoralist systems can invert in the face of pressures to feed growing populations and growing economies, coupled with climate change.
A review by Dong et al., (2011) outlines 10 case studies from across the world showing that scaling pastoralist systems can compromise their food security benefits. For example:
- In the Sahel region of Africa (including Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mauritania), pastoralist farming was greatly expanded in the 1960’s. This was implemented by newly-independent nations who were looking to kickstart strong economic growth. To scale, many governments promoted expansion of pastoralists into marginal areas of the Sahel which had more variable weather. Pastoralists under the old system had dealt with periodic droughts for hundreds of years. However, the new, larger system collapsed when a prolonged drought hit in the 1970s and 80s, causing mass famine, the starvation of 100,000 people and the death of one third of all livestock in these countries. Whilst it is unclear whether increased livestock numbers contributed to the drought, they certainly reduced the ability of these countries to respond. Moreover, Dong and colleagues review evidence from several sources to argue that the scaling of pastoralism caused severe degradation of the environment.
- The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau of China has become degraded by large increases in sheep and yak herds caused by rapid population growth in the area. About 26% of the plateau has been reduced to “black beach” or “black-soil-land”, where land is bare during the winter and only sparsely covered by weeds or poisonous plants in the summer. Increased warming due to climate change also shortens the growing season, so the land is less able to rebound.
Other case studies include:
- Satellite imagery has shown that large increases in cattle populations between 1984 and 2007 were the main drivers of desertification of the Middle Atlas region of Morocco, with 67% of grassland experiencing severe degradation and 17% irreversibly converted to desert.
- The most well known case study is the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Our World in Data estimates that 41% of tropical deforestation, some 2.1 million hectares a year, is driven by cattle farmers to create more grazing land. 72% of deforestation in Brazil is driven by cattle ranching, which accounts for 24% of tropical deforestation worldwide.
By destroying local environments to produce more food short term, these countries are enhancing food availability and food access now, but directly harming both in the medium and long term. Large scale pastoralism can also fail to improve food security in other ways. Desertification, soil erosion, deforestation and climate change driven by unsustainably large pastoralist herds can contribute to water scarcity. Water scarcity decreases food utilization by increasing the risk of foodborne illness (see section) as it limits proper personal hygiene and safe food preparation. All 4 aspects of food security can also be compromised if people are forced to flee their homes due to drought, as is currently the case for the 2.3 million people displaced in Ethiopia and Somalia. Lastly, pastoralist's dependence on common grazing land can make their food stability uniquely vulnerable to 'land grabs' by governments and foreign corporations.