Client / Financial Support: LPP, LPPS
Duration: 25 minutes

The delicate symbiosis between the native livestock breeds and their herders is under grave threat from urbanization and modernization. Across the world, about one third of all livestock breeds are either endangered or already extinct. To sustain this vibrant coexistence in today’s world is very challenging. But to forsake it could be fatal, because each pastoral ecosystem is a web of enmeshed lives, and each plays a role in the larger web of life on earth.

Everywhere, people are waking up to the need to conserve livestock diversity and sustain the pastoral ecosystem. A Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources was adopted by 109 signatories at an international conference at Interlaken in Switzerland. The great potential for innovative products has helped even poorer economies to see the initiative as an opportunity rather than an expenditure of resources. Local breeds, cared for by their traditional human partners, have advantages in every way over modern imports and processes. Their loss would be the beginning of our own end.