Thursday Links

A biweekly round-up of recent articles, blog postings and tweets about livestock, aid and other topics that may be of interest to ILRI staff, by David Aronson.

Tanzania now boasts the second-largest cattle herds in Africa, behind only Ethiopia, says the Tanzania Bureau of Statistics. Their number apparently climbed to 30.5 million in 2017, up nearly five million head in just one year.

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva says that antimicrobials are still being used as growth promoters, especially in livestock and acquaculture, and that such practices “should be phased out immediately.”

Pastoralists in northern Burkina Faso, in particular the ethnic Peuhl, are under attack from both government and jihadist groups, says Human Rights Watch, which is calling for prompt and credible investigations into the killings.

The BBC is reporting that dozens of people have been killed by cattle thieves recently in Nigeria’s northern state of Zamfara, and that conflicts between vigilantes and cattle rustlers have recently intensified.

The Rift Valley Fever has killed five people in Wajir County in northeastern Kenya in the past week, according to the World Health Organization. An article in The Conversation says that Kenya must “wake up to the threat” posed by an outbreak of the disease, which is partly due to the season’s uncharacteristically heavy rains.

A delegation from ILRI recently participated in the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock meeting in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. This detailed article from Thomson Reuters depicts the challenges faced by Mongolian pastoralists who have chosen to settle in town.

Are we misusing the data associated with childhood stunting? This article provides a useful overview of the potential risks and pitfalls of using stunting in an unthinking way.

Pastoralists in Africa already face a precarious existence, with more than 80% living below the poverty line. Increasing their resilience in the face of climate change is an urgent challenge. This paper from Agrilinks addresses some possible solutions.

Cleaner pig poop? Pigs can’t digest the nitrogen and phosphorus in their feed. So they excrete most of it out, which ends up polluting the air and water. This article describes how scientists at South China Agricultural University have tweaked the animals’ genes, to make a new generation of transgenic pigs better able to digest these nutrients.

ILRI is a research institute rather than a think tank, but this article on African think tanks provides a useful overview of the challenges they face—and its investigation of how these institutions are trying to make an impact has a good deal of relevance for the work done here at ILRI.