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, compiled by David Aronson.

Children under five are only 9% of the world’s population, but suffer almost 40% of food-borne diseases. Their hardship can be prevented, says this new report from the World Bank.

Chinese tech companies are making a big play for large-scale pig farming, reports the Economist. At one state-of-the-art farm 20,000 organic free-range hogs are reared and slaughtered a year, with the aid of tracking sensors, big-data analysis and soothing music.

Lab-grown meat and lab-grown fish might end up subject to very different regulatory regimes in the US, for reasons that have everything to do with bureaucracy and politics—and almost nothing to do with the substantive issues at hand.

People eat more meat as they get richer and move to cities—and so, it turns out, do rats. Nearly 3,000 years after Aesop wrote ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,’ the fable in which an urban rodent exposes his rural cousin to the city’s superior dining options, scientists have confirmed that city rats enjoy a higher-quality and more stable diet than rural rats.

African governments need to do more to align their food security plans to advance agricultural transformation to reduce poverty, inequality and unemployment, say researchers at the University of Pretoria.

The New York Times reports that white supremacists in the US are chugging milk, under the absurd belief that the genetic mutation that allows many people of European origin to digest milk as adults confers some special worthiness. No word yet on how the Maasai are reacting. In a related development, sure to distress some of these supremacists, people in Chile are evolving the ability to digest goat milk, giving scientists a chance to study how and why humans first evolved the ability to digest milk.

An important op-ed by Lawrence Haddad and David Nabarro argues that malnutrition is imposing a staggering global burden: ‘Together, high body weight, poor diets and child and maternal malnutrition account for half of all the world’s combined mortality and morbidity.’

Most journalism on the suffering caused animals by industrial farming focuses on meat and chicken, but this article describes footage of fish suffocating on industrial fisheries.

A wind turbine designed by two Nigerian scientists in Kentucky (USA) may help African farmers prevent aflatoxin from contaminating their grain stores. The turbine costs less than USD100 to build, and increases the speed at which grain dries, reducing its vulnerability to aflatoxin spores.

A long article in the Huffington Post argues that goat meat could save our food system—if we weren’t too afraid to eat it: ‘Not only is goat often referred to as the healthiest of red meats, but it’s good for the planet, too. And, yes, it actually tastes good.’

Climate change is plunging Senegal’s herders into poverty: ‘Six million people in the Sahel faced severe food shortages in a prolonged lean season between January and August 2018; Senegal was one of the three worst affected countries in the region. It may get worse yet, as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 2.5 million livestock herders, or “pastoralists,’ and those who raise both livestock and crops in the Sahel risk losing their income.

Powerful agribusiness interests in Brazil known as ruralistas dominate Brazil’s political agenda—and are making sure the laws meant to deter illegal deforestation of the Amazon go unenforced. Part of an excellent four-part series on the future of the Amazon by PRI, Public Radio International.

There are more types of plant-based milks available than ever before. In addition to the old standbys – soy, rice and coconut milk – there are now alt-milks made from almonds, cashews, macadamia nuts, oats, peas, flax, hemp – and even potatoes or bananas. But are they any good for us—or for the planet?

Scientists should be doing more to track African swine fever, argues a journalist with Wired: ‘Though it’s an animal-only disease, human inattention is driving this epidemic. Our vast networks of food production and distribution, and consumption and waste disposal, are making an already grave situation worse. And the systems we’ve created to track the movement of human diseases aren’t adequate to capture animal pathogens on the move.’

A cute short video from the World Bank illustrates the challenges small-scale farmers face worldwide, from lack of water to extreme natural disasters.

And here for no good reason is a groovy cow from a neolithic site in Baluchistan. Is this where comic artist Gary Larson got his inspiration?

Since 1992, says the World Bank, the food deficit has fallen in most world regions:
– by over half (!) in East Asia and Pacific as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean
– by almost half (!) in sub-Saharan Africa
– by about a third (!) in South Asia
However, it has stagnated in ME & North Africa.