Lokhit Pashu-Palak Sansthan and other NGOs constituting the LIFE Network are currently developing and testing a new (“LIFE”) process of documenting indigenous breeds on the basis of their owners’ concepts, priorities and knowledge. Its purpose is to fully record the contribution of traditional livestock keepers – both pastoralists and farmers – in the creation and maintenance of domestic animal diversity. This will lay the groundwork for international recognition and acknowledgement of the role of these communities in sustaining a broad genetic base for the world’s farm animals.

The documentation methods currently in use by scientists focus on population, phenotypic and production characteristics and are based mostly on quantitative data and measurements. These methods do not capture the following important aspects of traditional breeds:

• The indigenous knowledge (especially breeding strategies) of the farmers and pastoralists that developed them.
• The livelihood contribution that goes beyond production in terms of cash products. Traditional breeds generate an array of benefits that are more difficult to grasp and quantify than outputs of meat, milk, eggs, and wool. These include their contribution to social cohesion and identity, their role in nutrient recycling and as providers of energy, and their capacity to act as savings bank and insurance against droughts and other natural calamities.

The LIFE method seeks to integrate the following conceptual and methodological innovations:

• Documentation of animal breeding related indigenous knowledge to put on record the intellectual contribution of the farming and pastoral communities that created the breeds. Such testimony will pre-empt attempts by outsiders to exploit, appropriate, or even patent, commercially valuable genes that may be inherent in certain breeds (such as worm resistance).
• Use of participatory appraisal methods (rather than formal questionnaires) that contribute to raising the awareness of local communities about the genetic treasures they have been husbanding.

By maintaining animals in marginal and challenging environments, breeders ensure conservation of a genetic reservoir of general fitness traits, such as resistance to infectious diseases and parasites as well as the ability to cope with harsh climates, temperature extremes, lack of fodder and drought. These traits have disappeared from the genetic make-up of the improved breeds selected exclusively for high performance. While intensive livestock production erodes genetic diversity, the keeping of animals in marginal environments conserves genetic diversity, and especially valuable fitness traits. Hence livestock keepers in marginal areas provide an important service for humanity at large that currently remains unrewarded, but which should be compensated for in the context of international framework regulations, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The current initiative is an important step towards achieving this long-term goal.

The results of the work will be shared in an international workshop, tentatively scheduled for early 2003.

For further information contact the following:

• WMK Warsi (wmkwarsi@yahoo.com, lpps@sify.com)
• GTZ Programme on Agrobiodiversity (OE 4556) ( Annette.Lossau-von@gtz.de)
• League for Pastoral Peoples (ilsekr@rediffmail.com)