Stakeholders, systems and issues in urban livestock keeping

There is a wide variety of forms and functions among urban livestock systems, and a high degree of cohesion between these systems and the outside world. Such variation and interrelation imply a need to establish who the major stakeholders are, what the major types of livestock systems are and what problems such as zoonoses, food hygiene, smell and dung effluent they face, before going on to list management approaches, technologies and policies for coping with them.

MAJOR STAKEHOLDERS IN URBAN LIVESTOCK KEEPING

Among the stakeholders in urban livestock systems are the shantytown women and children who make a living by, among other activities, feeding their food wastes to rabbits, guinea pigs or poultry. Other stakeholders are government officials, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, leaders of dairy cooperatives, feed and medicine merchants, retailers and wealthy consumers. Examples of various urban livestock activities and the occupational groups of the people involved are given in Table 3.
The differences among stakeholders imply different interests and perceptions regarding urban livestock. Government officials may know little or nothing about the socio-economic and technical aspects of animal production but they can be zealous in protecting their own private interests. Entrepreneurs may be retired or active government employees, their wives, single women or unemployed casual labourers; they may be schoolchildren or industrialists who know how to make good use of government subsidies and tax laws. Combined with the different forms of urban livestock, the result is a wide range of different ways of perceiving problems and opportunities in urban livestock; and some form of categorization is required to cope with this variation.

TABLE 3

Non-agricultural and agriculture-related occupations of poultry producers in the United Republic of Tanzania

	Dar-es-Salaam		Mwanza
	(No.)	(%)	(No.)	(%)
Occupation
Shopkeeper/trader	8	36	5	15
Retired/unemployed	3	14	4	12
Professional/office employee	1	5	14	41
Sewer/tailor	1	5	8	24
Military/government employee	0	0	2	6
Other occupation	9	39	1	3
Activity
Keeps dairy cows	23	37	18	50
Sells livestock products	6	10	1	3
Operates feed/maize mill	2	3	3	8
Farms	25	40	4	11
Involved in veterinary or agricultural extension work	2	3	3	8
Keeps small livestock	3	5	4	11
Other agricultural occupation	1	2	3	8
Total	62	100	36	100

Note: Some producers gave more than one response.

Source: Sumberg (1996a).

For instance, all those people who own a bullock cart could be regarded as representing one group; other groups could be all those who own two, or three or more dairy cows. Such people depend on their livestock for at least part of their and their families' livelihoods, and they will be reluctant to give up this source. The same is true of single parents who are raising extra income, improving their children's diets or earning money for school expenses by keeping animals, which also help to dispose of kitchen waste or by-products from the local industry (Photos 2 and 3). However, not everybody within the same level of urban society shares the same positive view of urban livestock keeping. For example, a livestock keeper may live next door to the mother of a child who comes home with clothes dirtied by animal excreta, or there may be a neighbour who gets angry about goats causing havoc in his vegetable plot.
A second category of people consists of local legislators and civil servants. Their main concerns are about disputes in their neighbourhoods, or about raising some extra money by fining people for breaking the law. Many administrators regard urban livestock keeping as a sign of backwardness, but there are exceptions. For example, much of the urban dairy business of Dar-es-Salaam in the United Republic of Tanzania is carried out by the city's civil servants as a sideline. In some places there is a strong relationship between local legislation and the large businesses that are engaged in intensive, industrial systems, but these are not the main focus of this report.
A third category of stakeholders in urban livestock are those administrators, and often academics, who are professionally geared to see only one aspect of what ever it is they are looking at. For example, people who work in the public health office will be concerned only about public health; tax collectors will worry only about tax (and fee) collecting; those in charge of urban housing will concentrate on construction plans and ignore the animals; and veterinarians will be interested in zoonoses and private practice opportunities. This description may be somewhat exaggerated but it does characterize the ways in which many employees of government offices tend to function. A health official cannot compromise on public health even when animals represent an essential form of income that helps local people to survive; a tax-collector cannot tolerate informal arrangements that are difficult to administer, even when they form an essential part of local livelihoods. Reports from such sector departments and/or discipline-oriented professionals are very likely to emphasize problems in whatever area they are regulating or studying. The identification of creative and holistic solutions is not part of their mandate, nor have they been trained to do so. One possible way of improving livestock systems, therefore, lies in the (re-)training of government officials to use their rules to help strengthen the positive aspects of urban livestock while overcoming the negative ones.

PHOTO

A goat in Khartoum (the Sudan) utilizing urban and household waste

A fourth category of stakeholders in urban agriculture is that of the national and international planners and policy-makers who are concerned with the production of sufficient food, of plant and animal origin, to ensure that people get enough to eat. These people tend to emphasize the fact that urban livestock and agriculture produce only a fraction of the dietary food requirements for an urban population, and they rightly concede that urban livestock and crops can never produce enough. A combination of the possible pollution and health risks of keeping animals in close proximity to people and the competition with other sectors (for space and resources), leads planners and policy- makers to suggest that the production of food from animal origin is better shifted to larger specialized units outside the city. As with the discipline- and sector-oriented people, these people also tend to overlook the fact that urban livestock can fulfil many roles besides producing milk or eggs, and that a small contribution to food security can make a lot of difference at the family level. Among planners and policy-makers it would be beneficial to increase awareness about the essential roles that animals can play in the economy, sociology and ecology of cities.
A fifth but very relevant category cuts across all the others. This categorization distinguishes between, on one hand, so-called "linear" thinkers who are interested in only one aspect, e.g. food production and, on the other hand, "non-linear" thinkers who consider several aspects and interests to reach holistic approaches to the issue. The two lines of thought should supplement each other, but in practice they tend to run counter to each other. Successful action is often the result of local creative initiative rather than general across-the-board legislation. The distinction between linear and non-linear is real but vague; in this publication such a distinction facilitates an understanding of the technological issues that exist in the complex systems involved in urban agriculture. In essence, these issues arise in any complex system, whether urban livestock, mixed farming or manufacture/supply chains. The unique aspect of urban livestock systems is that they present a microcosm of livestock systems in general, by relating to pigs, cows, draught animals, pets, milk, social and biophysical functions, etc. Because urban livestock systems include the direct involvement of such a wide variety of stakeholders, they provide a unique example of working with complexity and a good opportunity to learn about similar aspects of agriculture in general (FAO, 2000).

MAJOR SYSTEMS IN URBAN LIVESTOCK KEEPING

General issues

A working definition of an urban livestock system was given in Chapter 1, but urban livestock systems can be defined in many different ways and at many different levels. A global-level classification, which may be useful for organizations such as FAO, may be completely irrelevant for interventions at the city or suburb level. At that level, for example, a distinction may be made between monogastric and ruminant systems (pigs, chickens and ducks versus cows, buffaloes and goats or sheep), but that may, in turn, be irrelevant when two neighbours quarrel about their respective systems being a public nuisance or an asset. Participation of local stakeholders is indispensable to choose relevant criteria and discard irrelevant ones. However, the major patterns that occur in urban livestock systems seem to follow a set of classification criteria based on differences among cities, population densities and histories, local stakeholders, animal species, etc. The descriptions and classifications shown in Table 4 are not exhaustive, they only show the variation in approaches to defining urban livestock systems.

TABLE 4

Descriptions and characteristics of urban livestock systems, a random choice from the literature

Peri-urban producers have grazing land, located mainly on the outskirts of the town.

The urban interface is characterized by strong urban influences; easy access to markets, services and other inputs; ready supplies of labour; but relative shortage of land and risks from pollution and urban growth.

Peri-urban livestock zones [of Dar-es-Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania] exhibit both urban and rural characteristics, ... over a zone ... between the high-density, urban city centre (i.e. within a radius of 20 km) and the low-density, rural areas beyond a 40 to 50 km radius.

Most of the people in cities and peri-urban areas practise urban agriculture because it provides food for them; for income generation or poverty alleviation (because of the proximity to the market); for waste management (i.e. people take manure from the cattle barn or poultry house and send it to the farm); as a means of converting by-products (e.g. brewers' spent grain, bran, seed cakes, low-quality roughage) into high-quality proteins/food (milk, meat and eggs).

The (peri)-urban livestock system of Mexico City is located in an urban conglomerate that lies about 2 000 m above sea level, covers an area of 1 400 km2 and has a population of 22 million people.

Peri-urban Damascus (Syrian Arab Republic) is defined ... as the area surrounding Damascus within 30 to 50 km.... The total area is about 1 605 543 ha

(8.6 percent of the Syrian Arab Republic's total area). According to land use, the study area is divided as follows ...: cultivable land: 147 276 ha (9.17 percent); uncultivable land: 221 644 ha (14 percent) which includes buildings, public roads, rivers, lakes, rocky and sandy lands, steppe and pastures and accounts for 75 percent of the study area; forests: the study area is considered as very poor in forests, which do not exceed 2 percent of its total area; ... The study area has the following characteristics: small cultivable land and small agricultural holdings; population expansion that is basically at the expense of cultivable land; huge population with high population growth rate particularly in the countryside around Damascus; available rivers and well water, particularly in districts near Damascus city; a moderate climate throughout the year which allows intensive agriculture; huge animal numbers and intensive livestock production; cattle farming by smallholders; and poultry farming on large farms.

Source: Summarized from Schiere (FAO, 2000) based on work by Sumberg (1996a, 1997), FAO (1998f) and MAAR/FAO/GTZ (1997).

History and development of urban livestock systems

All cities differ from one another in size, development history, sociology and structure. Mexico City has a popu lation of around 22 million people, while Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire) and Dar-es-Salaam (United Republic of Tanzania) count about 2 and 3 million people, respect ively. When thinking in terms of future developments in opportunities for urban livestock, distinctions can also be made between cities that have grown in blanket form (Figure 1a) and cities that were planned according to the concept of satellite towns (Figure 1b). Obviously, a range of intermediate forms exists between blanket and satellite patterns, and practice does not always follow planning. Some cities opt for decentralized planning or laissez faire, others for centralized planning, and still others seem to have developed without any clear plans at all. Singapore is a typical case of a city with strong legislative measures, but in other cities hardly any effect is expected from legislation other than an increase in bribery. Keeping dairy cows may be impossible in the heart of modern Mumbai (India), Tokyo (Japan) or Amsterdam (the Netherlands); but rabbits, chickens and other small (pet) animals are commonly kept on balconies and in backyards everywhere. Even the keeping of dairy cows and/or goats can be quite acceptable in urban areas with much green, or where there are a lot of by-products from agro-industries. In the nineteenth century, urban dairies were quite important in areas around beer breweries in Copenhagen (Denmark) and around distilleries in major United States cities, while today they still supply a good income in Dar-es-Salaam, particularly to civil servants (Table 3).

This publication suggests that the possibilities for urban livestock should be distinguished according to a classification of cities into categories such as growing but diverse megalopolises (Mexico and Karachi [Pakistan]), stone/brick/concrete cities (Mumbai, Jakarta [Indonesia], Bangkok [Thailand] and Lima [Peru]) and garden cities (generally but not exclusively the fringes of cities such as in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi [Kenya]).

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