Losing the Links Between Livestock and Land

摘要

The industrial livestock sector has become footloose—no longer tied to a local land base for feed inputs or to supply animal power or manure for crop pro-duction. Spatially clustered within and among countries, this sector is expected to meet most of the income-driven doubling in meat demand forecast for developing coun-tries by 2030. Large-scale, intensive operations, in which animals are raised in confinement, already account for three-quarters of the world's poultry supply, 40% of its pork, and over two-thirds of all eggs. International trade in meat is also expanding; during the past 15 years, annual trade volumes have increased by 5.5% for pork and 8% for poultry. Livestock remains the world's largest user of land, but its use has shifted steadily from grazing to the consumption of feed crops. Unfortunately, environmental and resource costs of feed-crop and industrial-livestock systems—often separated in space from each other and from the consumer base— remain largely unaccounted for in the growth process.