Animal traction and transport in the 21st century: getting the priorities right.

摘要

For thousands of years, animals have been used to transport people and goods and to provide draught power for agricultural work. Today there are an estimated 100 million horses, mules and donkeys working in developing countries (FAOSTAT, 2008). The population of working bullocks, buffaloes, yaks and camelids is unknown but may be considerably higher than this. There is little recent information regarding the contribution of draught animal power to the economies of developing countries, although it has been suggested that more than half of the world’s population depends on animal power as its main energy source (Wilson, 2003). Contrary to the popular view that working animals are old-fashioned and irrelevant in the 21st century, their numbers are in fact stable in many parts of the world and actually increasing in others as human population demographics, global economic issues and a changing environment underline their importance in sustaining the livelihoods of farmers, pastoralists and the urban and rural poor (Starkey and Starkey, 2004; Starkey, 2010).