From the beginning of the 1970s to the mid 1990s, consumption of meat and milk in developing countries increased by 175 million metric tons, more than twice the increase that occurred in developed countries. The market value of that increase in meat and milk consumption totaled approximately $155 billion (1990 US$), more than twice the market value of increased cereals consumption under the cereals "Green Revolution". In the early 1990's, the share of the world's meat consumed in developing countries was 47 percent, and their share of the world's milk was 41 percent, up sharply from the early 1980's. IFPRI projections to 2020 place the developing countries share of world meat production at 60 percent, and their share of milk at 52 percent, a veritable "Livestock Revolution". The population growth, urbanization, and income growth that fueled the recent increase in meat and milk consumption in developing countries are expected to continue. Farm income in those countries could rise dramatically, but whether this will be shared by the rural poor who need it most is still undetermined. Furthermore, current rapid increases in pollution, land degradation and the incidence of zoonotic disease from increasing concentration of animals near major cities are expected to continue and even accelerate.

A multi-disciplinary panel of 12 persons covering 9 countries and 6 continents focused on the implications of the Livestock Revolution in developing countries for world markets and trade, human nutrition, environmental sustainability, food safety, poverty alleviation, and livestock technology policies in developing countries.

Structural changes and policies in three large countries - China, India and Brazil -are especially important in assessing the likely course of world real prices for meat and milk over the next two decades. However, the best estimate under a wide variety of scenarios is that inflation-adjusted world prices for livestock products will be within 20 percent up or down from average real prices in the early 1990's, and thus will remain very substantially below the high prices of the early 1980's. While trade in livestock products is likely to expand rapidly, including North-to-South and South-to-South trade, it will be small relative to a projected huge increase in feedgrains exports from the more developed to the less developed countries. While the shares of cereals and livestock in the total agricultural output of the OECD countries has remained fairly constant since the 1960's, the share of livestock in total agricultural output in the South is rising rapidly. Protection of the livestock sector in most rapidly growing East Asia economies - which account for 30 percent of world meat trade - remains high, even up to 70 to 80 percent in the case of dairy, although it is unlikely that this will be maintained as countries in the region assess their overall interests with respect to upcoming WTO negotiations.

The implications of the Livestock Revolution for human nutrition are especially critical. As many as 1.3 billion people presently suffer from anemia and hundreds of millions more from other forms of micro-nutrient malnutrition - the great "silent hunger". Deficiencies in intake of iron, iodine, vitamin A, zinc and other micronutrients are needlessly condemning masses of poor people in developing countries to disease and decreased ability to live a full and productive life. While it is possible to deliver the needed nutrients through daily pills or a highly varied vegan diet, there is an increasing consensus that under the conditions of rural areas in most developing countries, only intake of at least a small amount of meat and milk can supply the necessary nutrients on a widespread sustainable daily basis in bio-available form. Fifty grams of meat daily for a young child will greatly improve his or her nutritional status, including the utilization of ingested foods of vegetable origin. However many developing countries are still far from reaching this level of consumption even on a national average basis, much less in the diets of the children of the poor.

The implications of the Livestock Revolution for environmental sustainability are worrisome, in both the North and the South. Livestock currently use just under half the world's arable area (26 percent directly, 21 percent indirectly for feedgrain). Much of East Asia, in particular, has seen increases in the density of annual carcass-equivalent meat production of at least 6 tons/km2 over the last 25 years, and other "hot spots" for nutrient loading are being observed in the Southeastern seaboard of the United States, Northern Europe, Central America, and Southeast and South Asia. Seventy percent of the projected increase in world meat production through 2020 is projected to come from non-ruminant sources. The primary associated pollution problems are nutrient loading and greenhouse gases from manure handling. These - as in the case of ruminants - can be successfully addressed by a combination of policy changes and technology development, but greater attention needs to be devoted to the interaction of the two instruments. Improved policy can capture the externalities inherent in point-source pollution, for example through the creation of markets for tradable property rights for carbon sequestration and improved enforcement of regulatory control. Technologies can both lower the amount of waste and improve its utilization for purposes such as bio-gas.

The increasing concentrations of veterinary pharmaceuticals in both edible livestock products and residues is another major issue -in the North such drugs now account for roughly half of chemical input costs to livestock production. Food safety issues have also become more prominent with the rise in trade of meat and milk, and it will be critical to distinguish between vital food safety concerns and non-transparent use of health regulations for protectionist purposes. Evidence also suggests that the resolution of food safety and protection issues in developing countries can also have a major impact on the scale of livestock production units, and thus on how the growth of production affects poor rural people in developing countries.

Unlike most crop technologies which often can be adopted by some, but not others in a given location, sanitary measures for livestock such as control of Foot-and-Mouth disease need to be implemented on a national basis. Similarly, introduction of HACCP standards in the handling of perishable produce under tropical conditions cannot allow a lower technological standard to be part of the same chain. To make matters worse, partial trade liberalization, such as GATT-related Minimum Access Guarantees for feedgrains in specific markets, creates the possibility of better-connected large-scale actors garnering lower cost inputs than the mass of small-scale producers, if they can capture the right to pay a lower tariff on their feedgrain imports. Capital subsidies to large units and the concentration of infrastructure in urban areas is also contributing to the rapid growth of large industrial pig and poultry operations within the mega-cities of developing countries.

To some extent these large-scale operations displace imports from the North, often behind protective barriers ostensibly erected to protect smallholders. However, they are also having the effect of crowding the traditional producers on family farms in developing countries out of their own fast-growing urban markets. Historically, the rural poor in most of Asia and Africa and parts of Latin America have earned a higher share of their much smaller incomes from livestock than have the relatively wealthy in rural areas. Paradoxically, livestock, which accounts for roughly a third of world agriculture and is one of the fastest growing parts of developing country agriculture, is progressively becoming less of a viable development path for the 70 percent of the world's rural poor that currently earn a significant share of their income from livestock. Since the one billion rural poor currently living in Asia, Africa and Latin America have relatively few alternatives for sustainable livelihoods, it is imperative to investigate more fully the options for using a combination of policy and technology to include rather than exclude them from the Livestock Revolution.

The evidence on recent technological change in world livestock production suggests that the developing countries are catching up in both pigs and poultry, and falling further behind in beef cattle and dairy. China's industrial sector is now at 60 percent of the productivity levels of the United States in pigs, and 30 percent for poultry, and is continuing to catch up. The further possibilities offered by modern livestock technology are awe-inspiring. The biotechnological revolution has not escaped the notice of large-scale producers in Brazil, who are beginning to use transgenic feed and forage crops, recombinantly derived proteins (ST), steroid growth promoters, molecular markers, cloning, transgenic rumen bugs and DNA vaccines. Much of this has occurred through private sector research and the transfer and adaptation of technologies from the North. On the other hand, relatively little has been invested world-wide in improving the health, feed, and genetic technologies that would allow small-scale operators to continue to play a role in a more integrated livestock production and marketing chain. Often the benefits of such technologies and the extension that must go with them are not capturable by a single private actor; they need to be treated as public goods.

Multidisciplinary policy research is essential to illustrate the costs and benefits of various courses of action with respect to the Livestock Revolution in developing countries, including doing nothing. Health and environmental threats will not respect national boundaries. Increasingly global livestock markets will ensure that price outcomes will eventually impact on everyone. Increased transparency in our understanding of the economic, policy and technological forces currently driving the rapid industrialization of livestock production will benefit the vast majority of producers and consumers in both the North and the South. It would be illusionary for producers and consumers of the North to think that what actually transpires in the South will not eventually have a big impact on what they in the North earn, eat, and spend on humanitarian relief and peace-keeping.