Livestock and Climate Justice: Challenging Mainstream Policy Narratives

In discussions around food systems and the climate, livestock is often painted as the villain. While some livestock production in some places contributes significantly to climate change, this is not universally the case. This article focuses on pastoral production systems – extensive, often mobile systems using marginal rangelands across around half of the world’s surface, involving many millions of people. By examining the assumptions behind standard calculations of greenhouse gas emissions, a systematic bias against pastoralism is revealed. Many policy and campaign stances fail to discriminate between different material conditions of production, lumping all livestock systems together. Injustices arise through the framing of debates and policy knowledge; through procedures that exclude certain people and perspectives; and through the distributional consequences of policies. In all cases, extensive livestock keepers lose out. In reflecting on the implications for European pastoralism, an alternative approach is explored where pastoralists’ knowledge, practices and organisations take centre‑stage.

What’s beyond capitalist natures? The view from a camel’s back

The authors’ formulation ‘capitalist natures’ may be too quick to imply that the formal and/or real subsumption of all natures is in the process of being accomplished. I point toward liminal and dynamic cases, such as camels in pastoral production systems, to trouble the mental model of a spatialized ‘outside’ that is either simply colonized by or subsidizing capitalist relations.

Breeding lucerne for persistence

Cultivated lucerne is the most widely grown forage legume in pastoral agriculture. Persistence is critical for most pastoral production systems and its definition includes concepts of productivity, but maintenance of adequate plant numbers is essential. There were three important eras in lucerne persistence breeding: species introduction leading to local varieties and land races (adaptation), development of multiple pest-resistant, autumn dormancy-specific cultivars, and introducing complex traits and the use of biotechnologies. Today’s persistent cultivar needs, at a minimum, adaptation, proper autumn dormancy, and targeted pest resistances. Adding complex, ‘persistence-limiting’ traits to these minimum base traits, such as tolerance to grazing, acid, aluminum-toxic soils, and drought, is successfully being achieved via traditional selection, but biotechnologies and inter-specific hybridisations are also being employed in some cases. The main issues around biotechnologies are public perception and regulatory issues which continue to hamper transgene deployment while genetic marker programs need to lower costs and concentrate on successful application. There is not one persistent ‘ideotype’ that will fill all situations, but specific ones need to be developed and targeted for geographies such as the subtropics. Finally, breeders need to understand what persistence traits lucerne producers are willing to pay a premium to obtain.