Livestock Keeper’s Rights are three principles and five rights that ensure that livestock keepers can continue raising their animals. This document gives practical guidelines on how development professionals, private companies, researchers, governments and policymakers can turn the rights into practice.
Livestock keepers’ rights is a concept developed by civil society during the “Interlaken process” and is advocated for by a group of non-government organizations, livestock keepers, pastoralist associations and scientists who support community-based conservation of local breeds. This study provides an overview of the rationale, history and content of livestock keepers’ rights and suggests that biocultural or community protocols are a means of invoking the principles of livestock keepers’ rights even in the absence of their legal enshrinement. It is concluded that besides striving for legal codification of livestock keepers’ rights its principles should form the basis of pro-poor and ecological livestock development in general.
Biocultural community protocols are a new approach with great potential for empowering pastoralists and other traditional livestock-keeping communities. They are both a process and a document in which communities invoke their rights as guardians of biological diversity under Article 8j of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. Claiming rights for in-situ conservation, they also help promote Livestock Keepers’ Rights to maintain their breeds and continue their traditional management practices.
Biocultural community protocols put on record traditional knowledge and the biodiversity that communities steward, in a process that the communities themselves drive. In developing a biocultural community protocol, communities become informed about national and international laws that protect their rights. This book provides an overview of the process as well as its legal background and describes the first experiences with implementing this approach by livestock keepers in Asia and Africa.
