“When it rains and drylands bloom, one realises the remarkable diversity of living organisms they harbour. Long overlooked, this diversity is crucial to the food security of a large share of the world’s population.” This information brief describes the importance of dryland agricultural biodiversity, outlines the threats facing it, and points to the key role that local people play in conserving it.
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.
