A profile of South African sustainable animal production and greenhouse gas emissions.

Abstract

South Africa’s rich legacy of sustainable animal production reaches back centuries. Extensive animal production with cattle, sheep, and goats in pastoral systems and chickens and swine around settlements was well established among the African inhabitants of southern Africa before the European exploration and settlements. Animal production had migrated down Africa from the Middle-East and North Africa. Cattle were present in the Zambezi region 300 BCE and small stock at the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, 20 centuries ago (Maree and Plug, 1993; Mason and Maule, 1960). The presence of a sustained animal industry in southern Africa for millennia emphasized that pastoral systems fit in well with the wildlife that populated the region. The inhabitants drew sustenance from both domesticated and nondomesticated animal clusters and were sustainable despite sporadic droughts and endemic livestock diseases. The livestock were physiologically and morphologically highly adapted to the range of climatic regions and the seasonal variation of the nutritional value of natural herbage. Southern Africa with its indigenous livestock and inherent animal production practices was uniquely different from the Americas that had few domesticated animals (Stahl, 2008) and Australasia that had none (Parsonson, 2000) at the time of the European colonization. The region had the intellectual capital for livestock farming with suitable types of livestock. This article presents a profile of sustainable animal production and greenhouse gas emissions against an historical background, and the gains in animal husbandry in South Africa, which are important in the long-term context of sustainability.