Sheep production and sustainability in Latin America & the Caribbean: A combined productive, socio-economic & ecological footprint approach

Abstract

Currently, the sustainability of the planet is threatened mainly by the excessive extraction of resources from ecosystems to meet the needs of a growing and more demanding human population. Although products of animal origin are an essential source of protein for humans and have shown great growth due to the increasing demand worldwide, this sector contributes significantly to the anthropic environmental impact (EI). Certainly, animal production faces important challenges to promote food security, but it is required to improve its eco-environmental performance. Therefore, it is essential to generate comprehensive EI evaluations considering the carbon footprint (CF), the blue water footprint (BWF), economic footprint (E$F), social footprint (SF) and their interactions. We aimed to quantify the economic value (EV) generated by sheep production systems (SPS) in Latin America & the Caribbean (LAC) and compare it with the EV of both CF + BWF, across 1998–2018. The variables analyzed were deflated to their 2011 value in euros, indicating the value also in USA-dollars (USD). LAC reported an annual average of 80.84 million sheep, 305.84 kt of meat, 147.95 kt of wool, and 89.34 kt of milk. When comparing the EV-SPS [930.34 M€ (1203.67 MUSD)] with the EV-BWF [590.03 M€ (763.38 MUSD)]; 1.09 m3 H2O kg meat-milk-wool protein [MMWP] + EV-CF [168.06 M€ (217.44 MUSD)]; 69.56 kg CO2eq kg−1 MMWP−1], a positive balance was observed. In fact, the EV of the ecological footprint (EF) signified 81.49% of the EV-SPS, coupled with an interesting socio-economic effect since it has the potential to generate a basic annual income for 217,686 families, which are essentially distributed in marginal-rural areas in the LAC-countries. Our results confirm that SPS-LAC are highly eco-efficient considering their sophisticated adaptation to transform forages, generally of low quality, into animal protein (i.e. meat-milk-wool) with an undisputable high biological value. Such a scenario, based on a low ecological footprint (i.e. CF & BWF) coupled with a positive socio-economic impact, undoubtedly promote the sustainability of SPS-LAC. The last generating a positive impact not only on the generation of sheep products (i.e. meat, milk, wool) under a clean, green and ethical context, but promoting the well-being of the sheep-producer and his family.