Smart Dialogue for Sustainable Livestock
A session with this title was co-organised by Wageningen Livestock Research and Heifer Netherlands. The session happened on World Food Day, the yearly network event of Netherlands Food Partnership and its partners. As the event theme was Navigating in a Changing World in this session participants discussed aspects of sustainability in livestock aided by the Livestock Sustainability Assessment tool.
The dairy livestock sector in low and middle income countries is navigating through a series of sustainability challenges: an increasing demand for quality animal proteins, adapt to climate change, reduce emissions, reduce losses and contribute to the rural economy of mixed crop-livestock systems. The Livestock Sustainability Assessment tool (intro video, LSAT online tool) aims to support the stakeholder dialogue about sustainability challenges. In this session participants were introduced to livestock projects in Honduras, Nepal and Ethiopia and applied the tool to these cases.
The tool has four main steps: a) define most relevant aspects of sustainability for a specific case, b) then list per aspect the relevant indicators and c) give scores to each indicator based on the available info. In the last step scores are aggregated in a spider web. Dialogue is structured following these steps and from comparing the results.
In the photo below one can see how session participant scored differently from project staff in the Honduras case. Note there is no right or wrong with this tool, the visualisations show different perspectives in support of a smart dialogue.
During the session at WFD, participants discussed their perceptions of various sustainability aspects and indicators. Take for instance farmers gross income - expressed as percentage of retail prices (e.g. 50%) - this indicator brought up different views on whether farm gate prices in that range could lead to a profitable income. These discussions clearly showed the subjectivity of many sustainability aspects, and importance of context and the need for open dialogue. During the session the application of the tool was also heavily discussed. Participants agreed the tool could be used at the start of a project to create a baseline, or as a decision support tool. The importance of balanced participation of all stakeholders in such sustainability dialogues was also underlined, thereby avoiding that only one category of participants voice their opinion.
Do you want to try the LSAT tool for yourself? You can now dive into the cases and test it!
Go to LSAT online tool, choose individual assessment, leave some general profile details and get started with one of these 3 cases. You can use the fact sheet and the video of your choice.
Author
Wim Goris
coalition builder
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