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Project Description

Nearly 23 million people (70% of the poor population) in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) are smallholder farmers who depend on livestock for food security and income. Besides supporting crop production through draft power and producing manure to maintain soil fertility, livestock are an important, and often the only, source of cash income for poor farmers. They are an investment asset and serve as insurance against crop failure. Livestock are a particularly important source of income for ethnic minority farmers and for women, who account for over 50% of agriculture production. However, transboundary animal diseases (TADs) can have devastating impact on small-farmer economies as well as national economies, given their propensity for rapid spread, vast destruction of livestock, disruption of trade, and loss of vital economic resources. Policy and technological options that make the livelihoods of livestock-dependent poor farmers, especially ethnic minorities and women farmers, less vulnerable to the devastating effects of animal diseases and support their access to markets for economic growth are major priorities in the GMS. With demand for livestock products growing in Asia and presenting significant opportunities for small farmers to benefit from improved productivity of livestock, strong subregional cooperation and improved capacity to combat infectious livestock diseases, which travel across borders, have become critical. The technical assistance (TA) project was therefore designed to create a subregional framework for cooperation among the GMS countries to tackle the risk of TADs, and build better capacity at all levels to combat these diseases.

Progress (as of March 2021)

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