Livestock are ubiquitous in the developing world. The "big five" - cattle, sheep, goats, poultry and pigs - are joined by nine other popular farm animals and 26 or so more specialized species. More than half a billion people raise farm animals, either as nomadic herders on pastoral rangelands, as smallholders of mixed farms who raise crops along with livestock, or as peri-urban residents who raise a few animals in their backyards. All of these small-scale livestock enterprises matter to governments of developing countries because livestock accounts for some 30% of their agricultural gross domestic product, a figure expected to rise to 40% by 2030.

The diverse livestock production systems, like most crop production systems, are changing in response to globalization, urbanization, environmental degradation, climate change, and science and technology. But the fastest changes are occurring within the livestock systems themselves as they respond to markets. The developing world's rising populations and household incomes combine to create soaring demand for milk, meat, eggs and other livestock products.

The rate of change in the livestock sector is so rapid that many local livestock breeds developed by small-scale farmers over millennia no longer have time to evolve adaptations to their new and continuously changing circumstances or the new needs of their owners. Many are simply dying out at unprecedented and accelerating rates. On average, one breed disappears every month, and 20% of the world's uniquely adapted breeds of domestic animals are at risk of extinction.

Seventy percent of the world's known livestock genetic diversity now resides on small farms and in remote regions of developing countries. With all the challenges facing developing countries and their 1 billion people who live on less than a dollar a day, the question arises as to what immediate practical and cost-effective steps can be taken to preserve the wealth of livestock genetic diversity.

From a research viewpoint, it is clear that effectively managing the world's remaining livestock genetic resources requires characterizing the remaining populations to decide which are worth saving and why. Researchers must find ways of broadening the use of those populations deemed useful, and they must conserve the most important livestock genetic diversity for possible future use by poor and rich farmers alike.

From a political viewpoint, new and appropriate institutional and policy frameworks are required, as well as lots of policy discussions, to find ways to strengthen national and international programs that support the conservation of livestock biodiversity.

While the political issues are being discussed at length at national and intergovernmental fora, four practical steps can be taken immediately to ensure that the world's remaining livestock biodiversity is conserved for future generations:

1. Establish gene banks. Freeze the semen, embryos and tissues of local breeds and store them indefinitely to protect indigenous livestock germplasm from extinction and to provide long-term insurance against catastrophic losses from war, drought, famine and other future shocks.
2. Keep it on the hoof. Give local farmers and communities incentive to maintain local livestock breeds by, for example, improving access for poor farmers and herders to markets, perhaps including niche markets, where they can sell their traditional livestock products.
3. Move it or lose it. Encourage the safe movement of livestock populations within and between countries, regions and continents to widen the global access to, and the use and conservation of, farm animal genetic resources.
4. Match breeds with environments. Optimize livestock production by expertly matching livestock genotypes with farmer ambitions, fast-changing environments, specific natural resources, production systems and socioeconomic circumstances.

Advances in several scientific fields promise to give rise to innovations that will improve the conservation and husbandry of animal genetic resources. Breakthroughs in livestock reproductive technologies and functional genomics, as well as in the information fields of bioinformatics and spatial analysis, are now being systematically marshaled for the first time to address this challenge.

Whereas societies and countries tend to differ in their short-term interests regarding livestock production, their long-term interests - such as learning how to cope with unforeseen changes in livestock production systems and their environments - tend to converge. This creates real opportunities for international scientific, environmental and aid agencies to take collective action with developing countries to conserve the world's remaining livestock genetic diversity.