Carlos Seré, Director General of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), explains why genebanks and other measures are needed to protect livestock diversity, which is essential for ensuring world food supplies.

Q: How seriously endangered is the world's livestock genetic diversity?

CS: Currently, about one-fifth of the world's 7,616 livestock breeds are at risk of extinction. For example, the hardy Ankole cattle of East and Central Africa are being replaced by high-yielding Holstein-Friesian dairy cows and could disappear within the next 50 years.

In the industrialized world, just six tightly defined breeds already account for 90 percent of all cattle. A 2007 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization showed that over-reliance on a small number of livestock breeds is resulting in the loss of around one breed every month. Livestock genetic diversity is especially vulnerable in the developing world, which is where the vast majority of farm animal breeds reside.

In Vietnam, the proportion of indigenous sows dropped from 72 per cent in 1994 to just 26 percent 8 years later. In some countries, chicken populations have changed practically overnight from genetic mixtures of backyard fowl to selected uniform stocks raised under intensive conditions.

Across the developing world, livestock are herded by pastoralists or tended by farmers who grow both crops and livestock on small plots of land. Many of these farmers face a daily struggle to survive, so they are unlikely to prioritize conservation of their rare breeds - at least not without significant support.

Q: What is the tradeoff between improving livestock production and conserving livestock diversity, and how can it be better managed?

CS: From Africa to Asia, farmers of the South, like the farmers in Europe and the Americas before them, are increasingly choosing the breeds that will produce more milk, meat and eggs to feed their hungry families and raise their incomes.

They should be supported in doing so. But we cannot afford to altogether lose the breeds that are abandoned. Many of them possess genetic attributes that are critical for coping with threats such as climate change and emerging pests and diseases.

We urgently need policy support for their conservation. This means creating incentives that encourage farmers to keep traditional animals. For example, breeding programs could boost the productivity of local breeds, or farmers could be helped to access niche markets for traditional livestock products. The latter include grass-fed Boran beef raised by dryland pastoral herders in Kenya and Ethiopia, sweet milk from the long-horned Ankole cattle of Uganda and Rwanda, buffalo milk produced by urban dairies in India, and the popular free-range "black" chicken and native Mong Cai potbellied pigs kept by ethnic communities in the remote mountains of northern Vietnam.

Policymakers must also consider the value of indigenous breeds when designing restocking programs following droughts, disease epidemics, civil conflicts and other disasters that deplete herds.

Q: With such support, can farmers and herders do enough to stop the loss of livestock genetic diversity?

CS: We must do all we can to help farmers and herders conserve the farm animal breeds they have selected and nurtured over many generations. But poor farmers cannot stem all the diversity loss in farm animal breeds, even with additional help. We need a parallel, even bigger effort, to link local, national and international resources and conserve livestock genetic diversity through dedicated livestock genebanks.

The livestock breeds that need to be conserved, in Africa especially, are not confined tidily within national boundaries. They are important regionally and even globally. For that reason and also because it's expensive to conserve livestock genetic diversity, we urgently need international initiatives to reinforce national efforts.

National livestock genebanks already exist in Europe and the Americas. But with the exception of South Africa and possibly Namibia, they are practically nonexistent in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to many threatened livestock breeds.

International livestock genebanks should store frozen cells, semen and DNA of endangered livestock from across the world. It is these genes that will help us feed humanity and cope with unforeseen crises.

Such facilities should also be used to conserve the legacy of 10,000 years of animal husbandry. Collections must be accompanied by comprehensive descriptions of the animals, the populations from which they were obtained, and the environments and local practices under which they were raised.

The necessary technology is already available. Cryopreservation has been used for years to aid both human and animal reproduction. What's lacking is a strong policy framework for widespread use of the available technologies to preserve livestock genetic diversity.

Q: Does the erosion of livestock genetic diversity merit as much attention as that focused on crop diversity?

CS: Documenting and conserving the diversity of cattle, goats, sheep, swine and poultry is at least as essential as the maintenance of crop diversity for ensuring future food supplies in the face of health and environmental threats.

Just as we should know which crop varieties are most tolerant to flooding or disease, we should know which kinds of milking goat can bounce back quickly from a drought, which breeds of cow resist infection from sleeping sickness and which types of chicken can survive avian flu.

But while crop genes are being stored in thousands of collections across the world and a fail-safe genebank buried in the Arctic permafrost, no comparable effort exists to conserve livestock genes.