No abstract

The early initiatives on animal disease control measures were stimulated and justified by unacceptable losses of animals from rinderpest and foot and mouth disease (FMD) in Europe in the nineteenth century. In the 1960s, an increasingly large and ambitious veterinary profession turned to cost-benefit analysis methods in order to justify previous and proposed animal disease campaigns that supported livestock producers using more intensive production systems. These economic assessment methods were in the process of being developed and refined, and were increasingly important in the assessment of public investments. Some economists saw the use of cost-benefit analysis as simply an add-on to the technical aspects of animal disease control, and requested more rigorous economics when looking at the subject of animal health. This was the beginning of an ongoing debate on animal health economics that has developed into a number of different strands of thought. The paper reviews the development of animal health economics and the question whether there are new issues and opportunities that the subject needs to address. In this way it provides information on where animal health economics has come from and where it should be going next.

Poultry sectors are the fastest-changing component of the general livestock sector. These changes are typified by tremendous growth in poultry populations in industrial production systems. These industrial systems generally separate feed mills, breeding, production and processing into different operations. In a competitive market environment, such operations may be physically separated, but are closely integrated by strong private regulations. In less competitive market environments, encouraged by protection policies, industrial poultry chains are loosely integrated and are weakly regulated by governments. Large breeding flocks continue to exist, but are very weakly linked to low investment fattening and layer production units. Investment in processing is low and live bird markets are commonly used to market products. Loosely integrated industrial chains create enormous risks for the spread of contagious diseases such as highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), and affect the smallholder poultry producers who live and work alongside the industrial units and traditionally use live-bird markets for the sale of their own products and purchase of poultry. The review will discuss how changes in sector policy could improve industrial poultry sector performance and in turn reduce risks to the smallholder producers.

Primary livestock data collection methods can be classified into the following categories: (1) informal data collection methods (participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and rapid rural appraisal (RRA)); (2) formal data collection (cross-sectional and longitudinal); and (3) combination of informal and formal data collection methods. This chapter explains those methods and details some problems of sampling for the different methods.