The need for national livestock surveillance in Pakistan

Abstract

Ranked amongst the top five milk-producing countries globally, the Pakistan dairy industry can help to overcome food shortage and hunger, alleviate poverty and positively impact economic growth. This influencing role could potentially be more significant while the COVID-19 pandemic severely affects humanity, challenges the economy and increases the risk of global food shortage. However, its large national population of dairy livestock contrasts with Pakistan's top-five ranking, indeed, four to five Pakistani cows produce milk equivalent to one dairy cow of countries with a well-developed dairy industry. Low milk yield per cow negatively impacts the national production and compromises the development of an efficient processing sector, such that consumers are very often forced to use adulterated milk sold by local ‘milkmen.’ As a consequence, while committed to alleviating global hunger, Pakistan imports in excess of half a million tons of milk and milk-based products annually. Many studies have identified unproductive, inefficient and imprecise management issues combined with poor genetics and imbalanced nutrition as the leading barriers to improvement in the Pakistani dairy livestock sector. At an individual level, lack of awareness, affordability issues, illiteracy and low ambition of a large percentile of dairy farmers creates additional significant barriers. To address low productivity and poor genetics, Pakistani corporate farms and wealthier individual farmers import genetically improved breeds to attain high milk yields. However, they are then faced with the challenge of managing such breeds to attain sustainable and persistent milk yields under Pakistani climatic conditions, often risking excessive culling even to the point of business liquidation. In developed dairy industries, automated sensor-based livestock management systems are now available to help monitor, compute, and optimize procedures in real-time and are proven to increase productivity and profitability. The term precision livestock farming (PLF) is used to describe systems that monitor individual animals or groups of animals to overcome management deficiencies and optimize productivity. My stance in this Opinion Paper is that adopting and utilizing such precision technologies may support Pakistan in raising its livestock resources toward greater productivity, thereby helping to overcome the global food shortage.

Technical Efficiency, Economic Sustainability, and Environmental Implications of Dairy Farms in Pakistan

“…The third constraint requires that the sum of the weights must equal 1 and that all weights must be greater than or equal to 0. quantity of inputs and their respective market prices. The formula for calculating variable costs is given by: (2) where F Price and C Price represent the market prices of fodder and concentrates, respectively.…”

“…Despite this importance, the sector faces persistent challenges that limit its full potential. Low milk yields, inefficient farm management, and the increasing environmental vulnerability stemming from climate change are prime areas of concern [2,3]. Climate change poses severe risks to dairy production in Pakistan. Research demonstrates that farmers' awareness of climate risks, their risk tolerance levels, and their access to information can significantly influence their adoption of adaptation strategies [4,5].…”

Future trajectory of SARS-CoV-2: Constant spillover back and forth between humans and animals

“…In developing countries, the COVID-19 crisis has severely impacted poultry production and sustainability ( Attia et al., 2022 ). As a result, Pakistan has raised the need for national livestock surveillance for COVID-19 ( Aamir Shahzad, 2022 ). Some scholars suggested that it is also necessary to strengthen the control of mink farms to prevent the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants in this animal reservoir ( Colson et al., 2021 ).…”

A Novel Active RFID and TinyML based system for livestock Localization in Pakistan

“…They contribute to the country's economy and agricultural livelihoods as key sources of milk production. Pakistan is one of the top milk-producing countries, with cows and buffaloes being the main contributors [2]. These animals supply valuable milk supplies, serving the nutritional demands of the population and supporting the dairy sector's expansion [1], and [2].…”