Pastoralists are important for food production, ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, maintenance of landscapes. They practice a sustainable, low carbon, animal welfare friendly way of livestock production. If we want to put the livestock sector on a sustainable trajectory, we need to support these kinds of systems and reign in others that are less beneficial.

But nobody knows how many pastoralists there are and most figures provided are pure conjecture. Therefore, LPP commissioned five country studies to look at the available data sets for pastoralism. We made the somewhat surprising discovery that in no case the government actually uses pastoralism as a category for data collection.

Our briefs cover Argentina, Germany, India, Kenya and Uganda. And there is also a summary brief that analyses the results of all studies and makes the recommendation to the FAO to take the lead in initiating data collection on pastoralism and livestock production systems at country level.