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Livestock Keepers’ Rights: A rights-based approach to invoking justice for pastoralists and biodiversity conserving livestock keepers

Adapted livestock breeds enable their keepers to take advantage of common property resources. They are an important resource for maintaining food security in remote areas and in the adaptation to climate change. To ensure their long-term survival, the livestock keepers who have bred and nurtured these breeds need a bundle of rights that enable them to continue keeping these breeds and make a living from them. Players in livestock development should support the struggle of the livestock keepers for recognition during the negotiations at various international forums. This article summarizes the three principles and five rights that make up Livestock Keepers’ Rights.

  • Title: Livestock Keepers’ Rights: A rights-based approach to invoking justice for pastoralists and biodiversity conserving livestock keepers
  • Author: Ilse Köhler-Rollefson and Evelyn Mathias / Policy Matters / 2010
  • Description: Adapted livestock breeds enable their keepers to take advantage of common property resources
  • Format: Zip
  • Pages: 3

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    Bio-cultural Community Protocols, starting point for endogenous livestock development?

    A biocultural protocol is a document that records a community’s role in ecosystem management, and states its rights to benefit from the ecosystem. Several groups of livestock keepers have created biocultural protocols describing their animal breeds and their indigenous knowledge about their breeds.

  • Title: Bio-cultural Community Protocols, starting point for endogenous livestock development?
  • Author: Ilse Köhler-Rollefson / Endogenous Development Magazine / 2010
  • Description: A biocultural protocol is a document that records a community's role in ecosystem management, and states its rights to benefit from the ecosystem
  • Format: Zip
  • Pages: 32

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    Livestock keepers’ rights: The state of discussion

    Livestock keepers’ rights is a concept developed by civil society during the “Interlaken process” and is advocated for by a group of non-government organizations, livestock keepers, pastoralist associations and scientists who support community-based conservation of local breeds. This study provides an overview of the rationale, history and content of livestock keepers’ rights and suggests that biocultural or community protocols are a means of invoking the principles of livestock keepers’ rights even in the absence of their legal enshrinement. It is concluded that besides striving for legal codification of livestock keepers’ rights its principles should form the basis of pro-poor and ecological livestock development in general.

  • Title: Livestock keepers’ rights: The state of discussion
  • Author: I.U. Köhler-Rollefson, E. Mathias, H. Singh, P. Vivekanandan and J. Wanyama / Animal Genetic Resources / 2010
  • Description: Livestock keepers’ rights is a concept developed by civil society during the “Interlaken process” and is advocated for by a group of non-government organizations, livestock keepers, pastoralist associations and scientists who support community-based conservation of local breeds
  • Format: Zip
  • Pages: 5

    • Download document