Thematic Focus
Small Holder Poultry ll Small Ruminants ll Common Property Resources - "Livestock" ll Other Livestock
Poultry is the fastest growing component of global meat production, consumption, and trade, with developing and transition economies playing a leading role in the expansion. In addition to providing opportunities to increase poultry exports, rising poultry production spurs growth in global import demand for feeds and other inputs and in investment opportunities in these sectors. In the South Asian context, assessments of the USDA (2005) recounts India’s remarkable growth in 
poultry meat production, which grew about 6 percent annually during the 1980s, accelerating to 11 percent annually in the 1990s and nearly 19 percent during 1997-2002 largely due to growth in commercial poultry within states like Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamil Nadu .
The small scale dimension of the poultry production also provides rare and extremely promising opportunities for poverty reduction and women’s empowerment. Given the dual realities that i) many of the poor, especially the ultra poor either do not have any livestock or have a few chickens (Islam and Jabbar 2005) and ii) the unanimous subscription to the Millennium Development Goals stipulating the target to reduce the numbers of the poor and hungry in the world by half by 2015, the potential of small scale poultry production and marketing as a vehicle of poverty reduction and food security is largely eminent. Read More...
SA PPLPP is focusing on the theme common property resources in relation to
livestock Common property refers to some form of shared resource tenure – usually involving a group that uses and manages the resources. Common property resources constitute all such resources which are meant for common use of the villagers without any individual ownership right (Jodha, 1986). These resources can broadly be categorized into common property land resources, common forest resources and common water resources. 
In addition and referring to the agrarian society in South Asia especially, there are also a range of private lands which are seasonally open for grazing; livestock can normally freely graze on crop land after the crop is harvested providing animals access to stubbles, crop residues and grasses on boundaries while available fodder trees are lopped; private pasture lands too are normally open to all when the grass crops have been harvested. The Good Practices identified primarily refer to the former; i.e. Common Property Resources (CPR ) namely grazing lands, forested areas, and other community lands under common property regimes. Read More...
In South Asia, small ruminants contribute enormously towards promotion of livelihoods security and as an insurance cover to cope with crop failures particularly for rural landless, small and marginal fe/male farmers (Pasha 2000, Misra 2005). Goat farming is also increasingly being taken up by peri-urban poor population due to easy market access and as a source of nutritional security for the household (Pollot and Wilson 2009). The small ruminants are favored because of low 
investments, easy to raise and manage, low feed requirement compared to cattle, ability to thrive on different flora, high disease resistance, and superior market potential.
Sheep rearing is a livelihood activity of shepherds rearing herds on nomadic pastoral systems fully or partially in the semi arid, arid and mountainous regions. Shepherds maintain their stock by grazing on community lands by employing family labour with negligible economic inputs and marginal outputs (Chauhan and Moorti, 1999). Moreover it is common among lower caste families to rear 1-3 sheep or goats whereby making use of tethering systems, for instance while going out as a farm laborer the small ruminants are taken along. Read More...
