Small Holder Poultry
Small Holder Poultry ll Small Ruminants ll Common Property Resources - "Livestock" ll Other Livestock
"Rearing a few birds means for my household, the chance to have a healthy meal, a source of income, especially when we are jobless and the opportunity to buy a few small things for myself and my children from my own earnings. It isn’t just an income, its my dignity" (Jamuna- female poultry rearer, Village Kanker, Chhattisgarh)
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 sector 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 need to reduce the numbers of the poor and hungry in the world by half by 2015, the need to use small scale poultry production as a vehicle of poverty reduction and food security is largely eminent. Successful examples from South Asia like the Bangladesh Poultry model that build on traditional scavenging poultry production systems, represent an effective amalgamation of technology merged with people’s involvement in management, supply chain development and service provision. This model not only created o
pportunities for enhanced incomes, with Rise et al estimating average monthly income levels from small holder poultry to be around 200-250 taka but also showcases a rare example of a successful pro-poor initiative in comparison to large animal backed projects (Dolberg 2003); with one of the pioneers BRAC using poultry production as a tool to equip destitute women to qualify for micro finance (BRAC 2003).
Source: Todd, 1999
These two distinct trends in poultry production (commercial and small scale) showcase 
both opportunities and challenges in the South Asian context and thus require careful analysis. Firstly, the FAO and OIE1 classification reveals interesting facts about producer profiles. While sector 1 & 2 represent the industry integrated and commercial sector, Sector 3 represents the small scale poultry production system tailored around commercial lines with birds being purchased from breeding companies for egg and meat and Sector 4 refers to the backyard poultry system which is most wide spread in South Asia and undertaken by millions of house holds (SA PPLPP 2007). Disaggregated data from Bangladesh reveals that Sector 4 type production accounts for 90% of poultry production (Ahuja, Sen 2007). Countries like India which has a large industrial poultry sector also showcases household poultry finding special favour with the poor (landless, marginal and small farmers) and tribals, scheduled castes and other backward caste communities (Shinde & Srivastava, 2006, Mandal et al., 2006). This fact coupled with examples of millions of rural households having near zero assets and high livelihood vulnerabilities relying on backyard poultry production establishes the pro poor potential of small holder poultry. 
In comparison, the market and production context of poultry production has shown 
trends in commercialization over the last two decades. Rapid economic growth and urbanization has resulted in fast expansion of industrial large scale, vertically integrated, poultry production units, in Asia (Ahuja and Sen 2007). While opportunities have expanded for small scale poultry enterprises as well, given their increased market orientation; the overall sector changes have brought large and small production systems in overlapping competitive spaces with each other. These changes have raised concerns about the sustainability of small scale poultry production systems due to i) intensified competition from large scale producers who can exercise significant control over the poultry value chain (including concentrated holding of genetic stock of industrial poultry by a few multinational corporations), and ii)
the public perception that small units of production may be dangerous reservoirs of diseases, specially in the wake of recent outbreaks of HPAI (with governments already beginning to emphasise the possible public health risks from small scale/household poultry and are discounting their critical contribution towards income and nutrition support in poor and ultra poor households (Ahuja and Sen 2007).
It is thus clear for example that despite India’s world ranking as 5th in egg production and 18th in broiler production (Mehta 2002), the significant contribution that poultry could have made to pro poor livelihood improvement has yet not been realised despite the fact that these few birds maybe the only assets available to the ultra poor creating disparity between the reality of the poultry sector and the orientation of the interventions (Maarse 2003). This is symbolic of a process of dichotomous development (Misra 2008). The reasons for the same have been summarised as below:
Given the aforesaid scenario and the emerging scope for south-south knowledge sharing between countries such as Bangladesh and India on pro poor poultry development, SA PPLPP attempt to gather and document poultry based Good Practices in the region and share them with development practitioners and policy makers thereby providing a platform for i) policy dialogue and offer evidence in support of pro poor policy formulation ii) provide practical extension tools for dissemination and iii) contribute towards suggesting poultry based policy scenarios that can lead to poverty reduction. It thematic mandate is thus to place this ‘bird of hope’ into the centre stage of pro-poor development.
