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Re: many people wondering why this hasn't happened organically, it is easy to underestimate how much cultural attitudes can affect common practice. As an anecd

Re: many people wondering why this hasn't happened organically, it is easy to underestimate how much cultural attitudes can affect common practice. As an anecdote, when I visited rural China a couple of years back I asked my friends who grew up there why, if most people had one chicken, they didn't simply grow a few more? The response was "you don't know what it was like back then. In the Mao attitude people would say ... 'who are you to have two chickens when everyone else only has one' " ... which was enough social pressure to keep everyone to one chicken, no matter how much that contributed to malnourishment. I'm not proposing the same social attitudes are at play in these regions, but there may be other non-obvious contexts discouraging people from getting started with a flock. For some scenarios I could imagine an initiative like this helping to break through inertia and change norms.

tonmoy 10y ago
This seems very accurate. When I was younger it was a social taboo for middle class families in rural area to raise animals in out country. Then the government started blasting propaganda about how farming fish and raising chickens/goats was a noble "entrepreneur" like thing, and now it does not seem like that much of a taboo any more.
- mapt 10y ago
  There is a campaign in West Africa right now to grow 'grasscutter', aka greater cane rat, as an entrepreneurial alternative to bush meat and as a noble poverty reduction measure. The biggest argument for micro livestock in extreme poverty areas is the barrier to entry. You can run a large chicken, rabbit, cuy, or grasscutter farm for less than it costs to own a single pair of cattle, and nobody in the area has high amounts of saved wealth. http://www.nap.edu/read/1831/chapter/1#xv http://www.nap.edu/read/1831/chapter/1#xv is an attempt to explore the options for getting the world's subsistence farmers (mostly growing crops that have already been heavily automated) into livestock production (which still require lots of human care).

tonmoy 10y ago

This seems very accurate. When I was younger it was a social taboo for middle class families in rural area to raise animals in out country. Then the government started blasting propaganda about how farming fish and raising chickens/goats was a noble "entrepreneur" like thing, and now it does not seem like that much of a taboo any more.

mapt 10y ago
There is a campaign in West Africa right now to grow 'grasscutter', aka greater cane rat, as an entrepreneurial alternative to bush meat and as a noble poverty reduction measure. The biggest argument for micro livestock in extreme poverty areas is the barrier to entry. You can run a large chicken, rabbit, cuy, or grasscutter farm for less than it costs to own a single pair of cattle, and nobody in the area has high amounts of saved wealth. http://www.nap.edu/read/1831/chapter/1#xv http://www.nap.edu/read/1831/chapter/1#xv is an attempt to explore the options for getting the world's subsistence farmers (mostly growing crops that have already been heavily automated) into livestock production (which still require lots of human care).