Animal breeding and development – South American perspective

Animal breeding science may add support to the development of livestock production by focusing on the farmers’ problems. Traditionally, livestock production has had a major economic and social role in South America, as a source of food, fiber, transport and draught, generating jobs, economic activities and trade. The value of beef, chicken meat, pork and cow milk produced rank among the six most important agricultural products in the region (soybeans and sugar cane ranking second and third). Important growth has occurred in the past few decades, e.g. between 1961 and 2010 the human population multiplied by 2.6, while the annual chicken meat production multiplied by 54, the number of eggs by 6, cow milk by 4.5, pork by 4.8, beef by 2.8 and greasy wool by 2.6. Animal products are an essential part of human nutrition in the region, accounting for more than half of the 80 g ⁄ capita ⁄ day total protein supply, and contribute to nutrition in other world regions as well, e.g. South America accounts for about onethird of the world beef and chicken meat exports, being the largest world exporter of these commodities (FAOSTAT). Family production adds to the social dimension, e.g. just in Brazil, some 600 000 farms produce less than 10 l of cow milk ⁄ day, two-thirds of which do not sell any of it, producing just for subsistence. Livestock production has contributed to the regional development, which in turn has influenced the possibilities for adoption of new production techniques. Pasture oriented systems prevail for ruminants. The ruminant production is continuously displaced by expanding agriculture towards areas of less costly land and labour. In the last few decades developments in many fields have occurred, including improved pasture species, fertilizers, pasture management, roughage production and conservation, irrigation, feeding with new agricultural by-products, concentrate and mineral supplementation, vaccination and health care. More productive genotypes are required to match the new circumstances. Of course, underlying any material development, human development and social stability are needed, which are being painfully and steadily gained in the region. Animal breeding is an essential part of livestock development, providing the genetic basis for it, in a continuous process of adapting the genetic resources to the changing production circumstances. Migration has been, and continues to be, a major driving genetic force, i.e. via importations of stock and genetic material for breed substitution and crossbreeding, which has radically altered the genetic make up of the local livestock populations. Many of these operations have been carried out by practical entrepreneurs, sometimes in spite of opposing expert opinion. In the last century, experts believed that the introduction of Bos indicus would ruin the cattle industry in Brazil, although nowadays the Nelore, Brahman and other zebu beef breeds prevail all over the tropical part of South America. The development of local breeds has also played an important role, again sometimes initially opposed by experts, e.g. the dairy Gir and Guzerá zebu breeds, which were improved by a few empirical pioneers in the 1950s, when most considered it unthinkable that B. indicus could be dairy animals. The breeds have now, via established progeny testing and MOET programmes, become some of the few world sources of tropical dairy germplasm with modern genetic evaluation, which has granted the breeds an amazing commercial success both in Brazil and abroad. Genetic evaluation programmes are nowadays rather common in beef and dairy cattle and in sheep, and expected progeny differences (EPD) are increasingly substituting show ring prizes as the basis for commercial decisions, e.g. in Brazil about half the beef cattle semen sold is presently from ‘EPD sires’, reflecting a (very slow) change of minds initiated at universities some 60 years ago, when the show ring experts lecturing on animal breeding became gradually substituted by quantitative geneticists usually with a PhD from North America or Europe. However, although the objective selection on function is an improvement over the subjective selection on form, the concept of total economic merit is not yet generally applied in practice, except in chicken and pigs. Too much emphasis is placed on single traits, such as milk yield in dairy J. Anim. Breed. Genet. ISSN 0931-2668