Promoting the Small Ruminant Sub-sector: A Way of Enhancing Livelihoods
Despite becoming more and more a preferred livelihood option, goat-rearing comes with its own challenges such as the high mortality rates and the lack of government interest in promoting it as a primary occupation. Can these be addressed comprehensively?
Background
T he recently initiated National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) has brought along a paradigm change in the understanding of the government’s way of looking at and implementing the poverty eradication programme in the country. The focus has shifted towards a demand-driven, bottoms-up approach with little or no provision for subsidy for private goods. The Mission has also made it mandatory to develop strong institutions of poor rural women, with a probable window for the development of sub-sector-specific producer groups and producer collectives. In such a progressive scenario, it will be interesting to understand where the livestock-based livelihoods promotion, especially the goat-rearing activity, stands and how this activity can be promoted for livelihoods augmentation of rural member-partners of NRLM.
That goat-rearing is a pro-poor activity has been largely accepted; this means a large section of the disadvantaged people—the economically poor, socially backward and non-mainstream community, disabled and elderly as well as communities living on the fringes of forest—are dependent on goat-rearing. Goat-rearing for these households is usually a secondary or tertiary source of income; very rarely is it a primary source. Apart from this, a large section of the rural community that NRLM plans to work with also keeps goats mostly as a buffer asset, which can be sold in times of distress or emergency. However, interestingly, whatever be the intensity of the activity at the household level—as a secondary, tertiary or a buffer stock—the herd size of the animals does not increase significantly across different household sections. It varies from 2–15, with the exception of communities that have been traditional goat/sheep rearers or living on the fringes of the forest and have access to abundant free source of green fodder.