It does not appear that recordings have been made public of the various sessions, but the proceedings of the Congress will be published and my keynote paper is included. I can share that with you once they have published the proceedings. (Here are links to the paper as submitted and to the second presentation.) The themes are ones I often talk about, and I can summarise them here.
The key message I wanted to convey is that we have a lot of technology, which if adopted everywhere, would already produce far more beef and milk than we have today, without any need to increase the herd.
In fact, we could afford to reduce the global ruminant herd and still produce more than we do today. When I say technologies, these are not necessarily rocket science or extremely expensive in terms of infrastructure. Simply adopting the right use of vaccines for the location would contribute massively to increased productivity.
The land sparing and increased food production involved in such a change would reduce pressure on forests and other land conversion and increase supply. Access to food remains a problem even as supply increases, but at the moment the human and animal populations are increasing fastest in lower income countries where access to food is more of a problem.
If through investment, increased supply was brought about through increased productivity instead of increased numbers we could see more sustainable economic development and through that, more equitable access to food.
One of the greatest things we can do for both the climate and for biodiversity is to invest in equitable development in lower income countries. Unfortunately, what we are seeing instead is a limiting of trade through increasing rules and consumption guidelines.
In addition to vaccines and veterinary medicines, I talked about the role of breeding and genetics, as well as the importance of EBVs and EPDs to the rate of progress we can make in genetic progress.
Wherever cattle are, we should be selecting a breed that is well adapted to both the physical environment as well as what we are asking them to do for us. With the advent of CRISPR technology we can now introduce individual genes into cattle to confer a specific trait. While we are at an early stage so far, the potential to revolutionise adaptation and disease resistance should not be underestimated.
One Health is an important approach to secure the future effectiveness of the medicines we have today, particularly those that are of critical importance to both humans and to livestock. Finding ways to improve resistance and avoid disease in the first place is central to this.
We have seen what economic development has done for efficiency in many countries, particularly higher income countries, and what it is already capable of doing in Brazil, for example. The path forward has to involve doing the same in lower income countries. We need investment in all aspects of animal health, welfare and husbandry to drive the combined benefits to human lives, health and livelihoods that better animal production can deliver.
