Rethinking agro-biodiversity conservation: livestock science and policy relationship in India

The paper analyzes how agro-biodiversity and its conservation are understood by science enterprises and decision makers in India and what relationship exists between science and policy for agro-biodiversity conservation. This has been explored using the case of India’s livestock sector. India has achieved remarkable heights in milk production by crossbreeding indigenous or non-descript (not characterised phenotypically and genotypically) cattle with high yielding exotic breeds to increase the ‘yield per animal’. This has successfully delivered but increasing milk production with exotic breeds led to the decline and even extinction of several indigenous breeds. This situation of increasing yield at the cost of depletion of agro-biodiversity and indigenous breed cannot afford to persist because of increasing climatic irregularities and the need for indigenous breed for resilience and the greater roles that they play in India’s rural economy (besides just milk production). The euphoria about the economic performance of the dairy sub-sector and the concerns about declining agro-biodiversity within the sub-sector were both the result of science and policy relationships. In the first, the sciences responded positively to the policy demand to increase production of milk and in the second, a new problem of declining agro-biodiversity was created as a consequence of the first. To this the sciences, responded again, feeding into new programmes for re-building indigenous livestock populations. The study reveals that in the India’s livestock sector, a complex and iterative agenda setting model explain the relationship between scientific research and the policy. Here, the linear “Modern model” of science providing evidence of the problem and generating solutions for policy, and policy makers implementing the solutions does not explain how the sciences work to generate knowledge or technologies, or how policies are made. In India, during the 1980s the need for conserving agro-biodiversity emerged because of the sciences coming up with evidences of agro-biodiversity loss (erosion of animal genetic resources) and most importantly, defining the loss in economic terms. But in the livestock sector, increasing yield from different livestock species drove the agenda for livestock policies which shifted to livestock breed conservation and eventually became the centre of all the conservation efforts. This was supported by scientific engagements to define, characterize, identify and inventory livestock breeds. The problem statement which began with conservation of agro-biodiversity and the multiple expressions of diversity has now narrowed down to breed and ‘purity’ of the genotype. At the same time, there are also several alternative pratices that have prevailed among the pastoral communities/local indigenous communities in different parts of the country, which ensure, well-being and sustainability. Given the climate change scenarios and global planetary boundaries threatened, there is an increasing demand to know more about the knowledge and practices of the communities that ensures sustainability. This paper emphasizes that there is a need to rethink how we understand agro-biodiversity and how democratically policies are being made.