An international panorama of goat selection and breeds

The preservation of the biodiversity of animal breeds is an important condition to maintain the ability of animal production to adapt to the changing conditions of breeding and production systems in the future. The decrease of the number of animal breeds has been observed both for sheep, cattle and goats in relation with the standardisation and intensification of animal production systems. Goats are mainly concerned by the situation as they have the biggest increase in livestock numbers in 20 years. A global overlook of goats worldwide is showing a contradictory situation: On one hand, small but well organised sectors have developed in a few countries for milk and cheese, meat and fibre production. On the other hand, most of the goats are mostly still used for auto consumption of milk meat and skin or fibres in village herds. The present goat genetic situation is the direct consequence of this evolution with the high specialisation of a small number of selected and well characterised breeds for milk, meat and fibres and a majority of not well defined populations and local breeds, generally without selection schemes and organisation. A global panorama of the main families and breeds is presented. A special consideration is then pointed on the necessary financial and logistic conditions to achieve successively these selection objectives. After having observed that in many cases these conditions are not present, this report concludes by some proposals to control better the possibilities of success and express with more efficiency the genetic potentiality of this interesting species. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.