Personally I think farmed animal numbers will rise faster than you projected in other African countries too—it all depends on how quickly they develop. I’m guessing Uganda is one of your lower lines, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is already increasing faster than that
Here in Gulu Northern Uganda, even in the last 10 years we’ve gone from the situation where most people ate almost exclusively animals which were reared on personal homesteads or farms (either home kill or bought locally to market) to the advent of factory farming, especially among chickens. When I first came here there were maybe 5 stalls selling fried chicken in town, now there are over 50.
Of all animals in Uganda, I’m fairly certain layers have the highest degree of suffering. Many “broilers” are brought up in barns, which are still bad but not as bad as battery cages.
My very uncertain personal opinion is that most home reared animals have net positive lives, and were good for the nutrition of the family so that was actually a pretty good situation. Now we are quickly descending from perhaps a slight net good to a massive net harm which is aweful to see in front of my eyes.
Thank you for your comment. Very insightful to hear about your direct experience in Uganda and how animal production is changing “right before your eyes”!
This is exactly the kind of development we are concerned about and are trying to address. Just like you, we are very uncertain about the quality of animal lives under subsistence farming. But we do think that a shift towards factory farming would be a massive net harm for animals.
Of course, farmed animal numbers might rise even faster than shown in our analysis, as you suspect. We are relying on projections from the FAO, since this is the only dataset we are aware of where animal numbers have been modelled globally until 2050. Needless to say, there are a lot of uncertainties and assumptions involved in such modelling. Precise numbers should thus be taken with caution, but the overall trend suggested by the data (i.e. Africa vs. other world regions) should be robust.
Uganda is just outside of the top 25 countries globally when it comes to the absolute increase in farmed land animal numbers in our analysis. Please see the graph below for a deep-dive into all African countries.
What a fantastic post thanks!
Personally I think farmed animal numbers will rise faster than you projected in other African countries too—it all depends on how quickly they develop. I’m guessing Uganda is one of your lower lines, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is already increasing faster than that
Here in Gulu Northern Uganda, even in the last 10 years we’ve gone from the situation where most people ate almost exclusively animals which were reared on personal homesteads or farms (either home kill or bought locally to market) to the advent of factory farming, especially among chickens. When I first came here there were maybe 5 stalls selling fried chicken in town, now there are over 50.
Of all animals in Uganda, I’m fairly certain layers have the highest degree of suffering. Many “broilers” are brought up in barns, which are still bad but not as bad as battery cages.
My very uncertain personal opinion is that most home reared animals have net positive lives, and were good for the nutrition of the family so that was actually a pretty good situation. Now we are quickly descending from perhaps a slight net good to a massive net harm which is aweful to see in front of my eyes.
Thank you for your comment. Very insightful to hear about your direct experience in Uganda and how animal production is changing “right before your eyes”!
This is exactly the kind of development we are concerned about and are trying to address. Just like you, we are very uncertain about the quality of animal lives under subsistence farming. But we do think that a shift towards factory farming would be a massive net harm for animals.
Of course, farmed animal numbers might rise even faster than shown in our analysis, as you suspect. We are relying on projections from the FAO, since this is the only dataset we are aware of where animal numbers have been modelled globally until 2050. Needless to say, there are a lot of uncertainties and assumptions involved in such modelling. Precise numbers should thus be taken with caution, but the overall trend suggested by the data (i.e. Africa vs. other world regions) should be robust.
Uganda is just outside of the top 25 countries globally when it comes to the absolute increase in farmed land animal numbers in our analysis. Please see the graph below for a deep-dive into all African countries.
We would also like to highlight the work of one of our partner organisations in Uganda: Animal Welfare Competence Center For Africa. Based on our strategic support and a research reportproduced in partnership with Animal Ask, they started a project on government outreach to stop or slow the growth of industrial animal agriculture in Uganda, funded by the EA Animal Welfare Fund.