But farmers like Mugira say they can’t afford to wait for science. Poor countries, which possess much of the world’s vanishing biodiversity, may also be discarding breeds that possess undiscovered genetic advantages. There’s a risk that future diseases could ravage these homogeneous animal populations.
The world’s food supply is increasingly dependent on a small and narrowing list of highly engineered breeds: the Holstein, the Large White pig and the Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens. Indigenous animals like East Africa’s sinewy Ankole, the product of centuries of selection for traits adapted to harsh conditions, are struggling to compete with foreign imports bred for maximal production. In recent decades, global trade, sophisticated marketing, artificial insemination and the demands of agricultural economics have transformed the Holstein into the world’s predominant dairy breed. To a modern African like himself, he said, the most desirable cattle were the American type: the Holsteins. Mugira, a high-school graduate, was wearing a pair of fashionably baggy jeans and spiffy white sneakers. They looked like the kind of cattle you might encounter in Wisconsin: plump and hornless creatures with dappled black-and-white coats. Mugira’s family lives on a 500-acre ranch, and one sunny day in November, the wiry 26-year-old showed me around, explaining, with some sadness but more pragmatism, why the Ankole breed that sustained his forebears for so many generations is now being driven to extinction.Īs we walked down the sloped valley path that led to a watering hole, we found a few cows lolling beneath a flat-topped acacia.
It is only within the last few generations that most Bahima have accepted the concept of private property. Mugira’s nomadic ancestors wandered in search of fresh pasture for their cattle, which in turn provided them with milk. For centuries, man and beast subsisted there in a tight symbiotic embrace. His people, the Bahima, are thought to have migrated into the hilly grasslands of western Uganda more than a thousand years ago, alongside a hardy breed of longhorns known as the Ankole. GERSHOM MUGIRA COMES from a long line of cattle-keepers.