Policy Options for Livestock Development in Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

Agriculture is big part of Kyrgyzstan economy. Livestock as a part of agriculture sector contributes to almost half of the gross output. In addressing the socio-economic development of Kyrgyzstan and poverty alleviation, livestock development has great potential. Over recent years, there has been a steady growth of livestock production and the number of farm animals in the agricultural sector of the country. However farmers are still poor and are their income is not increasing steadily due to number of reasons. Currently, the Kyrgyz government is trying to revive the sector, but continuous attempts to revive the sector have been continuously failing. In this work the author addressed problem of farmers' welfare and tested two development scenarios to see what will be the outcome of each. They are: removing first round middlemen between farmers and other actors along value chain and increasing value added at farm level through introduction of improved breed. To do so, dynamic model for production and marketing (with only one layer of middlemen) was built in special software and data for it was collected in one of the villages in Chui region. After field work and model simulations it was founded that removal of unnecessary layer in the value chain, increases gross revenue only to 4%. At the same time, introduction of improved cattle at the village is expected to increase money flow to at least 48% monthly.