Livestock Farming Systems diversity and challenges for sustainable livestock development in selected countries in Central and Eastern Europe

In Western Europe, agricultural development strategies are increasingly taking account of the realities at farm level. The attitudes and strategies of farmers are accepted as important «bottom-up» pressures for change alongside the conventional «top-down» pressures from general socio-economic conditions and agricultural policies. To understand and give more information on the current challenges of livestock farming in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a group of researchers from both Western and Eastern Europe carried out an initial study on the current diversity in livestock farming and management in selected regions in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic. This research, which for the first time applied the Livestock Farming Systems (LFS) approach developed in Western Europe to CEE conditions, was sponsored within the framework of a Food and Agriculture Organisation-European Association of Animal Production (FAO-EAAP) joint initiative. The research design applied to real-life farms in CEE and the results obtained are reported in this paper. The first positive finding was the adaptability of the fundamentals of LFS research, developed within the framework of family-farm agriculture in the West, to a system based more on large-scale private, corporate and co-operative farms. The field observations made offer a first insight into these livestock farming systems and their management. Some key issues of the potential contribution of and future needs for LFS research in the Central and Eastern European countries are discussed.