Livestock genetic resources and production systems: a Mediterranean overview

Abstract

The Mediterranean Region is one of the oldest and historically one of the most prosperous cradles of agriculture. Throughout the centuries, prosperity and rural decline have been linked to the economic situation of society. From an agricultural point of view, the eco-environmental concept is flanked to that of the single geopolitical one, which includes major social economic factors; on this basis it would be possible to define the zone around the Mediterranean Sea as a relatively homogenous one. This zone corresponds to a rich and complex historic and cultural system in which agriculture has always been carried out in difficult natural conditions: irregular seasons and rainfall, soil erosion, pronounced reliefs, an association of certain traditional dryland plants like the olive tree, the vine and the palm with cereals and dry pulses. The cow and sow have always been the main animal resources of Central and North Europe, as the ewe and goat have been of the Mediterranean, traditionally raised to produce milk which was then transformed into typical local products. Even today, in this zone, products of origin from small ruminants are more appreciated than the derivatives of cow milk. Products from multiple purpose breeds belonging to the small ruminant species present, are largely characteristic of the animal types that have accompanied man during the last 100 centuries. These breeds supplied man with food, milk and meat, clothes, wool and leather, fertilizer for the land and dung. The existence of sheep and goats in ancient European and medieval civilizations and those of the Near East, were already evident in the third millennium BC when animal images began to appear in paintings, incisions, scriptures, and artistic representations.