Improvement of production efficiency of dual purpose cattle (Taurus-Indicus) systems

Abstract

Concerns about the need to be more efficient did not begin in this century, rather this is an old international preoccupation that seeks to incorporate strategies in diverse development plans to improve productiveness and enable a transformation of livestock operations from extensive to intensive. Presuming the need to improve efficiency, this paper aims to analyze the factors that affect productive responses in dual-purpose cattle systems in the Latin American tropics, in both physical and economic terms, in order to define guidelines that direct action toward those critical obstacles to good performance. This objective will be approached on one hand, in the conceptual and referential frame of productive efficiency, and on the other hand by analyzing published evidence. Indicators of average productive efficiency for Latin America could be taken as support for the idea of focusing on specialization, given the known efficiency of specialized livestock enterprises. Yet there exist cases of proven rational technical management and application of sound business concepts that demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining competitive levels of productive efficiency in dual-purpose cattle, which serve to illustrate the strengths of dual-purpose production and promote the quest for technologies suited to the tropical environment, with relevance to reducing the gap in food security and fostering sustainable development and a greater productive contribution form the tropics, as strategic zones. The great limiting factors seem to be deficiencies of entrepreneurship and the need for research at the end of the holistic spiral that fits the proposal to the action, for evaluation of the impact of internal and external factors and for integrated evaluation of alternatives for diversification and improvement of the product quality.