Could reptiles fill the food supply gaps?

Dr Patrick Aust, conservation scientist for People for Wildlife, looks at how reptiles can help improve food security in Africa.

- Dr Patrick Aust

As Africa emerges from a season of pandemics and climate extremes, and braces for yet another drought, there is an urgent need to find new, sustainable ways to feed the continent’s growing population. In Asia, reptiles are playing a small but increasingly important role in addressing a wide range of novel agri-food challenges. Could reptile farming help Africa in a similar way?

But why reptiles?

As a highly specialised group of animals, reptiles require 90% less food calorie inputs and can cope with extreme conditions better than most warm-blooded animals, and they do not transmit dangerous diseases.

The impacts of climate change are bearing down on Africa’s livestock systems like never before. A high likelihood of El Niño arriving on the back of record-breaking temperatures could severely strain both livestock production and fisheries.

The long-term climate forecast suggests this situation will continue to deteriorate.

Efforts to feed our growing population with safe, nutritious, and sustainable food are failing.

Globally, over two billion people are food insecure, almost 700 million are undernourished, and 30% of children in Africa lack the nutrition required to stave off childhood stunting. One of the key challenges we face is that our food systems are dominated by energetically extravagant and inefficient livestock.

As much as 80% of the food calories birds and mammals consume are used for nothing more than maintaining an elevated temperature for their basal metabolic rate.

Three quarters of Earth’s farmed protein draws on just five species, all of which have similar warm-blooded physiologies to our own.