By Roy Behnke and Hala Mohamed Osman

IGAD LPI Working Paper No. 01 – 12

This is the fourth in a series of reports on the contribution of livestock to the economies of the IGAD member states. Building on methodologies developed in earlier studies of the role of livestock in the economies of Ethiopia and Kenya, the present report undertakes an assessment of the contribution of livestock to Sudan’s national economy. Conventional GDP accounting may ignore some of the benefits that people derive from livestock in subsistence-oriented economies, when households directly provision themselves, when economic exchanges are not calculated in monetary terms or when these exchanges go unrecorded.

The present study assigns monetary values to the non-marketed goods and services provided by livestock, and estimates the contribution of livestock to the wider national economy – as exports, as inputs into manufacturing industries, and as a component of household consumption. Official national accounts estimates are produced by the Sudan Central Bureau of Statistics (SCBS), and the Ministry of Animal Resources and Fisheries (MARF) is the single most important source of official data on livestock production and trade. This report refers to the Republic of Sudan prior to the independence of the Republic of South Sudan; the report therefore covers both North and South Sudan.