VALUING BIODIVERSITY FOR SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: THE CASE OF MOROCCAN SHEEP BREEDS’ CONSERVATION

Résumé

The sustainable management of animal genetic resources (AGRs) is important for future food, fertilizer and animal traction needs and enables farmers and pastoralists to adapt to the challenges of changing production conditions. In addition, sustainable management of animal genetic diversity requires national planning to ensure long-term availability of animal heritage. In order to optimize the sustainable management of animal genetic resources, this research aims at the economic evaluation of animal genetic biodiversity in Morocco. Thus, the economic values of five main sheep breeds were calculated and compared with each other. To do this, an economic weighting analysis was performed in which the marginal profit of the main breeds was evaluated. this work differentiates between the market value and the economic value of each observed sheep breed. The results showed differences between the breeds market value and their economic value relating to genetic polymorphism. Thus, the Dman breed has the highest economic value, about 3.3 MAD / kg, knowing that this race has the largest number of exclusive variants and a large effective population size. Overall, this work could be of interest to policymakers in guiding development programs and projects to sustainably improve the necessary productive capacity while ensuring the goods and services demanded by the market.