Livestock, capture fisheries, and aquaculture: Status and recent trends

Livestock rearing and fishing have been central components of rural livelihoods in Myanmar for centuries and remain so today. More capital-intensive forms of marine fishing, aquaculture, and poultry farming began to expand during the early 1990s and have grown briskly since then. Poultry and aquaculture commoditization accelerated between 2011 and 2019, stimulated by the demand-side pull of rapid income growth and by foreign and domestic investment in areas such as feed milling and food retail (for example, businesses such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, which opened in Myanmar in 2015). However, despite recent growth, both sectors lag behind those in more developed countries in the region in technological sophistication, scale, and regulation. This chapter summarizes the status of the supply side of livestock, capture fisheries, and aquaculture based on an analysis of nationally representative data extracted from the Myanmar Living Conditions Survey (MLCS) 2017 (CSO 2019) and a review of trends in these sectors using information drawn from other recent surveys and secondary sources. We analyze MLCS to sketch a picture of the contributions of livestock, capture fisheries, and aquaculture to household incomes in the four agroecological zones (AEZs—Delta, Dry Zone, Coastal Zone, and Hills and Mountains) into which MLCS results are categorized (CSO, UNDP, and World Bank 2019). The MLCS livestock and fishery modules asked questions about each household’s ownership, production, sales, and consumption of livestock and livestock byproducts, as well as aquaculture and capture fisheries products in the previous 12 months. Respondents were asked to estimate the quantity or value of these variables, making it possible to calculate the value of livestock and fish income, expenditure, and consumption for each household.