Rethinking Value: animals, health, and livelihoods in a One Health world

Globally, livestock are undeniably important. They contribute substantially to agricultural GDP, support the livelihoods of billions of people, and act as financial assets for households without access to formal banking. They provide food, income, manure, transport, and social status. In many African contexts, including Zambia, cattle are not just productive assets but also stores of wealth, insurance mechanisms, and markers of identity and belonging. 

But livestock also sit at the center of difficult trade-offs. They compete for land and water, contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, and are entangled in biodiversity loss and pollution. From a public health perspective, they are linked to zoonotic diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The same animals that sustain livelihoods can also strain ecosystems and health systems.

My own journey in animal health economics has mirrored these tensions. Early in my career, I approached disease control through conventional cost–benefit analysis. Yet some results were puzzling. Certain zoonotic disease controls were “not worth it” if judged purely by narrow economic returns. But how can protecting human life and public health be reduced to a simple profitability metric? This pushed me to recognize that zoonoses are public goods and that markets alone cannot guide policy.

Years later, another puzzle emerged: why do some cattle farmers not sell animals even when prices are good? Labelling this as “irrational” felt unsatisfactory. Perhaps the issue was not farmer behaviour but our frameworks. Maybe we were measuring the wrong kinds of value. 

The IAS environment has been transformative in this regard. Conversations with anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines have challenged my assumptions. Value is not singular; it is plural. Livestock carry economic, cultural, relational, and symbolic value simultaneously. When animal health policies ignore this plurality, misalignment arises. 

This insight has reshaped how I think about One Health. Integration alone is not enough. The real challenge may be alignment, between different systems of valuing animals, different knowledge traditions, and different priorities. AMR, for instance, may emerge less from ignorance and more from mismatches between how people value livestock and how stewardship frameworks are designed.

My evolving project on “Cattle and Interest” grows from this realization. If we better understand what people care about, attend to, and protect, we may design animal health policies that resonate more deeply with lived realities. IAS has offered the rare intellectual space to rethink fundamentals, and sometimes, rethinking value itself may be the most important step forward.

Dr Chisoni Mumba
Associate Professor of Animal Health Economics, University of Zambia