Diversity of rare breed management programs: Between conservation and development

Rare breeds face not only conservation challenges but also represent development opportunities. Both goals need to be reconciled and our aim was to understand whether such conciliation is achieved or not. A total of 132 rare breeds have been identified in France, and among them, 18 situations have been analyzed in details with an emphasis on interaction between the conservation and the development dynamics. We conducted interviews with stakeholders involved in the programs to analyze how the different development initiatives influenced conservation. Our results confirm that development initiatives can help maintain the population size, but also revealed situations where some aspects of development actions induced tensions with conservation. Potential points of tension need to be identified if they are to be overcome.