About 70% of the total population live in rural areas of South Asia, 70% of whom are landless or marginal farmers. Livestock production fulfills diverse roles in the social and economic development of the rural poor in South Asia. It is difficult for poor people to get expensive milk bovine (mainly, cattle in Bangladesh and buffalo in India) to enter dairy farming. As a potential solution, I focused on the mechanism of consignment rearing of domestic animals and investigated this mechanism in India and Bangladesh. We interviewed 246 rural households in India(141) and Bangladesh(105) about the number of cattle and buffaloes reared and their access routes. Fourteen out of the 246 households were found to rear milk bovines owned by others. These were divided into three types of consignment rearing: traditional, with purchase rights, and commercial dairy. The second and third mechanisms were constructed in each area according to the market specifically faced by livestock-raising households.
These is a possibility that the development of the milk market and the milk livestock market is promoting a change in the consignment mechanism. A traditional consignment rearing system that does not involve the transfer of money may have changed into a mechanism with a view to obtain cash income through the sale of consigned livestock.
