‘You can’t go home again’
Pastoralism in the new millennium
Roger Blench
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This version: London, 17 May 2001
This paper was prepared with financial support from the Food and Agriculture
Organisation of the United Nations. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
the views of the FAO.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BOXES
3
SUMMARY
4
PART I
6
1. INTRODUCTION: PASTORAL SYSTEMS WORLDWIDE
6
1.1 Overview
6
1.2 Classifying pastoral systems
6
1.3 Pastoral species
10
1.4 Pastoral enterprises
11
1.4.1 Nomadism ........................................................................................................................................... 11
1.4.2 Transhumance ..................................................................................................................................... 12
1.4.3 Agropastoralism.................................................................................................................................. 13
1.4.4 Enclosed systems and ranching........................................................................................................... 13
1.4.5 Pastoralism and trade .......................................................................................................................... 14
1.4.6 Pastoralism and warfare ...................................................................................................................... 15
1.4.7 Pastoralism and hunting ...................................................................................................................... 16
1.4.8 Pastoralism and fishing ....................................................................................................................... 16
1.4.9 Pastoralists and non-pastoral species .................................................................................................. 17
1.5 History and origins of pastoralism
17
1.6 Sources of information on pastoralism
18
1.7 The discourse of pastoralism
20
2. GRAZING AND NUTRITION
21
2.1 Rangelands: opportunistic use of patchy resources
21
2.2 Silvo-pastoral systems
24
2.3 Supplementary feeding
25
3. BREEDING AND REPRODUCTION
26
3.1 Breeding and reproduction in pastoral herds
26
3.1.1 Controlling bloodlines ........................................................................................................................ 26
3.1.2 Castration ............................................................................................................................................ 27
3.2 Hi-tech ex situ strategies
27
4. ANIMAL HEALTH
28
4.1 Pastoralists and the health of their animals
28
4.2 Traditional remedies
29
4.3 Trypanosomosis and the campaigns to eradicate tsetse
29
5. WHAT DO PASTORALISTS PRODUCE AND HOW DO THEY MARKET THEM?
31
5.1 Dairy products
31
5.2 Meat preservation
33
5.3 Hides, skins and other products
33
5.4 Work animals
34
5.5 Selling pastoral products
36
5.6 Worldwide demand for protein
37
5.7 Globalisation of the trade in livestock products
38
5.8 Evaluating productivity
39
6. MANAGEMENT AND THE MITIGATION OF VULNERABILITY
39
6.1 Migration
39
6.2 Changing herd composition
40
6.3 Predation
40
6.4 Theft
41
7. SOCIAL AND CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS OF PASTORALISM
41
7.1 Social structures
41
7.2 Role of women in pastoral society
42
7.3 Pastoral identities
43
7.4 Land tenure and the CPR debate
43
8. PASTORALISM AND THE STATE
44
8.1 The edge eats the centre
44
8.2 Pastoralists and national borders
44
PART II. PASTORALISM AND POLICY ISSUES
45
9. PASTORAL POPULATIONS AND RANGELANDS
45
9.1 Competition with foragers
45
i
9.2 Pastoralists and the environment
46
9.3 Competing uses of the world’s rangelands
49
9.3.1 Pastoralists and the exploitation of mineral resources .........................................................................49
9.3.2 Wildlife and conservation issues .........................................................................................................50
10. BIODIVERSITY
53
10.1 Maintaining livestock biodiversity
53
10.2 Maintaining rangeland biodiversity
56
11. IMPROVING THE LIVELIHOODS OF PASTORALIST FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES
57
11.1 Disaster management
57
11.1.1 Drought and the management of climatic anomalies.........................................................................57
11.1.2 Early warning systems: Idea and reality ...........................................................................................59
11.1.3 Security in pastoral zones .................................................................................................................60
11.2 Recovery strategies
61
11.2.1 Structural features of pastoralism ......................................................................................................61
11.2.2 Sedentarisation and land tenure .........................................................................................................61
11.2.3 Rethinking pastoral organisation .......................................................................................................64
11.2.4 Restocking .........................................................................................................................................66
11.2.5 Livestock banking..............................................................................................................................67
11.2.6 Economic diversification ...................................................................................................................67
12. WHO SHOULD ADDRESS THESE POLICIES AND ISSUES?
68
12.1 Pastoralists in national, regional and global perspective
68
12.2 Key re-orientation of policy towards pastoralists
68
12.2.1 Constructing policy: telling the truth .................................................................................................68
12.2.2 Rethinking policy clusters .................................................................................................................70
12.3 Who should be doing what?
71
12.3.1 Intervention versus information dissemination..................................................................................71
12.3.2 Remedying uneven research ..............................................................................................................72
12.3.3 Practical support ................................................................................................................................72
13. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
73
13.1 Why has pastoralism survived?
73
13.2 Key trends in twentieth century pastoralism
73
13.3 Where is pastoralism headed?
74
APPENDIX I: THE ORIGIN OF PASTORAL SPECIES
76
APPENDIX II: PASTORALISM WITH MONOGASTRIC SPECIES
78
Ducks and geese
78
APPENDIX III: WORLDWIDE TABLES OF PASTORAL PEOPLES
79
BIBLIOGRAPHY
83
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
104
UNDP
104
USAID
104
LINKS TO UNIVERSITIES AND RESEARCH CENTRES
104
RANGELANDS
104
ii
TABLES
Table 1. Regional zonation of pastoral systems
Table 2. Main pastoral species and management systems, worldwide
Table 3 Estimates of the area of the world’s rangelands
Table 4 Classes of grasslands
Table 5. Mongolian dairy products
Table 6. Dairy products by species*
Table 7. Livestock products other than dairy by species
Table 8. Working animals by species
Table 9. Actual and projected meat consumption by region
Table 10. Source of increases in world meat supply
Table 11 Kenya Rangeland Livestock and Wildlife Population Estimates: 1970–1990s
Table 12. Factors accelerating erosion of livestock biodiversity
Table 13. Key factors shaping twentieth century pastoralism
Table 14. Africa
Table 15. Europe
Table 16. Near East and West Asia
Table 17. India and Himalaya
Table 18. Central Asia and Far East
Table 19. Subarctic
Table 20. New World
8
10
21
22
31
32
34
35
37
38
52
54
74
79
80
80
81
81
81
82
BOXES
Box 1. The desert in Jordan: a parking lot for herds?
Box 2. The Raika and their camels
Box 3. Measuring output over time
Box 4 Overgrazing in Africa's high-altitude grasslands
Box 5. Keeping Chukchi reindeer herds in check
Box 6. Persuading the Navajo to sell
Box 7. The expansion of micro-livestock in Nigeria
25
36
39
47
48
49
55
iii
SUMMARY
1. Extensive pastoral production takes up some 25% of the world’s land area and produces some 10% of
the meat used for human consumption, while supporting some 20 million pastoral households.
Pastoral production is split between the extensive enclosed systems typical of North America,
Australia and parts of South America and the open-access systems in Africa, the Andes, Asia and
Siberia which are still largely the province of ‘traditional’ producers. The breakdown of the command
economies of Central Asia has probably increased the numbers of households depending on pastoral
production in the last decade of the twentieth century. Although pastoralists, along with foragers with
whom they have much in common, represent an almost archetypically vulnerable social group, donor
interest in the sector is minimal.
2. The rangelands exploited by pastoralists often cannot be used by conventional agriculture, although as
technical advances spread cultivation into remoter regions, pastoralists are forced into increasingly
inhospitable terrain. Although spontaneous settlement is quite common on the fringes of the pastoral
domain, national governments are often hostile to pastoralists. Many countries have policies of
sedentarisation that derive as much from political considerations as a concern for the welfare of those
they wish to settle. However, compelling pastoral nomads to settle has a very unsatisfactory history
and is unlikely to meet with long-term success.
3. Pastoralists make substantial contributions to the economy of developing countries, both in terms of
supporting their own households and in supplying protein, both meat and milk, to villages and towns.
The governments of those countries rarely recognise these contributions by a corresponding
investment in the pastoral sector. The pastoral economic system is under increasing threat from the
globalisation of the trade in livestock products and unpredictable import policies in many countries.
Broadly speaking, the trend in this century has been for the terms of trade to increasingly turn against
pastoralists.
4. The marginal lands that have previously been the province of pastoralists are increasingly coming into
focus as reserves of biodiversity. Their very inaccessibility has permitted the survival of species
eliminated in high-density agricultural areas. Consequently, there is pressure on governments to
declare large regions protected areas, both because of pressure from the conservation lobby and the
potential income from tourism. Uncertainties about pastoral tenure have made it difficult for
pastoralists to lodge effective land claims.
5. The future of pastoralism will depend heavily on political decisions made by national governments in
countries with extensive grasslands. Enclosed pastures are unlikely to see any significant extension,
but conditions for existing pastoralists will become more difficult as both farmers and the
conservation lobby expropriates land. Work with pastoralists, and a more sympathetic understanding
of their production systems, could act both to protect their lifeways and enhance their capacity to
produce protein on otherwise marginal land.
iv
6. Experience to date suggests that technical inputs will only have a very limited impact on overall
output. Only a major policy re-orientation will protect and support pastoralism during the next
millennium. Elements likely to become important are;
a. Production of niche products, either unusual species or breeds, and meat and milk free from
contaminants
b. Crop-livestock integration, the effective use of pastoral outputs in mixed farming, particularly
the extension of work animals
c. Co-conservation, the development of interlocking strategies to link conservation of wild fauna
and flora with pastoral production
d. The expansion of ecologically-sensitive low-volume tourism, using pastoralists to provide
services, particularly in the area of indigenous knowledge
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Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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PART I
1. Introduction: pastoral systems worldwide
1.1 Overview
Pastoralism, the use of extensive grazing in rangelands for livestock production, is one of the key production
systems in the world's drylands. Nonetheless, throughout much of its long history its reputation has been
unflattering, its practitioners marginalised by sedentary cultivators and urban dwellers. Pastoral societies
have risen and fallen, fragmented into isolated families or constructed world-spanning empires and their
demise regularly announced, often in the face of entirely contrary evidence of their persistence.
By some paradox, anthropologists and social theorists have conducted a prolonged love affair with
pastoralism, at times seeing it as an inevitable stage in the growth of civilization or perversely caricaturing it
as an anarchic institution ready to pull down that same civilization. Planners have denigrated the mobility
characteristic of pastoral societies and novelists have romanticised the wanderings of these same nomads.
Development experts, remarking the enormous passing herds, first saw pastoral systems as rich in potential,
and later castigated pastoralists as vulnerable and unable to invest in development. To all this, pastoralists
have remained largely indifferent, since a certain scepticism towards the schemes and caprices of the
external world is an almost inevitable product of the independent image they have of themselves.
The late twentieth century has seen a new upwelling of writing on pastoralism, both sentimental and
aggrieved, regretting its inevitable demise and blaming pastoralists for their failure to respond to the vagaries
of climate and the international economic system. Investment in pastoral development, which reached a high
point in the 1970s, crumbles progressively every year. At the same time, however, pastoralists themselves
have become far more articulate and able to communicate their concerns and desires to the outer world. The
collapse of the Soviet Empire has opened up the great steppes of Central Asia for the first time in seventy
years making accessible a whole world of pastoralism that had been essentially closed to researchers since
1919. Indeed, the likely effect has been to expand pastoralism, as refugees from now collapsed industrial
enterprises that only functioned with significant subsidy have sought to revive the only method of
subsistence that is practical through much of this region.
The time seems apposite then, for a view of pastoralism in the world as a whole, combining recent insights
from archaeology and anthropology with twentieth century experiences of development. Despite a plethora
of case studies, monographs and collected papers on African and Asian pastoral systems, integrated
worldwide overviews of pastoralism are surprisingly few. The most recent essay in this direction is probably
Khazanov (1984) which approaches pastoralism from a historical point of view, focusing on nomad relations
with external societies and the origin of the state. The rich and complex literature on pastoral development is
effectively ignored, perhaps unsurprisingly from the point of view of Soviet ethnography. More important,
however, is the failure to integrate the biological, to recognise that pastoral society is above all driven by the
nature and requirements of different species. This monograph is intended to try and provide a synopsis of the
present and draw out the implications for the future.
1.2 Classifying pastoral systems
Pastoral strategies can be categorized in a number of ways. The most important of these are;
a. by species
b. by management system
c. by geography
d. by ecology
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In addition to these there is a broad distinction between the developed and developing world. Extensive
livestock production is practised in both Australia and North America, under very different conditions from
elsewhere in the world, using fenced ranges and unambiguous tenure. This creates a level of investment in
land and animals very different from ‘traditional’ systems.
Pastoralism evolved as a response to two factors, medium human population densities and the presence of
extensive rangelands, usually in semi-arid regions, although the reindeer pastoralism found across the
circumpolar regions of Eurasia is an exception to this. Where human population densities are too low, i.e.
hunting-gathering was relatively easy, then the impetus to herd animals was absent. Hence pastoralism was
absent from the rangelands of the New World and Australia in the pre-European epoch. It is debated whether
the absence of appropriate species also has an impact on the evolution of pastoralism; for example, the
camelids, the alpaca and llama, were domesticated as pastoral species in the Andes in the pre-Columbian era
but no pastoralism developed in the New World plains, perhaps for lack of an appropriate species.
Pastoralism has had a vertiginous history in the realm of development agencies. The potential of the world’s
rangelands and the large numbers of livestock using them was for a long time seen as a major and underused
resource and stimulated a vast body of research and development projects, both technical and social. The
perceived failure of many of these projects and the linking of livestock to a spectrum of environmental
damage caused a major retreat from support to pastoralism in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1990s saw the
realisation that pastoralism remained in place, and moreover, the opening up of Central Asia, the largest
pastoral region in the world, stimulated a renewed interest in, if not necessarily a wise application, of lessons
learnt in the previous decades. The new millennium therefore seems quite an appropriate time to review the
status of pastoral production worldwide and particularly to focus on the insights gained by comparing Asian
and African pastoralism, as well as to review policy in the light of recent concerns about poverty and
vulnerability1.
Pastoralism is strongly associated with the presence of grasslands, but there are numerous grasslands without
pastoralists. This is partly a reflection of history; pastoralists tend to exist in complex relationships with
hunter-gatherers, and in most of the New World and Australia, pastoralism never developed because
population pressure on land remained limited. Table 1 shows a summary of the regions of the world where
pastoralism is found and gives a simplified summary of its status.
1
The material in this book reflects some two decades’ research into pastoralism, but also the insights of many
colleagues. I would particularly like to thank Piers Vitebsky and the staff at the Scott-Polar Institute in Cambridge for
giving me access to the world of reindeer pastoralism, and also David Bourn, Carol Kerven, Simon Mack, Paul Starkey,
Stephen Hall, Cindy White, William Wint and Ian Wright, for discussion and insights over the years. Florian Sommer,
Zoë Marriage and Robert Chapman have acted as research assistants on pastoral projects over the years.
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Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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Table 1. Regional zonation of pastoral systems
Zone
Main Species
Sub-Saharan Africa
Cattle, camel, sheep, goat
Europe
Small ruminants
Status
Reducing due to advancing agriculture
Everywhere declining due to enclosure and
advancing agriculture
North Africa
Small ruminants
Reducing due to advancing agriculture
Near
East
and Small ruminants
Locally declining due to enclosure and advancing
South-Central Asia
agriculture
India
Camel, cattle, buffalo, sheep, Declining due to advancing agriculture but perigoats, ducks
urban livestock production expanding
Central Asia
Yak, camel, horse, sheep, goat Expanding following decollectivisation
Circumpolar
Reindeer
Expanding following decollectivisation in Siberia,
but under pressure in Scandinavia
North America
Sheep, cattle
Declining with increased enclosure of land and
alternative economic opportunities
Central America
Sheep, cattle
Declining with increased enclosure of land and
alternative economic opportunities
Andes
Llama, alpaca, sheep
Contracting llama production due to expansion of
road systems and European-model livestock
production but increased alpaca wool production
South
American Cattle, sheep
Expanding where forests are converted to savanna
lowlands
but probably otherwise static
It is no accident that the high-capital land management approaches common in Australia and the New World
are in areas where populations were hunter-gatherers lived prior to colonial intrusions. Historically, forager
cultures have proved the most vulnerable to aggression from agricultural and technology-based cultures;
‘guns, germs and steel’ against dispersed low-technology populations (Diamond 1997). Pastoralism
developed in North and Central America post the Spanish era as Amerindian peoples gained access to
European ruminants or migrants from the Old World settled and began to farm (Melville 1994). These have
been adopted in very contrastive fashions, with such peoples as the Navaho developing what may be termed
‘true’ pastoralism, while others such as the Apache evolving highly-focused meat production through
collective herds (Kunstadter 1965).
African pastoralists are very unevenly distributed; occupationally specialised pastoralists, principally
dependent on camels, cattle and sheep, are virtually confined to the region north of the equator in semi-arid
regions (Blench 1998). Agropastoral communities, owning cattle, sheep and goats, also occur in the northern
region, but predominate south of the equator.
Estimating numbers for pastoral households worldwide is very speculative. There is a striking difference
between Central Asia and Africa in this respect; pastoral societies in Asia tend to have very high populations
but to have substantial non-pastoral sectors. The Kazakhs, for example, number some 10,000,000 in ten
countries, but only a small fraction these are herders (Benson and Svanberg 1998). The other aspect of the
situation in Central Asia, is that the creation of new countries with ethnic bases and freer movement across
borders is allowing expatriate members of specific ethnic groups to return to their 'home', thus Kazakhs,
Kyrgyz and Uzbeks and all now moving back to the state that bears their name. At the same time, the
collapse of industries that had previously been supported by Russian subsides has forced unemployed urban
workers to begin herding with their rural relatives. The situation is therefore dynamic and can be expected to
change further in coming years.
Any numbers are therefore highly speculative. De Haan et al. (1997) quote an estimate of 20 million
households worldwide for pastoral households. Pastoral and agro-pastoral communities account for 20
million and 240 million individuals respectively in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Swallow, 1994 in Holden et
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Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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al. 1997). Broadly speaking the economic importance of livestock within total household income rises as
rainfall declines, and in desertic regions, dependence is near total.
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1.3 Pastoral species
Table 2 is a schematic tabulation of pastoral species worldwide, showing their approximate geographical distribution and the main management strategies used to
keep them. ‘Enclosed’ covers fenced or demarcated rangelands operating within a Western economy.
Table 2. Main pastoral species and management systems, worldwide
Species
Scientific name
Main regions
Alpaca
Lama pacos
Andes
Bactrian camel
Camelus bactrianus
East-central Asia
Buffalo
Bubalus bubalis
Iran, India
Cattle (taurine)
Bos taurus
Europe, West Asia, West Africa
Cattle (zebu)
Bos indicus
Africa, Central Asia
Donkey
Equus asinus
Africa, Asia
Dromedary
Camelus dromedarius Africa, West Asia
Goat
Capra hircus
Africa, Europe, Asia
Horse
Equus caballus
Central Asia
Llama
Lama lama
Andes
Reindeer
Rangifer tarandus
Circumpolar Eurasia
Sheep
Ovis aries
Africa, Europe, Asia
Yak
Poephagus grunniens Highland Central Asia
Nomadic
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
-
Transhumant Agropastoral
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
-
Enclosed
?
+
+
+
?
+
-
The inclusion of buffalo in pastoral herds is rare and those in Iran are thought to derive from the migrations of the Zott Gypsies in the eighth century (see note in
Digard 1981:30). In India, the Gujjar and other peoples practise vertical transhumance with buffalos between the foothills of the Himalaya and the alpine meadows
(Garwahl 1981).
This discussion excludes birds, notably ducks and geese. Particularly in India, ducks and geese are herded by specialised pastoralists who move them from place to
place to exploit changing feed resources. Given the very different parameters of such pastoralism from mainstream systems, they are not treated in the main text but
a short discussion is given in APPENDIX II. Historically in Europe and the Middle East, pig-based pastoralism clearly existed, but there seem to be no clear
modern cases of it, in part because the main areas where it was important have either switched to Islam or to enclosed production systems2.
2
The dehesa systems of Central Spain, based around cork-oak forests may well be the last10survival of a major European swineherding tradition.
Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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Another division of pastoralism that is less easy to model is the contrast between systems essentially
based around a single species, and those based around the integrated production of several species. For
example, although horses, donkeys, camels, goats, cattle and dogs are kept by nomads of Southwest Asia,
sheep predominate and other animals are used for portage, riding, ploughing or herd management (e.g.
Barfield 1981 for a description of the Arabs of northeast Afghanistan). By contrast, in Mongolia, and in
the Northern Sudan, herders seem to manage 2-4 species of roughly equal importance simultaneously.
Göbel (1997) shows that herders in the arid puna of northwest Argentina, herders keep a mixture of
llamas, sheep and goats in roughly equal proportions.
1.4 Pastoral enterprises
The most common categorisation of pastoralism is by the degree of movement, from highly nomadic
through transhumant to agropastoral. Cultivators also keep livestock for work or marketable products but
these are not usually regarded as pastoralists. Any classification of this type must be treated as a
simplification; pastoralists are by their nature flexible and opportunistic and can rapidly switch
management systems as well as operating multiple systems in one overall productive enterprise. For
example, West African cattle-herders can practise a system of regular transhumance for a long period,
building up patronage relationships with farmers on their routes. However, in a case of extreme drought
or disease stress, they will switch to highly ‘nomadic’ patterns, moving to new areas and breaking these
relationships. When the crisis has passed they may revert to their former routes or move into an entirely
new management mode.
1.4.1 Nomadism
Exclusive pastoralists are livestock producers who grow no crops and simply depend on the sale or
exchange of animals and their products to obtain foodstuffs. Such producers are most likely to be
‘nomads’ i.e. their movements are opportunistic and follow pasture resources in a pattern that varies from
year to year. This type of nomadism reflects almost directly the availability of forage resources; the more
patchy these are, the more likely an individual herder is to move in an irregular pattern.
In popular imagination, ‘nomads’ wander from place to place without any logic –Ammianus Marcellinus
described the Huns thus;
No-one ever ploughs a field in their country, or touches a plough handle. They are ignorant of time, law or
settled existence and they keep roaming from places in their wagons. If you ask one of their children where
he comes from, he was conceived in one place, born far away and brought up still further off.
Ammianus Marcellinus –The Histories
In reality, pastoralists’ landscape is flecked with an invisible constellation of resources. They have to
balance their knowledge of pasture, rainfall, disease, political insecurity and national boundaries with
access to markets and infrastructure. They prefer established migration routes and often develop longstanding exchange arrangements with farmers to make use of crop residues or to bring trade goods.
Pastoralists usually only diverge from their existing patterns in the face of a drought, a pasture failure or
the spread of an epizootic. Nonetheless, this flexibility is often the key to their survival. Highly mobile
camel people such as the Rashaida retained a much greater proportion of their herds than the
neighbouring Beja in the droughts of the early 1980s because of the Beja attachment to set routes and
pastures (RIM 1989).
In some regions of the world, nomadism is an ancient and relatively static subsistence strategy; for
example among the ‘nomads of the nomads’ in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia (Cole 1975).
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However, along the ecotone between rangeland and arable land, movement between different strategies
can be quite fluid. The tone of much of the literature suggests that the process of sedentarisation among
nomads is irreversible, but as Glatzer (1997, 1982) shows clearly that limited opportunities for
agriculturists in northwest Afghanistan have impelled some to turn to pastoral nomadism.
1.4.2 Transhumance
Transhumance is the regular movement of herds between fixed points to exploit seasonal availability of
pastures. In montane regions such as Switzerland, Bosnia, North Africa, the Himalayas, Kyrgyzstan and
the Andes, this is a vertical movement usually between established points and the routes be very ancient.
There is strong association with higher-rainfall zones; if the precipitation is such that the presence of
forage is not a problem, then herders can afford to develop permanent relations with particular sites, for
example building houses. Horizontal transhumance is more opportunistic, with movement between fixed
sites developing over a few years but often disrupted by climatic, economic or political change.
Transhumant pastoralists often have a permanent homestead and base at which the older members of the
community remain throughout the year. Transhumance is often associated with the production of some
crops, although primarily for herders’ own use rather than for the market. In many temperate regions,
where snow is likely to block animals’ access to pasture, haymaking is an important component of the
system. ‘Make hay while the sun shines’ is very significant advice in such systems; if the grass is not cut,
dried and bundled during the summer, it may rot while being stored. Hay production in tropical systems
is less common because the movement of the herds is between higher and lower rainfall zones, in the
expectation that there will be forage in both sites. In West Africa, for example, there is a broad pattern of
movement south in the dry season, when grass is available and insect problems are minimised, and a
return movement north in the wet, when humidity-related diseases increase and there is pasture in the
regions further north.
A characteristic feature of transhumance is herd-splitting; the men take away the majority of the animals
in search of grazing, but leave the resident community with a nucleus of lactating females. There are
many variations on this procedure and moreover the development of modern transport has meant that in
recent times, households are not split up as radically; members can travel easily between the two bases.
Whether it is milking females, weak animals or work animals that are left behind differs substantially
between one system and another and may even vary within an individual system on a year-by-year basis.
Transhumance has been transformed by the introduction of modern transport in many regions of Eurasia.
For example, the transhumance of sheep in Britain between rough grazing on highland areas and
lowlands is now conducted entirely by putting the sheep in trucks and carrying them between grazing
points. Many pastoralists in North Africa send their animals on transhumance by truck or on trains
(Trautmann 1985). Wealthier countries in the Gulf, such as Oman and Saudi Arabia have made vehicles
available at subsidised rates to pastoralists to assist with animal transport and it seems likely this pattern
will be more and more frequent, especially as the problem of controlling animals in increasingly densely
settled environments can only get worse.
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1.4.3 Agropastoralism
Agropastoralists may be described as settled pastoralists who cultivate sufficient areas to feed their
families from their own crop production. Agropastoralists hold land rights, use their own or hired labour
to cultivate land and grow staples. While livestock are still valued property, their herds are on average
smaller than other pastoral systems, possibly because they no longer solely rely on livestock and depend
on a finite grazing area around their village which can be reached within a day. Agropastoralists make
greater investment in housing and other local infrastructure and if their herds become large, they often
send them away with more nomadic pastoralists.
Agropastoralism is often also the key to interaction between the sedentary and mobile communities.
Sharing the same ethnolinguistic identity with the pastoralists they often act as brokers in establishing
cattle-tracks, negotiating the ‘camping’ of herds on farms, which potentially exchanges crop residues for
valuable manure, and arranging for the rearing of work animals which adds value to overall agricultural
production.
1.4.4 Enclosed systems and ranching
Apart from the traditional pastoral systems described above, the fourth system of extensive livestock
production may be described as enclosed systems or ranching, i.e. where the land is individually owned
and usually fenced. The United States is an example of the gradual transition from common ownership
systems prevalent in the nineteenth century to a fully enclosed system today. Ranching is the dominant
system in North America, Australia and parts of South America, notably Argentina (Strickon 1965).
Rivière (1972) describes these transitional systems for northern Brazil, where communal tenure is giving
way to ranching. Some European systems could be described as ranching, although enclosures are often
small and animals frequently supplemented in the field. As Ingold (1990) points out, there has been
remarkably little description of ranching from points of view other than the technical and socio-economic
descriptions tend to be uniformly hostile because the individual ownership of large tracts of land is seen
as antisocial. Ranching, however, is an inevitable development in certain types of economy, where urban
demand for protein makes the lax supply systems of conventional pastoralism unacceptable, and input
supply can support the higher throughputs that justify ranches.
It represents a powerful ideology and the history of both colonial and post-colonial development and
command economies is littered with failed attempts to introduce these systems both throughout the dry
tropics and the temperate grasslands of Eurasia. In Nigeria, they have had a long and unsuccessful history
dating from the early colonial era (e.g. Dunbar 1970); elsewhere in Africa, the late 1960s was the renewal
of hopeful introductions and equally convincing failure (e.g. Galaty 1994:190). Livestock ranches have
an interesting history in Southern Africa; in the colonial era these were established in Namibia,
Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa. Although a substantial proportion of these
remain, in many places they have been gradually perceived as an unacceptable concentration of land in
the hands of a single owner and are gradually reverting to more traditional tenure. In Zimbabwe, for
example, large livestock enterprises are being invaded by smallholder settlers with the tacit approval of
government.
The situation in North-Central Asia is a story of decollectivisation. Among Sakha and Even reindeer
herders in Siberia, a system of managing wild reindeer seems to have operated in the pre-Soviet era
(Vitebsky 1991, 1992; Van Veen 1995). After the imposition of Bolshevik rule, the land was divided into
fenced enclaves and the herds collectivised and managed as very large ranches with centralised services.
Although a suboptimal system of managing fodder resources, improved health of the animals and the
ready market for their products acted as compensation in market terms. With decollectivisation after
1991, the fencing is gradually collapsing and veterinary services are in decline. The townships
established to provide centralised social services are functioning less well and the product-buying
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systems have faltered. Herders are compelled to re-establish older management systems whilst trying to
develop new markets for their products in a situation where inputs are no longer subsidised .
1.4.5 Pastoralism and trade
The flexibility so characteristic of pastoral nomadism and the ability to transport goods and people have
meant that pastoralism has long been associated with two other major livelihood strategies, trade and
warfare. Prior to the evolution of modern transport, animals were the only method of moving large
quantities of goods across land. Consequently, pastoralists often became involved in trade caravans,
guiding, managing and supplying the appropriate livestock and sometimes themselves becoming traders.
In the Sahara and Arabia, this evolved into a quite sophisticated form of blackmail, whereby the nomads
both guided the caravans and extracted monetary payments to prevent them from raiding those same
caravans (Sweet 1965). Long-distance trade in the Andes was a key function of llama breeders, and
elaborate multiple-point trade systems have been recorded, based on exchange relationships lasting many
generations (Orlove 1982:104). Similar camel-based systems traverse the deserts between Eastern Turkey
and Northwest India, while the movement of yaks and long-legged sheep is essentially to the distribution
of trade goods in the Himalayan region (Downs & Ekvall 1965; Jina 1999). A caravan trade still exists in
the more inaccessible regions of the pastoral zone, but its economic importance has been much reduced
by modern transport.
Frederiksen (1995) describes in detail the transformation of the Hazarbuz, pastoral nomads of eastern
Afghanistan, who form a section of the Pashtun. Until the 1920s, the Hazarbuz lived principally as
herders, concentrating principally on sheep, despite their name (which means ‘a thousand goats’). As
their migration routes coincided with a major arm of the silk route they began to be more involved, first
in transporting and then in trading, typically bringing tea from Bukhara into Afghanistan. As they
became more and more successful, an increasing number of households gave up nomadism and settled in
Kabul or elsewhere, until by the mid-1970s less than 10% of the Hazarbuz were actually involved in
pastoralism. The Soviet invasion scattered the population still further and many Hazarbuz now operate
from Pakistan while those remaining in Afghanistan are unable to go on migration because of the security
situation.
By no coincidence at all, pastoralism has also been associated with another type of trade, namely
smuggling. The consolidation of national borders and the evolution of contradictory tariffs in
neighbouring countries makes nomads the ideal group to smuggle contraband between these countries.
This is particularly highly developed in the Near East and Central Asia, where extremely different
economies border one another and long featureless frontiers are almost impossible to police. Bourgeois &
Bourgeois (1972) describe the pastoral nomad smuggling systems of Afghanistan prior to the Soviet
invasion and Abu-Rabia (1994) the important role the Negev Bedouin played in Israel in the 1950s,
smuggling in both meat and scarce consumer goods with the tacit approval of the authorities. More
recently, the Bedu in Jordan have played a key role both in smuggling primary products out of Iraq, taxfree consumer goods from Saudi Arabia to all other countries and small products such as cigarettes into
Syria. Similarly, the Rashaida in Sudan are key intermediaries in the trade moving fat-tailed sheep across
the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia and receiving consumer goods in return.
This has interesting consequences for both livestock production and intervention in the livestock sector.
In many places where smuggling and trade are key sources of income, pastoralist economic dependence
on livestock is slight, although trade depends on the pastoral way of life. As a consequence, animals are
often few and little investment is made in either reproduction or health, since returns on these are low
compared with, for example, bribing officials or buying four-wheel drive vehicles. So when development
projects are proposed which make the assumption that pastoralism is the basis of the local economy,
since speaking openly about smuggling is politically unacceptable, they usually run into sand literally
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and metaphorically, as herders will never make the investments required by the project as their attention
is directed elsewhere.
1.4.6 Pastoralism and warfare
The association between pastoralism and raiding is of great antiquity; Herodotos reported on the Scythian
horsemen 2500 years ago. Since then, waves of raiders from Central Asia threatened Europe until the end
of the Middle Ages. Barfield (1989) is a history of the dynamic relationship between the Chinese Empire
and its nomadic raiders from the steppes over a period of 3000 years. Chatwin (1989) describes in some
detail the ebb and flow of the association between pastoralism and military cultures across Asia. There is
little doubt that the domestication of the horse contributed significantly to the evolution of both raiding
cultures and large states. Horses made possible the rapid movement of large armies and the transport of
goods, personnel and messages in a way that was impractical with any other livestock species. It is
probably no accident that the cyclical nature of the conflict between nomads and the state was first
described with some acuity by the medieval North African historian, Ibn Khaldun, in his study of history,
the Muqadimah (trans. Rosenthal 1967). It also helps explain why so much of the discourse of pastoral
nomadism is framed in terms of ‘crisis’ and ‘problem’ (§1.7); the explosive nature of relations with the
state and the natural environment suggests to observers at any given time that a catastrophic cusp has
been breached.
This type of centre-periphery warfare has largely ceased, and the probable key factor is the introduction
of the aeroplane. Once the state can move around freely in rugged and remote areas and move troops and
weapons to inaccessible areas, the previous advantage held by the nomad disappears. Only if the state is
too impoverished to outmanoeuvre the pastoralists in this way, can the nomad persist with dissent.
Nonetheless, the ability of nomads to move in hostile terrain continues to be perceived as a threat by
national governments, as witness the continuing hostilities between the Saharan nomads, the Tuareg and
Teda, and the countries in whose territory they live.
Brotherston (1989:244) notes that the llama was essentially to Inca military operations, providing both
transport and food on the hoof, playing a role analogous to the horse. In regions where the horse was an
introduced exotic, such as West Africa, this may have contributed to the failure of large states to develop.
Although large North African horses were brought across the desert in the medieval period, the high
costs of keeping them alive in a tsetse zone, meant that they could never support an empire on the scale
of those in Central Asia (Law 198O; Blench 1993). Nonetheless, as horses became accustomed to West
Africa, they played an increasing role in warfare and without the intervention of colonialism would
perhaps have begun to underpin large state structures. The Ful∫e in West Africa launched a jihad in the
early nineteenth century which transformed the political map the Sahelian region.
An aspect of the colonial and postcolonial era relevant to this type of conflict is changing social structure
and a breakdown in the acceptance of former hierarchical relations. Just as in the West, special interest
groups increasingly challenge the process whereby the governments of nation-states make decisions for
them, so sections of society at the bottom of the social pyramid in Africa have begun similarly to assert
their rights. All across the semi-arid zone, pastoralist societies such as the Moors, the Tamachek and
some Ful∫e groups depended heavily on slave labour in the precolonial period. After the colonial
conquest, slaves were given their freedom legally, although realising that freedom was often a lengthy
process. However, as groups such as the Haratin [Moors], Bella or Iklan [Tamachek] and Rimay∫e
[Ful∫e] moved away from their former masters, they retained both their language and lifestyle.
Gradually, however, resentment at their former status has surfaced and they have responded either by
denying their slave origins or antagonistic behaviour towards their former owners, some of whom have
been reduced to poverty by the major droughts in the 1970s and 1980s.
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In more subtle ways, authority systems that depended on farmers being subservient to pastoralists
gradually collapsed in the post-colonial era. For example, in Nigeria, many non-Muslim populations were
placed under a local juridical system controlled by the Hausa/Fulani during the colonial period. Court
cases between herders and farmers tended almost invariably to be decided in favour of herders. However,
after independence, farmers began gradually to take control of local authorities and thus judicial systems
and their own appointees made decisions in courts. The result has often been a reversal of the previous
bias.
In the case of seasonal pastoral migrations, committees were established throughout Anglophone West
Africa to ensure that established cattle routes were respected by both farmers and pastoralists. These
committees functioned into the early years of independence, but have now been largely disbanded. Many
years of seasonal migration of cattle herds have created fertile north-south swathes. Declining soil
fertility in many regions has made these attractive places to farm, outweighing the dangers of possible
conflict. Farmers have also been emboldened by taking control of the local or regional administration in
many areas.
1.4.7 Pastoralism and hunting
In many environments, pastoralism and agriculture have effectively eliminated all but small animals and
commensals. However, especially in some parts of Africa and Central Asia, herders still interact with
significant wildlife populations. This has two opposing consequences; the persistence of predators and
the availability of hunted meat. Pastoralists have no sympathy with predators at all and usually end up in
conflict with conservation lobbies, especially in Mongolia (p. 40). Curiously, few pastoralists are
hunters; in contrast to farmers, where hunting is often regarded as a prestigious activity, hunting is a
minor activity, often focussed on particular species. In Mongolia again, the main focus of hunting activity
is the marmot, hardly high-status game in terms of large mammals. Similarly, over much of Africa,
pastoralists don't hunt. It has been noted that the side of the Serengeti where pastoralists are resident
suffers less from the depredations of poachers than where it is bordered by farming villages.
However, in some pastoral subarctic systems, such as that of the Saami of the Kola peninsula, hunting
plays an important role in overall subsistence (Konstantinov n.d.). The Saami have relatively small
reindeer herds which they exploit principally for household meat. Their herding system allows them to
leave the reindeer to run wild for much of the year and during this period fishing, hunting and trapping of
mammals predominate, both occasionally for meat but also for the pelts of high-value species sold for
cash. The Kazakhs combine all these sources of income, both hunting with hawks on a recreational basis,
hunting meat species and trapping fur animals and selling the pelts.
1.4.8 Pastoralism and fishing
Pastoralists divide sharply in their attitude to aquatic resources. In some regions, fishing and gathering of
shellfish is essential to subsistence, elsewhere pastoralists regard such foods as taboo. For example, all
along the coast of the Horn of Africa from Southern Egypt to North Kenya, an extremely dry region
dominated by pastoral peoples, a prohibition on marine resources means that these go virtually
unexploited, despite the sometimes desperate straits to which these peoples are reduced in times of
drought or warfare. Inland, however, in the swamps of Southern Sudan, Nilotic pastoral peoples such as
the Dinka and Nuer regard fish as an integral part of their subsistence. The Turkana have always had
subgroups that exploited the fish in the lake that bears their name. Mongolian lakes remain largely
unfished, but throughout much of the subarctic region, for example among the Chukchi and Saami,
hunting of marine mammals and fishing is regarded as essential.
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The sources of these rather marked cultural differences are not easy to determine, although it is evident
they are of great antiquity. In some cases, this is because fishing people and pastoralists have systems of
interlocking land use, for example in the Inland Delta in Mali (Gallais 1975a, 1984). Making more
effective use of aquatic resources in pastoral areas might clearly be important for increasing food
security, although experience suggest that changing entrenched dietary preferences is quite difficult.
However, there could be considerable potential for increasing levels of co-operation between pastoral and
fishing peoples to make effective use of a rich but fragile environment.
Apart from livestock producers, there are also nomadic fishermen and in some circumstances these are
treated by the state in the same way. Nigeria, for example, has numerous pastoralists and also nomadic
fishing communities moving from site to site in the sea Delta of the Niger, following estuarine aquatic
resources. They face similar problems in terms of poor health and education and have successfully
lobbied the government for access to funds intended for 'nomads'.
1.4.9 Pastoralists and non-pastoral species
Apart from their livestock, most pastoralists keep non-pastoral species, notably chickens and dogs. The
Tuareg of the Hoggar keep dogs, cats, hedgehogs, chicken, guinea-fowl and pigeons (Nicolaisen &
Nicolaisen 1997, II:173). Usually these enterprises are rather casual and vary considerably from one
fraction to another. However, in West Africa, the chickens carried by Ful∫e nomads grow very fat on the
worms associated with animal dung and thus constitute a significant source of cash to the household.
Dogs are of considerable importance in the protection of livestock across a wide swathe of Eurasia,
especially where wolves are a problem. Indeed in Hungary, and other parts of Eastern Europe, wolves
have interbred with feral dogs. In Britain and some parts of Western Europe, dogs are also used to herd
sheep, making a considerable saving on labour. This practice is not well-documented but it seems that
despite the importance of sheep from the Near East to Central Asia, using to dogs to herd is not known.
In Central Asia and the Middle East, pastoral peoples such as the Bedouin and the Kazak use hawks for
hunting.
1.5 History and origins of pastoralism
Although this book is principally an account of the situation of pastoralists in the present, it makes no
apology for referring to the historical literature. The naïveté of much development literature concerning
even the recent past is a rich source of error in the present. One all too common mistake is to suppose that
a crisis in the present signals the final demise of pastoralism. If history shows anything, it shows that
pastoralists and settled cultures establish dynamic relationships and that while pastoralism has a certain
ethnic component, it is above all a way of life appropriate to particular economic and ecological
circumstances. In other words, it may disappear briefly, but will always make its return because the
settled need the mobile, to trade, to breed animals and to open up areas too remote for agriculture.
Planning for pastoral societies must have this long-term perspective, it needs to assume that herds will
always recover eventually as they have in the past and that the colonisation of inaccessible zones will
always be the preserve of such peoples.
The origin of pastoralism has been much discussed, especially in an older type of literature, influenced,
unconsciously perhaps, by Marxist historical schemas. Pastoralism was seen as an evolutionary stage in
human history, a phase following hunting-gathering and leading thence to sedentarisation and agriculture.
This may have seemed perfectly reasonable both because of a lack of archaeological evidence and
because it unconsciously reflected the contempt in which settled peoples historically held nomads. It may
also be influenced by the myth of Cain and Abel which places the burden of original sin unambiguously
on the livestock producer. However, the expansion of archaeological data and a more careful reading of
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the historical sources, especially in Asia, has demonstrated a more complex story (see Cribb 1991 for a
review of modern theoretical developments). In most parts of the world, Africa excepted, agriculture
seems to be earlier than pastoralism. Pastoralism develops from surplus, as individuals simply
accumulate too many animals to graze them around a settlement throughout the year. In addition, as
herders learnt more about the relations between particular types of ecology and the spread of debilitating
diseases they gradually developed the practice of seasonally removing their animals from danger-zones.
The earliest literary references to a people who would appear to be pastoralists are the Amorites, who
herded cattle, sheep, goats and donkeys in the Near East in the first half of the second millennium BC
(Cribb 1991:10). Chronicles of the Hsia dynasty in China (2205-1766 BC) note the Ch’iang nomads,
probably the ancestors of modern Tibetans, as weavers of fine wool (Miller & Craig, 1997:58 ff.).
Herodotos mentions a number of peoples assumed to be pastoral across Central Asia: Russian
archaeology has made remarkable and still little-known contributions to our knowledge of the Scythians,
the Sauromations, the Saka, the Siberian Schythisna and the Mongols (see Davis-Kimball, Bashilov &
Yablonsky 1995). The llama and alpaca are conventionally assigned dates of 6000 bp for their
domestication, although differentiating their bones from their wild ancestors is a doubtful exercise.
Descriptions of a recognisably pastoral culture in Sub-Saharan Africa date back to Pliny (who described
blood and milk drinking in the Horn of Africa). However, pastoralism is likely to be far earlier than these
records. The exact origins of pastoralism can only be gauged from archaeology and in particular from
careful osteometric work demonstrating the gradual divergence between wild forms of livestock and their
domesticated relatives. Some claims have been made for domestic cattle in Northeast Africa as early as
9000 bp although not all scholars accept these dates and more solid dates are available for 6000 bp
onwards (MacDonald and MacDonald 2000). However, the interpretation of osteometric evidence
already depends on the assumption that early herders were controlling breeding; but it seems likely that
the earliest stages of pastoralism involved the management of wild animals, as reindeer pastoralism does
still today in some parts of the subarctic.
Pastoral culture spread out from the Nile Valley and North Africa, probably through the agency of the
ancestors of present-day Berber populations (Blench in press). Pastoral production appears clearly in the
archaeological record in both East and West Africa 4500-4000 bp (Marshall 2000). The exact routes and
dates whereby pastoralism reached southern Africa are disputed (Bousman 1998), but there seems to
have been pre-Iron Age transmission nearly 2000 bp, probably initially with sheep and shortly after with
cattle. The elaborate cattle culture described by early travellers to the Cape (Boonzaier et al. 1996) was
probably established only some five hundred years before the first navigators encountered the Khoikhoi.
1.6 Sources of information on pastoralism
The worldwide literature on pastoralism is extremely uneven, and determined by politics and security
issues as much as by the need for empirical data. Pastoralism studies have historically been dominated by
anthropologists; and the initial focus was probably East African pastoralists.
At any rate, in many ways the accessibility of East African pastoralists combined with a perception of the
importance of their herds in the eyes of the colonial authorities led to a flowering of monographs (Asad
1970). Sudan is well-known and Kenya (Bollig 1990); but for example, the non-colonial status of
Ethiopia meant that its many pastoral peoples remained unstudied and even today are little known
(Abbink 1993). In West Africa, the dominance of the Ful∫e stimulated a series of monographs in French
covering the different subgroups (Dupire 1970; Benoit 1979; Bougeot 1981; Awogbade 1983; Blench
1984, 1985, 1991a; 1994). By contrast, the Kanuri-speaking groups of Nigeria and Niger are barely
described (though see Conte 1991).
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Pastoralism was widespread in southern Africa at the period of first European contact, but the
extermination of the Khoikhoi and the Herero has led to a near-elimination of true pastoralism systems
from the region (see Boonzaier 1987; Vivelo 1977). Only in the extreme north of Namibia among the
Himba does a recognisable pastoral system still exist (Bollig 1997).
Berber pastoralism in North Africa and the Sahara is relatively well described (Chapelle 1957; Bernus
1981; Baroin 1985; Nicolaisen & Nicolaisen 1997; Spittler 1998) but in West Asia and Northeast Africa,
the emphasis has historically been on the Bedu and romanticised descriptions of their herding data back
to the mid-nineteenth century (Oppenheim 1939-1952; Lancaster 1981; Blench 1998). This tradition has
been in the British social anthropological tradition and the relative wealth of many of these countries has
rather discouraged pastoral projects of the type that has been dominant in Africa.
Between Eastern Turkey and northwest India lies a region very imperfectly known. The south of Iran is
rich in pastoral groups usually specialised in sheep and these are described in a number of monographs
from the epoch of the Shah (e.g. Barth 1961; Bates 1973; Irons 1975; Digard 1981; Barfield 1981; BlackMichaud 1986). Since the Iranian revolution, all scholarly field-study appears to have ceased. Similarly
in Afghanistan and Pakistan, political insecurity in the pastoral regions has all but halted research. Indian
pastoralism in the Rajasthan desert has been extensively covered (e.g. Agrawal 1992; Casimir 1996;
Kavoori 1991, 1996; Sansthan & League for Pastoral Peoples 1999) but the Tibet-style transhumance
typical of the Himalayan region less so (e.g. Downs and Ekvall 1965; Ekvall 1968; Garwahl 1981;
Goldstein and Beall 1990).
In Central Asia, the Soviet period produced a large literature, seen through a rather specific ideological
filter; little of this literature has been translated and much is inaccessible (though see Khazanov 1984).
After the break-up of the Soviet Union there has been a major expansion of materials on pastoralists in
both the CIS countries and Mongolia, although the potential for outside scholars to study has been
limited by political insecurity (e.g. Temple, Swift & Payne 1993; Mearns 1991, 1993; Van Veen 1995).
At the same time, the desire of development agencies to mount projects has led to a burgeoning of
development literature and consultancy reports; much of this material is frankly very weak.
Chinese-dominated regions of Central Asia were off-limits for a long period, but have now begun to open
up. Although Tibet remains problematic, Mongol and Kazakh herders in northwest China are gradually
being placed on the pastoral map. Longworth and Williamson (1993) is a major source for these regions,
concentrating principally on sheep and wool production.
Pastoralism in north America is of recent origin, and in many cases the documentation is somewhat old,
so the systems described may well have changed. For example, domestic reindeer were introduced into
Alaska in the 1890s principally herded by the native Inupiat people (Beach 1985). At their height,
reindeer numbered some 640,000 head in the 1930s. However, by the 1970s this had fallen to just 24,000
and the practice may well have disappeared altogether. Similarly, accounts of Apache and Navajo
herding are more than thirty years old (Kunstadter 1965) and the situation is likely to have changed
dramatically.
In the Andes, indigenous pastoralism was virtually ignored until the 1960s and the herding of llama and
alpaca (auchenids) was considered to be a borrowing from European traditions, similar to Navaho sheep
herding. Andean pastoralism is now know to be extremely ancient (Rick 1980). Pastoralism is confined
to the semi-arid regions of the Andes in a habitat known as puna, between 3700-5000 masl. This type of
herding is found in South-Central Peru, Bolivia and in northern Chile. By comparison with other types of
pastoralism, publications are few and scattered (see review in Orlove 1982 and also Flores 1964;
Nachtigall 1966; Webster 1973; Browman, 1974, 1982; Orlove 1977; Novoa 1989; Göbel 1997).
The emphasis placed here on the sporadic and interrupted nature of pastoralist studies in many regions is
important, because of the highly flexible and opportunistic nature of pastoral society. Descriptive
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monographs tend to fix a region or a people in time, but very often a restudy shows that major changes in
species, breeding strategies and movement patterns has occurred. Basing development interventions on
old data in the pastoral sector is a particularly inappropriate strategy.
For information to flow effectively, substantially more effort must go into translating and synthesising
publications on pastoralism in languages other than English or French. Even monographs in German
have a tendency to be ignored by the Anglo-American establishment; this is much more the case for
Chinese and Russian. Similarly, approaches from different disciplines tend to write in ignorance of one
another; animal scientists don’t read anthropology and development literature often seems to be written
in blissful ignorance of any other discipline.
1.7 The discourse of pastoralism
The literature of pastoralism is not simply an ordered body of empirical descriptive literature; to read
through this material is to become aware of authors writing within a particular context. As much as
nomadism is viewed negatively within many countries where it is practised so it is as often viewed
positively by outsiders. Writers are frequently impressed by the independence of nomads, their ability to
survive in extremely harsh landscapes and their cosmopolitan outlook compared with neighbouring
farmers. The other side of this, however, is the discourse of the ‘crisis’ or ‘problem’. Even from the early
period, the literature is rich with articles and books analysing the crisis of nomadism or the problems
nomads experience or are said to cause. Gloomy predictions as to the catastrophic decline of pastoralism
are commonplace, although nomads surprisingly seem to outlast these forebodings. For example, one of
the earliest texts on the Maasai (Hinde & Hinde 1910) was entitled ‘The last of the Masai’. Many of the
books and articles listed in the bibliography include words such as 'last', 'final' and 'end' even where this
is manifestly not the case. Benson and Svanberg (1998) refer to the Kazakh as China's last nomads
despite the fact that China has many other nomadic peoples, some indeed who seem to have been given a
new lease of life by recent liberalisation.
In part this reflects an inevitable aspect of the nomadic system of production, frequent catastrophic
collapses and recoveries. Climatic extremes and disease can cause apparently terminal livestock losses,
while prosperity and stability in nation-states lead to agricultural encroachment on pastoral land. The
presence of researchers while such processes are under way almost inevitably leads to dire
prognostications; however, history should make it clear that the flexibility and opportunism insisted upon
in their monographs in fact allows pastoralism to be constantly resuscitated.
The other side of this is that national governments often see pastoralists as a ‘problem’ and it is hard not
to be coloured by this discourse especially when writing reports. If it is national policy to sedentarise
pastoralists, then the failure of projects or initiatives to settle them transmutes into a problem. If is
accepted that pastoralism is simply a part of the national tapestry of lifeways, then the ‘problem’
evanesces. Much in the essay that follows describes attempts that have been made to provide solutions to
these problems, but it is essential to remember that the existence and nature of such problems consists
almost entirely of issues defined by outsiders. Pastoralists themselves often take considerable satisfaction
in their lifestyle, sometimes to the extent of intentionally offending farmers with outrageous dress or
customs.
More recently, the literature of pastoralism has taken a more reflexive academic turn, with authors less
concerned about ethnographic reality and more with the vast literature and archive material that has now
accumulated. Anderson & Broch-Due’s (1999) The poor are not us is a good example of this; its theme
reflecting the fashionable concerns of the aid agencies that fund much of the work now undertaken with
its contributors relying heavily on archives and early published material to draw out past ‘narratives’ of
rangeland degradation, pastoral fecklessness etc.
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Given the vast body of publication and grey literature on pastoralism, it may seem invidious to suggest
that yet more research is required. But recent literature describing the current economics, ecology and
production systems is remarkably sparse for many regions. Chad, probably one of the most significant
pastoral countries in Africa, must make do with descriptions that are more than fifty years old. The
locations, size and status of many of its pastoral groups are presently unknown. If even a small part of the
energy that has been directed towards the Turkana were turned to Chad, the picture of pastoralism in
Africa would be more balanced. The situation is similar with the 'new' pastoral societies of Central Asia.
They are not new of course, the rapid changes following decollectivisation makes much of the existing
literature of historical interest.
2. Grazing and Nutrition
2.1 Rangelands: opportunistic use of patchy resources
Pastoralists are strongly associated with rangelands across the world, with the exception of reindeer, in
part because their key asset, the mobility of their animals, makes it possible to exploit nutritional
resources in regions unavailable to arable farmers. Rangelands is a broader term than grasslands,
including regions where woody vegetation is dominant; moreover, it is common in texts describing land
from the viewpoint of livestock production. Grasslands are just that, and the term has a more biological
emphasis3. Some of the ecological literature attempts to distinguish ‘rangelands’ and ‘natural’ grasslands
(for example, the Elsevier ‘Ecosystems of the World’ premises different volumes on this dichotomy – see
Bourlière (1983) and Coupland (1993a). But closer examination of the descriptions suggests that either
the origin of many grasslands is contentious or else grasslands become ‘natural’ if they are ancient
human creations (see, for example, Gillson (1993a) on the grasslands of New Guinea).
The literature uses several terms for the main world’s rangelands: African savanna, Eurasian steppe,
South American savanna, North American prairies, Indian savanna, and Australian grasslands (Moore
1970: Groombridge 1992: 285; Solbrig, 1996). Estimates of their importance vary according to the
regions included, but as figures given in the literature suggest, rangelands occupy between 18–23% of
world land area, excluding Antarctica (Table 3).
Table 3 Estimates of the area of the world’s rangelands
Whittaker
Atlay,
Kettner, Olson, Watts and
and
Likens Dugvigneaud
Allison (1983)
(1975)
(1979)
Savanna (million km²)
15.0
22.5
24.6
Temperate grassland (million km²)
9.0
12.5
6.7
Total (million km²)
24.0
35.0
31.3
%
%
%
Rangeland as % of world land area
16.1
23.7
20.7
Rangeland as % of world land area
17.9
26.5
23.1
(excluding Antarctica)
Source: Groombridge (1992: 281)
3
There are two parallel series of international congresses, the International Rangelands Congress and the
International Grasslands Society whose meetings alternate, but which are attended by largely the same constituency.
So similar are these meetings that it has recently been proposed to merge the two societies, although this proposal
remains controversial.
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Grasslands are usually divided into four major types: tropical grasslands, prairie/steppe, temperate
grasslands and tundra, determined either by the underlying soils or by climatic conditions. Table 4 shows
the main categories of grasslands and their major zones of concentration:
Table 4 Classes of grasslands
Category
Where
Tropical grasslands
Africa, South America, northern Australia, India
Prairie/steppe
North America, Central Eurasia, South Africa
Temperate grasslands
Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Asia
Tundra
All subarctic regions
The rangelands of the Tibetan Plateau are unique in that they are the highest grazing lands anywhere in
the world. The greater part of the Plateau is above 4000m and some camps are as high as 5100m (Miller
& Craig 1997:58ff.)
The main floral component of rangelands, grass, exists to be grazed, and over time co-adapts to both the
intensity and quality of grazing. The long-term evolutionary history of a grassland ecosystem as well as
the history of the last few centuries are therefore essential to understanding its response both to
management and to new pressures on it.
In parts of North Africa and Southwest Asia, rangelands have been reduced in size, in part because the
widespread use of irrigation technologies, both in traditional and more recently in hi-tech forms, has
allowed agriculture to colonise much larger regions of the rangelands. As a result, what rangelands
remain are considerably more arid than those exploited by pastoralists in Sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed,
‘drought’ conditions may be said to obtain most of the year. Responses to this have long since been
developed, both in terms of species and the movement of resources. Pastoralism has traditionally been
oriented around camels and sheep, with sheep becoming predominant in recent times due to their greater
marketability. The movement of water and feed resources to arid areas has been practised since before
ethnographers began to describe pastoral nomads (notably through the carriage of large water-skins on
camel-back). Today pastoralists throughout the North Africa and Southwest Asia have relatively
sophisticated trucking systems (of water, feed resources and the animals themselves) that allow them to
exploit areas that would be unavailable in Sub-Saharan Africa (Blench, 1998).
The situation in Australia is somewhat different; Australian arid and semi-arid rangelands occupy nearly
70% of the continental land mass, much of it used for extensive livestock production (Groves, 1981).
Australia’s rangelands have been transformed subsequent to European settlement by:
•
•
•
•
•
•
provision of artificial sources of water
introduction of cattle, sheep and rabbits
introduction of exotic forage species (e.g. buffel grass, Stylosanthes)
changes to traditional burning patterns
elimination of the dingo from most sheep areas
and clearing of overstorey trees
(James et al., 1998)
In many arid or semi-arid rangelands in Australia and in North America artificial sources of water are so
widespread that lack of rainfall results in localised feed shortages (Bennet, 1997). Large herbivorous
mammals are able to continue grazing in areas which they would usually have abandoned (James et al.,
1996). Native wild animal populations, which previously relied on drinking from natural sources,
increase because they are able to persist in areas that were previously most of the time not habitable.
Such ‘artificial’ increases in some species may have negative effects on others. The effects on native
fauna are: the displacement of ground-dwelling bird species; changes to the distribution and abundance
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of invertebrates (e.g. grasshoppers, ants and collembolans); possible recent extinction of some mediumsized native mammals; and indirect effect on wildlife populations through changing activities of
predators (James et al., 1998:1). Another effect of artificial water sources is to maintain constant high
levels of grazing pressure. Many native plant species are naturally not adapted to constant grazing and
will tend to be eliminated in favour of exotics (Austin and Williams, 1988).
Rangelands in turn are strongly characterised by patchiness of resources and resilience in the face of
climatic extremes. Especially where water resources are short, as in the semi-arid rangelands in Africa,
the Middle East, the New World and Australia, vegetation has become adapted to patchy and variable
rainfall. Reserves of seeds of particular species accumulate in the soil which will germinate when
particular precipitation regimes occur. As a result, not only pasture availability but pasture quality may
vary substantially; it is often difficult to predict which species may be abundant in a given year.
The situation in cold-weather rangelands is somewhat different since water availability is not usually a
limiting factor, but rather the severe cold itself and a short flowering season bracketed by snow. Pastures
are thus rather different in structure, with a very large number of flowering species competing to seed in
a brief window. Abundance and quality are less often an issue for pastoralists than access, whether the
barriers are snow or administrative. For this reason, cold-weather pastoralism tends towards systems
based on transhumance and haymaking.
Traditional pastoralists broadly accept pasture and rainfall as a given and adapt their social and herding
systems to take best advantage of them. The one exception appears to be in the Andes, where herders
create irrigation channels to encourage the growth of bofedales, bunch grasses that are particularly
important for llama nutrition (Orlove 1982:100). The stone-lined leets of Dartmoor constructed in the
Neolithic period may also have the same purpose. But the economic importance of extensive livestock
production in Australia and North America and the greater integration with the market has given greater
impetus to evening out the unpredictability of rangeland productivity. Once mobile pastoralism in these
regions had been eliminated through enclosure, the size of ranches was often large enough to still make
use of movement within the property, especially as an increasing number of water sources were installed,
blunting the impact of overall precipitation. Increasing borehole numbers has often been associated with
pasture seeding, thereby encouraging numbers to increase well beyond the long-term capacity of the land
to support them. The consequence has been, as the droughts of 1996-1998 in the mid-West of the United
States and Australia demonstrate all too clearly, that even extensive livestock producers with high levels
of access to infrastructural support and management tools can mistake short-term gains for long-term
equilibrium and go out of business.
The vagaries of the weather have produced another technological response, increasingly sophisticated
software programmes and databases intended to assist producers to both be aware of climatic data and to
make real-time use of it in managing their stock. This particularly the case in Australia, where a series of
blows to the pastoral industries have badly affected the economies of states dependent on them and where
there is intense commercial competition to find better management tools. As a result, there is both an
abundance of information available to pastoral producers and a plethora of commercial hard sell, often
larded with exaggerated claims masquerading as science. While there is no doubt that real-time and
historical climatic data are valuable, it remains to be seen whether practical producers can make use of it
in such as way as to gain real advantages in stock survival rates.
Control of stock numbers is another important tool; pastoralists in open-access systems find it practically
impossible to restrict overall numbers especially when pasture productivity is poor. The consequence has
been the evolution of a minor industry, the calculation of carrying capacity. Despite a scientific
superstructure, there is virtually no evidence that this has any scientific validity, as is evidenced by the
fact that different experts come up with widely varying figures when asked to estimate the carrying
capacity for the same piece of rangeland. Even without hand-held computers and innovative software,
livestock producers in enclosed systems with experience of the landscape should be able to detect when
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their herds are putting undue pressure on resources. However, this is not necessarily the case; recent
evaluations of Australian properties suggest that overstocking is common with all too predictable
consequences. One response has been the evolution of the Landcare movement/strategy which
encourages producers to take a more holistic approach to the landscape and its management, rather than
simply treating it as a more or less depleted resource.
Especially in enclosed systems, another strategy has been to seed rangelands with exotic species
supposed to have greater nutritional properties. In recent times, this has been carried from small planes,
using legumes such as Stylosanthes. The consequences of introducing exotic species into vegetational
systems with a high degree of endemism such as that of Australia have been well-documented elsewhere;
Acacia albida, an important browse plant in Sahelian Africa, is now characterised as an ‘aggressive
weed’ in Australia, has out-competed local species and become the subject of an expensive elimination
campaign.
Obviously, these strategies are relevant mainly to developed economies, although over-insertion of
boreholes has afflicted semi-arid rangelands everywhere. Control of stock numbers in open-access
rangelands is basically only possible in totalitarian regimes, and thus occurred in the former Soviet Union
and in the pastoral regions of the Negev, at least for the Palestinians. Regretfully, the numerous projects,
policies and strategy papers that have proposed the opposite have now joined consultancy documents on
destocking in some limbo where such idealistic entities are finally laid to rest.
2.2 Silvo-pastoral systems
Although pastoralists are primarily associated with rangelands, almost everywhere they make some use
of forest vegetation in their annual grazing cycle; the most extreme cases are Eurasian arctic reindeer
systems, which are confined to forests. Reindeer are also a special case as they depend primarily on
mosses rather than browsing the trees themselves. The ability of pastoral species to digest woody
vegetation is highly variable; camels, donkeys and goats can live almost exclusively on such a diet,
whereas cattle, yaks, buffalo and sheep can only consume very limited quantities unless they have been
fed on browse from an early period. Livestock species also have differing capacities to access browse;
camels have an advantage in that they can browse on thorny species with leaves unreachable by other
species. Unlike goats, which uproot or strip shorter plants, camels rarely damage the biodiversity of
environments in which they graze.
The differing capacities of individual species have had a long-term impact on both ethnic specialisations
and the balance of environments. In the Horn of Africa, peoples that depend on ‘browsing’ species such
as the Somali camel herders, border on arid-zone cattle producers such as the Boran and Turkana in
Ethiopia and Kenya. Years of intensive grazing of grasslands cause gradual invasions of woody
vegetation and gradually drive away grazing species, unable to digest the lignin. It seems likely that
pressure from biting flies also increases as the shade provides a greater range of habitats, to judge by
work in the Cameroon grasslands (Boutrais 1995). Peoples specialised in browsing livestock, such as
Somali and Rendille, then move in and take over. However, over a long time span, grasslands re-invade,
making the land again suitable for cattle and sheep.
Throughout much of Africa, trees are the characteristic haunt of tsetse and other biting flies, which makes
more than seasonal use problematic. In vertical transhumance in the Himalaya, the winters are spent in
forested areas, the animals only moving to meadows during the summers (Chakravarty-Kaul 1997). This
has more to do with the cycles of snow than habituation to diet, but animals in these systems have
become more adaptable than those in Sahelian Africa by virtue of the major diet changes to which they
are exposed within the course of a year.
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Increasing the amount of browse cattle can consume would certainly improve conditions for pastoralists
in parts of Sahelian Africa, although presumably resources for browsing species would thereby be
reduced. Some experiments with camels in Australia may be promising in this respect. Recent research
on watering camels and cattle at the same trough when both are feeding in wooded grasslands, suggests
that the enzymes that allow camels to digest browse may transfer across to cattle and increase their
abilities to digest browse. If this were expanded to encourage semi-arid cattle producers to adopt some
camels in their herd and adapt their watering strategies it might have a major impact on survival in some
regions.
2.3 Supplementary feeding
Supplementary feeding seems to have had little place in traditional pastoralism anywhere in the world, in
part because herds were so small and pasture resources so vast in the pre-modern era. However, stocking
winter hay was practised all across the temperate world, where snow or other climatic conditions made it
impossible to provide the herds with adequate food. Grass is usually cut in autumn and bundled in stores
and rationed to the herds during the winter months. Mechanised grass-cutters and transport have
increased the efficiency of this process, and the helicopter has made it possible to drop hay on herds
isolated by snow. However, this is expensive, and while typically subsidised from military budgets in
Central Asia in the past, its use is now only sporadic.
In this century, changes in supplementary feeding have been extremely significant following the
increasing availability of agro-industrial by-products and transport systems to deliver them to remote
areas. In semi-arid Africa, products such as cottonseed and groundnut cakes and molasses are now
regularly sold to pastoralists, together with mineral licks. Throughout semi-arid West-Central Africa,
cotton production was introduced in the colonial era as a cash crop, and its cultivation has remained an
integral part of the economy in some
countries. The main by-product of Box 1. The desert in Jordan: a parking lot for herds?
ginning cotton locally is cottonseed cake: It is generally considered that Bedu herds in Jordan in
an oily compressed cake that acts as a the pre-modern era were limited to some 150-200
nutritious livestock feed. In the 1960s, animals, since this was all that could be managed by the
cottonseed cake was introduced as an labour available in a family unit. However, two changes
experimental diet-supplement in Nigeria, have occurred to radically change this situation; the
and had to be given away to herders introduction of water trucks and the widespread
(Otchere 1986). After some time, availability of subsidised feeds. The buying of feeds has
pastoralists gradually realised the value of become the single most important household
these supplements; however, so did more expenditure. Every single livestock producer interviewed
intensive producers, especially those with in a survey of some 400 households spent some money
stall-fed animals based around cut-and- on feeds. Feeds are purchased in bulk by the
carry. As a consequence, oil-seed cakes Government and sold according to allocations denoted
have become so highly valued that by the 1991 livestock census. It is government policy not
supplies are regularly bought up by to allow purchase of subsidised feed for camels. Despite
wealthy urban entrepreneurs and rarely this, many of the camels, especially those kept for milk
reach the markets or are available to on the western edge of the rangelands, are fed on
ordinary cattle producers (Kaufmann and purchased feed. The use of these feeds has spiralled in
Blench 1989).
the last few years with the ever-declining rangeland
resources. The system of allocating subsidised feeds on a
Increased globalisation of markets has per-head basis has created a major incentive to increase
also led to a highly significant herd sizes and in the Badia, the rangelands covering
international trade in animal feeds. Where most of eastern Jordan, herds of 1000-2000 sheep are
herds have expanded far beyond carrying common. The forage resources cannot support herds of
capacity as in most of the semi-arid this size and desert is increasingly a place to store
steppeland of the Middle East, this is animals while trucking in sacks of feed.
Source: Blench (1995).
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premised on supplementing herds with purchased feeds. The political significance of pastoralism in many
countries in the region has had the consequence that national governments are tempted to subsidise these
feeds thereby acting to swell herds to wholly unrealistic levels (Box 1).
3. Breeding and Reproduction
3.1 Breeding and reproduction in pastoral herds
3.1.1 Controlling bloodlines
Strategies in pastoral societies for controlling the breeding of livestock are extremely variable across the
world. Pastoralism, by its very nature makes it difficult to control which animals breed, unless poorquality males are excluded, either by mechanical means or by castration. Pastoralists are better at
ensuring their herds do not mix with other herds than controlling breeding within their own herd.
Nonetheless, different societies seem to have taken very different attitudes for reasons that are not always
evident.
There is also a strong difference between species; camel pastoralists are much more likely to take a
strong interest in breeding than sheep and goat producers. Musil (1928) describes the complex ideas
about breeding of the Arabian Bedu. In contrast, Black-Michaud (1986) attributes extreme indifference to
the Luri small ruminant herders of Iran. The Incas had a highly effective programme of recording the
details of llama bloodlines, using quipu cords and a selection process to ensure that the strongest and
fittest animals were used for breeding (Brotherston 1989:244). Mongolian herders make a very strong
association between human and animal bloodlines; human ancestry is closely recorded and there is a
sense that the same should be true for livestock, although this process was interrupted by the
collectivisation of herds and the partial introduction of ‘scientific’ breeding practice. Many pastoral
peoples in West Africa seem relatively indifferent about controlling breeding even among cattle,
although they are well aware of the need to introduce new cattle races if their herds begins to exploit a
different environmental niche (Blench 1999).
The notion that pastoralists should ensure they are breeding from high-quality males and that exotic stock
would increase output has a long history in pastoral development. Horse pastoralism is replete with semimythological narratives of kings searching for stallions with near-magical attributes. In the real world,
however, such introductions have not had the same success. In some ways, the reason is evident;
pastoralists breed their animals to survive and produce under extremely harsh conditions and also to pass
through climatic and environmental extremes. Animal breeders concentrate on marketable attributes and
frequently focus on individual traits such as milk or meat production. Research stations are not ideal
places to test livestock for extreme drought and disease stress. So the improved animals do not generally
have the qualities that pastoralists really need, although of course they are pleased with the increased
milk or meat output. As a consequence, the features of the introduced stock that make it attractive in the
first place are rapidly eliminated and the overall herd output remains static.
Nonetheless, since pastoralists do engage in their own introductions, this must be possible; a more
effective programme would work with animals genetically closer to those in the pastoral herds and under
conditions more similar to those experienced by a real herd. Some progress in this direction has recently
been made through ‘open-nucleus’ breeding schemes, where the pastoralist exchanges animals with those
in an improved herd. More success in this area will come with a greater understanding of the conflict
between pastoralists’ goals and animal breeders’ goals.
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3.1.2 Castration
The castration of male animals is a common strategy among pastoralists in many systems. It has the
advantage that animals may become fatter and are very often less aggressive and thus easier to manage.
The disadvantage is that wrong decisions about the genetic attributes of those left entire, or indeed
accidents to male animals may leave a herd breeding from poor-quality animals. One counter-strategy is
the use of mechanical means to prevent animals reproducing; genital covers are quite widespread in
Western Asia with sheep and goats. Castration was probably little practised in sub-Saharan Africa in premodern times because of the risk to the stock of males; however, the gradual spread of better health care
has made it more widespread as a strategy. In the Andes, castration seems to have been widespread and
across all species (Göbel 1997:42). Castration also depends on social institutions for the effective
circulation of males; in some ways it has structural similarities to the effects of droughts and blizzards. If
the number of potent high-quality males is at a minimum and one dies, then it is only possible to recover
by borrowing animals from beyond the household or community. This works more effectively as the
community is more cohesive, but also can lead communities to taking substantial risks in reducing
numbers of males.
3.2 Hi-tech ex situ strategies
Pastoralism is not well adapted for ex situ strategies because of the lack of infrastructure in pastoral areas
and the difficulties of access. As was suggested in 2.1.1, some societies take great care over bloodlines
and controlled mating while other allow unrestricted access to females. For the former, the concept of
introducing unknown semen or embryos into their intricate breeding mosaic seems unlikely to be easily
accepted. For the latter, it may be introduced, but the consequences will probably be the same as more
conventional introductions of improved breeding stock; the elements in the introduced line that make it
attractive will be rapidly eliminated by the harsh conditions of pastoralism.
Nonetheless, pastoralists are also the owners and managers of rare livestock breeds and there is now
increasing concern that these could lost or progressively eliminated by genetic introgression. With the
loss of such breeds there would be a corresponding loss of genetic traits, in some cases built up over
millennia, for example, the resistance to extreme cold of Yakut cattle, to extreme water heights, as
Criollo and Kuri cattle and trypanotolerance. Recent scientific advances have made more intricate
possibilities available for conservation and monitoring. Cloning is presently carried out in real time, since
the goal is not breed conservation, but the same technology could be adapted to clone extremely rare
breeds or individuals containing valuable genes. Nonetheless, cloning technology is subject to the same
objections as conventional cryopreservation, that it does not reproduce the evolving responses of a live
population.
The mitochondrial DNA of cattle is now routinely extracted through PCRs and can be used not only to
establish the evolutionary history of breeds and species but also for routine monitoring of genetic
variability within populations. DNA can be used to measure directly levels of homozygosity and thus the
degree of inbreeding and thereby forming the basis for planning conservation programmes. ILRI, the
International Livestock Research Institute, has taken the lead in this area and is presently engaged in
DNA characterisation of African cattle breeds.
All these techniques are strictly concentrated in the developed world at present and within the scientific
establishment of a few countries. Some are controlled by patents owned by large agricultural companies
who will only license these technologies for their own profit. Nonetheless, as with transgenic crops, the
technology will probably spread quickly to parts the developing world with a sophisticated science
infrastructure and not at all to many other countries. The whole area is too new to make any secure
predictions, but access to information, as in many other areas, may perpetuate inequity although not
along conventional developed/developing world dichotomies.
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4. Animal Health
4.1 Pastoralists and the health of their animals
One of the significant asymmetries between farmer and pastoralist is that the capital of the latter is tied
up in living animals and these are subject to catastrophic declines through disease. An epizootic can
rapidly eliminate an entire herd, well before the veterinary services reach the area. This has had two
consequences historically, that pastoral herds never became very large and herders developed elaborate
systems of loans and animal exchange to reduce risk in case of this type of disaster. It seems fairly clear
that there were no effective remedies against major epizootics such as rinderpest, anthrax, CBPP etc. in
the pre-modern era. The rinderpest epidemics that swept through Africa in the 1890s devastated pastoral
herds throughout the continent and brought whole herding systems to an end. Major epizootics that could
wipe out whole herds and even debilitating diseases such as brucellosis were virtually untreatable. The
principal response to trypanosomosis was simply to avoid vast swathes of the continent, whilst rinderpest
could only be combated by taking the entire herd into a remote area.
A consequence of this has been that, after an initial period of suspicion, pastoralists have generally
engaged with modern veterinary medicine with enthusiasm. The consequence has been a major socioeconomic transformation that essentially sabotages the notion of a ‘traditional’ pastoralist. Vaccinations
and drugs allow pastoralists to increase the size of their herds and to expand into regions previously
closed to them (see Boutrais (1986, 1995) and Blench (1994) for documentation of the movement of
herds into sub-humid regions of West Africa previously closed to cattle). By the 1930s, the Navaho had
accumulated extremely large sheep herds because of the level of services available to them (Hoover
1931). Fixed veterinary services have reduced the flexibility of pastoralists to move their herds, placing
greater stress on areas near where services are provided (Bovin and Manger, 1990). Unprecedented
pressure was placed on feed and water resources, as well as keeping alive stock that would have died in
previous conditions, creating large herds of poorly fed animals, often harbouring sub-clinical pathogens.
A major problem has been that after internationally-organised campaigns against epizootics, the normal
veterinary infrastructure has been unable to cope with supplying a service of similar quality and
pastoralists then become desperate for medicines. This usually stimulates the evolution of an extensive
black market in drugs, many expired and some blatant fakes, which can cause havoc with pastoral herds.
Nonetheless, recent years have seen considerable improvements in the techniques of reaching remote
pastoral communities with veterinary services. The most important of these is the training of ‘paravets’
who can treat minor ailments and recognise epizootic conditions and major traumas and alert the
veterinary authorities. Such programmes are in operation in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Chad,
CAR and Mali with varying degrees of success (Catley and Walker, 1997). In addition, traders and
private vets (in some countries) are both making drugs available in remote areas and treating animals;
this has the advantage of providing some service where the government may provide none, but the
obvious drawback that there is no control over the quality and dosage of drugs. Pastoralists are
increasingly taking control over the medication of their herds and are thus forced to make choices based
on a very concrete appreciation of the economics of using drugs versus the value of an individual animal.
However, there is another, longer-term consideration. Just as the labour-intensive nature of traditional
water-points limited the use that could be made of them and thus the potential for pasture degradation, so
the low-level effectiveness of traditional veterinary systems kept down herd size and thus pressure on
resources. Veterinary programmes are usually initiated without any consideration of the consequences for
overall animal production (Konczacki 1978). The medical aspect simply takes precedence, as it does in
human medicine, and programmes are often self-perpetuating. When the impact on environmental
resources is considered, it is usually accompanied by the pious hope that pastoralists will voluntarily destock since their animals now have greater survival rates. The introduction of modern veterinary
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medicine demands a whole new management system, as the nature of a major threat, disease, is thereby
radically changed (Bernus 1983). Herd maximisation is justified by the argument that if there are more
animals to begin with, the impact of shock events will not be so devastating. However, when resource
availability becomes the single most important factor limiting herd size, this argument breaks down: the
more the animals, the greater the shock.
4.2 Traditional remedies
Pastoralists are usually highly knowledgeable about the behaviour and physiology of their animals and in
many places have developed traditional remedies for some complaints, especially chronic pathogens,
prior to their access to modern veterinary medicine. This is not always the case; for example, among the
Luri of Iran there is marked disinterest in the health of animals and even a limited interest in modern
remedies reflecting an underlying low investment in the health of individual animals (Black-Michaud
1986:50). The study of this ‘ethnoveterinary’ knowledge of animal health and indigenous remedies has
now accumulated a considerable literature (see e.g. McCorkle 1986; Mathias-Mundy and McCorkle
1989).
Essentially there are two views about this type of ethnoveterinary practice; that it is of limited value and
only a resort when modern remedies are not available, or that it is a grossly under-utilised resource that
has been displaced as a result of the machinations of the drug companies. Prior to the colonial era, the
ability of livestock producers to deal with viral diseases and pathogens other than ticks or worms was
extremely limited. This is somewhat controversial; an alternative view is that ethnoveterinary techniques
were widespread and more effective than they appear to be in hindsight. What is certainly true is that
local remedies remain in use and pastoralists will continue to resort to them while the infrastructure to
supply and the cost of modern veterinary drugs remains out of reach. Failures in the delivery of
veterinary services have a deleterious effect on the trust placed by pastoralists in the state and are often
responsible for the diffusion of iatrogenic diseases, notably when animals gather for vaccinations that
fail to arrive and thus further transmit the pathogen the exercise is intended to protect them against.
4.3 Trypanosomosis and the campaigns to eradicate tsetse
Trypanosomosis is a disease-complex associated with the tsetse fly Glossina spp. found through much of
Sub-Saharan Africa affecting wildlife, humans and livestock (Bourn et al. 2001). In humans it is the
cause of sleeping-sickness, which is usually fatal in the strain typical of eastern and southern Africa.
Wildlife vectors include antelope species, bush-pigs and monitor lizards which may acquire long-term
symptomless infections. Livestock are more or less susceptible, and may undergo progressive debilitation
leading to death, or may develop partial or near-complete immunity. Tsetse flies inhabit most
environments in tropical Africa except highlands and extremely arid regions, but their presence is very
much dependent on animal hosts and suitable habitats. The drastic environmental changes of the
twentieth century have greatly reduced the habitats and wildlife hosts of tsetse, and hence their overall
distribution and abundance has declined..
The control of tsetse and trypanosomosis was a major concern of colonial authorities with the first
international conference on human sleeping sickness held in London as early as 1907. With the eventual
decline of human sleeping sickness, attention turned to control of the disease in livestock and continues
to be a major focus of donor investment through the ISCTRC (International Scientific Council for
Trypanosomiasis Research and Control) and various national bodies in East and West Africa. Yet two
very different narratives exist of the history of research and action in the control of tsetse and
trypanosomosis. Contrasting these is instructive in understanding how international bodies make policy
for pastoralists with limited regard for empirical data and scant concern for the very people they are
attempting to assist.
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In the first version, trypanosomosis is responsible for human sleeping sickness and lowered animal
production. More importantly, it keeps livestock out of much of the continent, thus decreasing access to a
reliable source of protein and income generation, thereby affecting nutrition and maintaining poverty. If
the tsetse fly can be eliminated, or trypanosomosis defeated chemically, then livestock production will
both be more productive in its traditional locales and spread to those where it is absent. The major
beneficial consequences would be improved protein supply and more effective farming through animal
power. Hence the launching of major long-term programmes, to eliminate tsetse through chemical
spraying and/or sterile male release (Putt et al. 1980). Although these have been reported to be
‘successful’ in a series of annual and project reports, somehow they are never successful enough to solve
the problem. Indeed in 1995, the Programme Against African Trypanosomosis (PAAT) the co-ordinating
body for international agencies, noted that ‘despite all the efforts and expenditure devoted to research on
and control of African trypanosomosis, it is generally accepted that in general terms the impact of the
disease is as great today as it was forty years ago’ (quoted in Bourn et al. 2001). The conclusion is not,
however, that something may be defective in the analysis of the problem, but that efforts must be
redoubled with even larger and more extensive projects.
In the second version, trypanosomosis is just one of many diseases affecting African livestock, and the
patterns of production in the continent reflect human adaptation to its incidence (Ford 1971). In areas
where game is abundant, tsetse is abundant and livestock correspondingly rare; humans can thus hunt to
supplement their diet. Hence also, although some species of ruminant have been adapted to highhumidity conditions and are kept by forest-dwelling communities, these are never in significant numbers
and are usually kept as a prestige enterprise rather than for economic purposes. When hunting eliminates
wildlife hosts and arable expansion removes tsetse habitats, livestock move in, making up the protein
deficit caused by wildlife elimination. Pastoralists are well aware of the threats that more humid
environments pose to their stock and have developed intricate cross-breeding strategies to limit mortality
in their herds. Blench (1998b, 1999a) describes the cross-breeding strategies of the Ful∫e in West Africa
that allow them to move into derived savanna cleared by cultivators on the northern edge of the forest in
West Africa. In a somewhat poignant image, a government project in Nigeria imported at considerable
cost a large number of ‘trypanotolerant’ ndama cattle from the Gambia by air and settled them on a ranch
in the humid zone. However, mortality was substantially higher among the ndama cattle than in the
pastoral cattle herds passing by outside the fence which were better adapted to local conditions.
Tsetse programmes have proceeded in Africa curiously innocent about both biology and infrastructural
capacity. Glossina spp. are too diverse and co-adapted to the African environment to be defeated by
simple warfare analogies. The claimed victories in tsetse eradication have almost certainly been due to
anthropic effects, hunting out of vectors and habitat conversion rather than the strategy itself (Bourn et al.
2001). It is probable that the success of campaigns in the area of human health, for example those against
smallpox and yaws, have unduly influenced those planning for tsetse eradication. But these were
susceptible to single-shot vaccinations and were given large-scale international infrastructural support.
The troubling persistence of malaria would perhaps be a better parallel, highly polymorphous and
habitat-dependent, it requires the sort of sustained attention on the part of national governments that it
inevitably does not receive.
This story has no moral except that once established, different narratives have their own inertia; these
parallel interpretations of the situation will continue into the future. But they do illustrate how
pastoralists’ actual strategies are inevitably ignored in the rhetoric of national and international agencies,
irrespective of how often the term ‘participatory’ is repeated. In some ways there are ironic parallels with
the foot and mouth epizootics that affected Europe in 2001. In much of the world, foot and mouth is
accepted as a continuing pathogen and its effects minimised. Systems that excluded it completely made
themselves vulnerable to a rapid and devastating spread with consequent massive losses of stock and
disruption of the rural economy.
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5. What do pastoralists produce and how do they market them?
5.1 Dairy products
Pastoralists almost everywhere in the Old World depend heavily on livestock milk products for nutrition;
both directly by consumption and through sales of dairy products to adjacent farmers to acquire grains or
other foods. The exceptions to this pattern of exchange are where pastoralists are so remote from arable
areas that this is not practical. The pastoral peoples in the centre of deserts, such as the Sahara, and in
extremely cold areas such as Siberia, have no opportunity for such sales (for the Hoggar Tuareg, see Gast
et al. 1969). Similarly, the evolution of processing technologies, such as cheese and yoghurt-making, are
driven by climate; in extreme cold there may be limited value in elaborate preservation technologies.
Processing technologies are also driven by breeding seasonality; for example, in most of sub-Saharan
Africa, breeding is uncontrolled, with the consequence that animals can come into oestrus at any time,
with some milk thus available all year round. In temperate zones, oestrus may be naturally highly
seasonal or herders may control breeding through mechanical means or exclosure. Milk is thus seasonal
and if herders depend on sales for carbohydrates then they must preserve the product and sell it when
there is a market opportunity.
Dairy products thus exhibit a wide variety of storability. In an extreme herding economy such as
Mongolia, where fresh milk is only available for part of the year, there is a strong requirement for a
diversity of products to meet nutritional requirements throughout the year. Table 5 shows the principal
dairy products made by Mongolian herders;
Table 5. Mongolian dairy products
Mongolian
English
Aaruul
Solidified dried curds
Urum
Clotted cream
Shar Tos
Reduced Butter
Tsagaan Tos
Fermented butter?
Ezgi
Caramelised curd
Aartz
Boiled yoghurt
Tarag
Yoghurt
Byaslag
Cheese
Airag
Fermented mares' milk
Huuruulsen suu
Boiled milk
Tsurum
Dried yoghurt
Source: Blench (1995)
In Iran and Afghanistan, a similarly wide range of products is made essentially from small ruminant milk
(e.g. Ferdinand 1969; Martin 1980; Digard 1981). Generally speaking, dairy products in Eurasia seem to
be much more complex and varied than those in Africa, which probably reflects greater exposure to
climatic extremes and thus the need to devise products with differing degrees of storability. There is also
considerable variation in attitudes to fresh milk; in Africa and Europe this has historically had a high
cultural value among livestock producers, although in Iran it is rarely if ever drunk without processing
(Digard 1981:198).
All species produce milk, but the culture of dairying varies between species. For example, although
Cleopatra ‘bathed in asses’ milk’ donkey milk seems no longer drunk anywhere in the world on a regular
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basis though it is often an ingredient in magical remedies4. Table 6 shows a summary of a variety of dairy
products produced from the milk of different species.
Table 6. Dairy products by species*
Product
Camel
Horse
Donkey
Cattle
Yak
Buffalo*
Fresh Milk
+
+
–
+
+
+
Yoghurt
+
–
–
+
+
+
Butter
–
–
–
+
+
+
Ghee
–
–
–
+
+
+
Cheese
+
–
–
+
+
+
Fermented milk
–
+
–
–
–
–
Source: Collated from FAO (1990) and other sources
*Buffalo are very rarely herded by pastoralists (although see Digard 1981)
Sheep
+
+
+
+
+
–
Goat
+
+
+
+
+
–
Reindeer
+
–
–
–
–
+
Reindeer milk yields are extremely low and thus reindeer are only occasionally milked and no products
are made from the milk (Fondahl 1989).
Llama and alpaca were not traditionally milked and it seems that Andean populations were lactaseintolerant, pointing to a long history for this situation (Orlove 1982). Dairying in South America is thus
entirely an introduced culture and probably the sale of dairy products such as cheeses originally
developed because of a market among individuals of European descent. Nonetheless, where herds are
mixed, combining llamas with small ruminants, cheese-making represents a significant economic activity
(Göbel 1997).
A constant factor among pastoral populations is the assignation of milk and milking to women (Little
1994). Men usually only milk animals for their immediate consumption but almost everywhere, women
are assigned the right to milk animals for feeding the family and for sale, where there are surpluses. This
has been positive for women where the external market for milk has increased demand, for example in
Sudan where the introduction of rural cheese factories pushed up prices (Michael 1987). However, where
the comparative prices of milk and meat shift in favour of meat, men become more concerned about calf
survival and thus pressure women to take less milk.
Milk yields of pastoral herds are almost everywhere very low compared to farmed species in modern
intensive systems. West African cattle may give as little as one litre a day, compared with up to sixty in
highly intensive stall-fed systems. The inevitable experiments on university and research station farms
have shown that the capacity of ‘traditional’ breeds is much higher when their nutritional regime is
changed. But pastoralists do not operate under these conditions, but have rather to contend with a range
of subclinical pathogens, constant movement, and the need to balance calf survival against human
nutritional needs. So, despite being the recipients of reams of good advice and the beneficiaries of
countless projects intended to increase yields, this situation remains much the same.
Another aspect of pastoral dairying that has frequently been the source of near moral panic among
developers is hygiene. Although hygiene in dairy production represents a major cost to intensive milk
producers, pastoral societies have virtually no outgoings in this respect, since they generally take no
special precautions. Since the principal consumers and purchasers of their products attach no importance
to this they can compete effectively with packaged products from intensive systems and see no need to
adopt additional technologies that increase costs without also increasing market price. If, however,
pastoralists operated in countries with onerous regulations concerning dairy hygiene that were actually
enforced, their production systems would be threatened; but almost by definition pastoralists are remote
from such regimes.
4
Apparently, fresh donkey milk was widely available in nineteenth century London as an alternative to the highly
adulterated cow milk sold by dairies.
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It has been observed in various regions of the world that the terms of trade are slowly but inexorably
moving against pastoral producers (Swift 19xx). In other words, the value of their milk, either exchanged
directly against grain or sold to buy grain, is gradually declining. The reasons for this are manifold but
can be reduced probably to a single underlying cause, the spread of competing products in a market once
dominated by milk. For example, in semi-arid West Africa, milk was once the gift of preference to
visitors and the status of an individual confirmed by the amount of milk they drank. The availability and
prestige of beer and soft drinks has largely displaced milk and it has become something of a poor
person’s drink, thus forcing down the price. In addition, the tendency of Western economies to produce
surplus milk has the consequence that there are frequently surpluses of dried milk powder which are
either dumped in countries with a pastoral sector or sent as development assistance. The sporadic and
aseasonal availability of such a competing product makes it problematic for pastoralists to predict the
market value of their own product.
Apart from milk, live animals can also yield blood and this has been historically exploited in Eastern
Africa and the horn of Africa, although it is a practice looked on with distaste by pastoralists elsewhere.
Pastoralists such as the Maasai bleed cattle with a special hollow arrow and mix the blood with milk. The
Dodoth and perhaps other pastoralists also bleed small ruminants, making a cut above the eye. Yields are
not high as individual adult animals give about a litre a month during the wet season and less in the dry,
while small ruminants give only about 0.25l (Deshler 1965). Although nutritious and apparently safe, it
seems unlikely this practice will has potential to spread to other pastoral regions.
5.2 Meat preservation
The preservation of meat is extremely variable among pastoralists and reflects both the seasonality of
slaughter and market access. For example, where the majority of animals are slaughtered at one time of
year, notably in cold-weather sites such as Mongolia and Siberia, meat must be preserved, but can often
be kept fresh by simply freezing it. In the arid tropics, there is less impetus to slaughter at a particular
time of year because of aseasonal oestrus and thus significantly less interannual weight variation. Meat is
occasionally smoked, especially for market, but pastoralists usually match the species slaughtered to the
occasion and consume all the meat before it goes bad.
5.3 Hides, skins and other products
Apart from meat and milk, livestock fibres and hides can also be of substantial economic importance.
Woolled sheep tend to be found in temperate zones; for example there were hardly any wool sheep in
Sub-Saharan African pastoral systems or in South-Central India. Wool is one of the high-value products
that is not facing significant competition from an equivalent external product; the evidence is that
globalisation of trade has caused wool and cashmere production to expand. Alpacas, for example, are
tending to expand at the expense of lamas because their wool commands a better price on the
international market. The exact definition of ‘wool’ versus ‘hair’ is somewhat variable; products from
camelids are listed under hair in some statistics and wool elsewhere. Orlove (1977:205 ff.) has a useful
discussion of this problem in relation to the Andean wool trade. Table 7 shows the main fibre and hide
products traded by pastoralists by species.
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Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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Table 7. Livestock products other than dairy by species
Livestock
Camel Horse Donkey Cattle Yak Sheep Goat Reindeer Llama Alpaca
products
Hair
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
–
–
Wool
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
+
+
Cashmere
–
–
–
–
+
–
+
–
–
–
Hide
+
–
–
–
–
+
+
+
+
+
Tail
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Antlers
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
+
–
–
Camelids are defined as having wool along with sheep. However, the cashmere produced by goats, yaks
and Bactrian camels is very close to a wool. Reindeer antlers can be harvested both mature, when they
are used for handles and other implements that require bone, and immature when they are prized for
medicine, especially in Korea and other SE Asian countries.
All the products except hides can be harvested sustainably but hides come only post-slaughter.
Pastoralists are usually more concerned about animal survival than the quality of hides, so these are often
of limited market value. Enterprises requiring quality skins very often prefer to work with specialised
sedentary producers. For example, the Sokoto Red goats of the Sahel used to produce morocco bindings
are never drawn from pastoral herds. In West Africa, however, there is a substantial market in hides for
human consumption, so much so that leather for shoe production has to be imported. In large economies
such as Nigeria, this can lead to quite startling frauds such as the passing off of donkey or camel skins as
cattle hides in remote markets.
In the traditional sector, almost all post-abattoir products are of some economic value; blood is dried and
sold as fertiliser, horns and bones are clean and ground up as animal feed. However, animals are sold live
and this disposition of minor products is in the hands of traders leaving little room for improving the
added value of pastoral products.
5.4 Work animals
One way of gaining added value from pastoral species is through their use as work animals. Working
animals are more likely to be found among agropastoralists or farmers, but the boundary between the two
is highly permeable. In West Africa, for example, it is not uncommon for farmers in semi-arid regions to
use cattle for ploughing or carting produce during the rainy season and then hand the animals to
occupationally specialised pastoralists for the remainder of the year. This enables them to exploit the
economies of scale that come with the management of large herds, or alternatively to avoid the labour
outlay associated with cut-and-carry management.
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Table 8 shows the same species of animal as the other tables and the types of work performed by animals. An additional column notes the importance of the dog
which is a key species used for herding throughout much of semi-arid Eurasia.
Table 8. Working animals by species
Uses
Dromedary Bactrian
Riding
+
+
Portage
+
+
Cartage°
+
?
Tillage+
+
+
Threshing
–
–
Rotational machines*
+
–
Drawing water
+
?
Herding
–
–
Horse
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
–
Donkey
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
–
Cattle
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
–
Yak
+
+
+
–
–
–
–
–
Buffalo
–
+
–
+
–
+
+
–
Sheep
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
+
Goat Reindeer
–
+
+
+
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
+
+
Llama
+
+
–
–
–
–
–
+
Alpaca
–
+
–
–
–
–
–
–
Dog
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
+
°Includes pulling sledges, both for human and agricultural products transport
Includes, planting, ploughing, harrowing, weeding and lifting
*Sugar-cane mills, oil-mills and clay brick making mortars
It should be emphasised that there is a strong negative correlation between the presence of pastoral buffalos and their use as work animals. Normally the key areas where they are
used for work, such as Egypt and lowland SE Asia they have no pastoral role.
Reindeer are used for riding and pulling sleighs, but a recently published photograph of the Dolgan (a Turkic group related to the Sakha in Yakutia) shows reindeer hitch to a
crossbar pulling carts on wheels.
+
Sheep and goats are not usually used as pack animals, but they are essential to the system of vertical transhumance in part of the Himalayas (Downs & Ekvall 1965).
Similarly, goat-carts are used on a small scale in Honduras, although but could not be described as a significant widespread technology. The use of reindeer for
herding is a key element in the entire production system; reindeer brought up in the household can be trained to round up and lead the semi-wild herds. Much the
same is true of goats, for example among the Bedu, where a trained goat will manage a flock of goats and sheep.
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5.5 Selling pastoral products
The orientation of pastoralists towards the market has been extremely variable across the world, according to
accessibility and ecology. Pastoralists have always had to exchange some products with outsiders for basic
foodstuffs and minor household goods. Extreme weather pastoralists have generally reduced this to
minimum because of the difficulties of such trade. However, West African pastoralists seem to have coevolved with highly sophisticated long-distance trade networks, and indeed make use of them to pass
information about both market conditions and forage resources (Blench 1996).
Until recently, many pastoralists functioned essentially without cash, exchanging livestock products directly
for external goods. In the command economies, prices were completely arbitrary, fixed at the centre and
without regard to availability and access costs, and thus the inverse of a market system. In the sheepherding
systems of Central Asia, Russian demand for wool caused the replacement of the hardy breeds with Merino
varieties, which could only be kept alive with high levels of external inputs (see Van Veen 1995 for
Kyrgyzstan). But as monetarised systems and commoditisation have penetrated the region this has caused
major adaptation problems. In Kyrgyzstan at least, the system is expected to revert to coarse wool and meat
as more traditional breeds gradually replace the exotics.
The general problem of operating in a monetary economy is that pastoralism is essentially a ‘slow-response’
system; the reproductive cycle of livestock is not adapted to making major changes in strategy over a short
period. Thus if the price of dairy products falls dramatically, a herd cannot be suddenly switched into meat
production. It is no accident that livestock producers in the developed world are usually enmeshed in
complex webs of subsidies and price-support
Box 2. The Raika and their camels
mechanisms; they would otherwise soon go out of
business in a world of rapidly changing market
The Raika/ Rebari people of Western Rajasthan
conditions.
are specialised camel-breeders who raise camels to
Although agencies dominated by economists are sell as work animals to farmers and traders.
prone to forget this, pastoralism is above all a However, they maintain a remarkable number of
cultural system and the close relationship between economic restrictions on the products of camels,
people and animals is essential to its persistence. which is not serving them well in the changing
The theoretical literature on pastoralism was economy of India. Raika do not slaughter camels
dominated by an argument about the rationality of and will not eat camel meat. Female camels cannot
pastoral strategies. As far back as the 1920s, be sold and it is against custom to make
Herskovitz (1926) argued for the existence of ‘cattle commercial gain from milk and wool. Moreover,
complex’, in other words a skein of close cultural camel milk cannot be processed in any way. One
ties between herders and their animals that meant of the consequences of this is the existence of
that their management practices were remote from large herds of females with almost no adult males,
rational economic strategies. In particular argument which is turn is leading to low reproductive rates
focused on the maximisation of herd size through and less than optimal bloodlines. Moreover, the
the retention of ‘useless’ animals such as barren restrictions on making a profit from animals are
females. The rise of development economics meant leading young people to turn away from camel
that this anthropological view was regarded as production and seek jobs in towns. These cultural
unacceptable and much ink was expended trying to constraints have been strongly maintained, leading
show that whatever pastoralists did was somehow both to falling camel production and economic
‘rational’5. The debate itself now seems outmoded; fragmentation rather than responsive systemic
pastoralists have their own culture and their change.
Source: League for Pastoral Peoples (1999).
management strategies develop within their cultural
5
Much of this argument was entirely circular; for example, if pastoralists maximised herd size this demonstrated their
rationality as they would have a higher number of animals post-catastrophe. If they rid the herd of unproductive
animals this was equally rational in terms of classical economics.
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Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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frame of reference. The result is often at cross purposes with outsiders’ views; but then the
recommendations of experts have a distressing habit of contradicting themselves over time, as changing
attitudes to biodiversity and minor breeds demonstrate. Box 2 illustrates a case where customary
management ideas seem very remote from modern ideas, but also underlines strongly the importance of a
profound anthropological understanding of cultural constraints as a prerequisite to effective development.
5.6 Worldwide demand for protein
A series of recent analyses have shown the remarkable speed at which worldwide demand for animal protein
is rising and project its likely increases over the next two decades (e.g. De Haan et al. n.d.; Delgado et al.
1999). Table 9 shows projections for meat consumption based on FAO annual data since 1982;
Table 9. Actual and projected meat consumption by region
Region
China
Other East Asia
SE Asia
India
Other South Asia
Latin America
West Asia & North Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
Developing world
Developed World
World
Source: Delgado et al. (1999)
Annual growth of total
meat consumption
1982-1994
1993-2020
percent
8.6
3.0
5.8
2.4
5.6
3.0
3.6
2.9
4.8
3.2
3.3
2.3
2.4
2.8
2.2
3.5
5.4
2.8
1.0
0.6
2.9
1.8
Total meat consumption
1983
1993
million metric tonnes
16
38
1
3
4
7
3
4
1
2
15
21
5
6
4
5
50
88
88
97
139
184
2020
85
8
16
8
5
39
15
12
188
115
303
The suggestion is that it will be particularly in East Asia and Latin America that demand will rise, which
squares with a more general understanding of the increasing wealth and growth of cities and market-driven
economies in these regions. Projecting demand in the developed world is more problematic, since fashion
and levels of confidence in the safety of intensively produced livestock products have an increasing
influence on consumption. Changing societal patterns can often make new domesticates attractive; demand
for stronger-tasting meat with a low fat content has accelerated the supply of antelope and ostrich.
Similar figures are given for milk; by 2020 projections suggest that developing countries will consume 100
million metric tonnes more meat and 223 million metric tonnes more milk than in 1993. At present, people
in the developed world obtain 27% of calories and 56% of protein from animal food products, compared
with 11% and 26% in the developing world; a well-known relationship between increasing income and meat
consumption suggests that these percentages are set to rise in the developing world.
In terms of the sources of meat; the fastest growth areas are in pork and poultry; production costs fall more
rapidly for monogastrics wherever land costs are high. Monogastric are also more efficient at converting
feed and can typically be supplied with agro-industrial by-products form the cities. Sere & Steinfeld (1996)
give the following rates for the increase of different livestock production systems in recent decades (Table
10);
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Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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Table 10. Source of increases in world meat supply
System
% increase
Industrial livestock production
4.3
Mixed farming
2.2
Extensive grazing
0.7
There is little doubt that these trends will continue; however, this is misleading in terms of determining the
attention that should be paid to each system. Industrial production is monomorphic, it has only a single
output goal. Both mixed farming and extensive grazing are polymorphic; they provide work animals, supply
rural households with protein, function as a store of wealth in areas where banks do not penetrate and often
play a key role in ceremonial life. Moreover, they frequently make it possible to produce protein in terrain
and eco-climatic conditions unusable in conditions of industrial production.
5.7 Globalisation of the trade in livestock products
A major factor transforming the situation of pastoralists in the twentieth century has been the globalisation
of the trade in livestock products. In the pre-modern era, pastoral products could be divided sharply between
those that depended on rapid consumption such as fresh milk and meat and those that withstood relatively
long-distance movement such live animals, fibres and skins. The comparative advantages of extensive
producers have meant that they have always had an advantage over agricultural regions which has stimulated
a lively trade. Long-distance commercial networks are common in pastoral areas and pastoralists are
frequently themselves involved.
However, enclosures in Europe and the gradual spread of both new transport, notably railways and
steamships and subindustrial livestock production, especially in the area of fibres, created for pastoral
producers both an opportunity and a threat. Roads opened up new markets for products such as wool and
cashmere and brought increased numbers of potential buyers, but they also allowed the movement of
products previously confined to local areas, such as milk and meat. As urban consumers became more
demanding, especially in the area of hygiene, the balance of the market shifted against pastoralists and
towards enclosed systems. This has reached its apogee in the 1990s where a sequence of health scares in
intensive production systems has forced the imposition of hi-tech traceability so that all livestock products
can be tracked from source to consumer. No pastoralist can compete in this market.
The other consequence has been that the large-scale livestock production characteristic of developed
economies frequently produces unsaleable surpluses, often as a consequence of an intricate nexus of
subsidies. Frozen meat and milk powder periodically glut world markets and eventually end up being sold in
developing countries at unrealistic prices or being distributed as food aid. National governments usually
accept this situation because it partially satisfies urban demand; cities are close at hand and pastoralists are
usually far away. Dairy products imported into sub-Saharan Africa rose more than 300 per cent between
1972 and 1982 with the an increase of dairy consumption as a percentage of total consumption form 1-27 per
cent (Von Massow 1989:7-9). But the inevitable impact is to depress production in the pastoral zone.
Ironically, these processes are affecting European livestock producers in much the same way; hill farmers in
Wales are going out of business because of a catastrophic decline in prices due to international competition.
In the case of fibres, the situation is more encouraging, as an international market for high-quality fibres
remains quite buoyant. For Andean pastoralists, penetration of the international wool trade came relatively
early, with wool being bought for export by the middle of the nineteenth century (Orlove 1977). Falling
demand for the coarser llama fibres and increased demand for fine wools has had the consequence that
alpaca production, previously of minor significance has become of much greater importance.
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5.8 Evaluating productivity
One of the common arguments against extensive
livestock production systems is framed in terms of low Box 3. Measuring output over time
productivity; measuring offtake from pastoral herds or
milk yields from ruminants and comparing them to Non-diverse livestock production systems are
industrial levels suggests to a certain type of economist profitable because revenues are sufficient to
that this is an ineffective use of land and resources. cover the cost of the special attention needed
More attractive is the relative output argument; high- to preserve a uniform and non-climax
input, high-output exotics are usually measured over a vegetation. Where such effort relies on
short time-slice gives them attractive characteristics planted pastures, it may also benefit from
compared with landraces. However, over longer economies of scale. Outputs from such
periods, when subjected to environmental stress, systems are usually higher when measured
subclinical pathogens and unpredictable feed over short periods of time against ‘complex’,
supplement costs often make them less economic, if diversified production systems such as those
only because mortality is almost inevitably higher. In involving an elaborate interface with
the case of the economics of large ruminants, for woodland. The greater the simplification of
smallholders even one dead animal can be a the genetic base, the greater the risk from
catastrophic loss, because accumulated profits from pathogens. The likelihood of a pathogen
outputs are unlikely to allow another animal to be eliminating the resource base and thereby
bought. Collecting data to show this is difficult, causing major food insecurity is hard to
because project cycles are typically 3-5 years and this quantify. The political pressure for food in
is barely time enough for exotics to be introduced and the present can often outweigh the potential
to reach their productive phase. The typical structure for famine in the future.
of evaluations does not allow sufficient time to elapse
for a true comparison to be made, which would have to be over a period of a decade or more, in the case of
slow reproducers such as cattle, camels and yaks. No absolute figure for such a period can be given as it
follows the reproductive cycle of individual species, but it should allow a female to develop from birth to a
maturity represented by several parturitions.
6. Management and the mitigation of vulnerability
6.1 Migration
Johnson (1969) identifies the combination of animals herded and the role that agriculture assumes in a
pastoral group’s economy as being the most influential factors determining migration. The first and most
obvious response to drought is to move the animals to areas where there is still pasture and water. This is
probably the major motor for the expansion of pastoralism, especially in the case of the eastward expansion
of the Ful∫e across the West African savannahs. In the pre-colonial era, pastoralists were limited principally
by disease and more occasionally by insecurity. In the present century, these have taken second place to the
occupation of land by cultivators and the presence of boundaries that impede free passage.
The migration of pastoralists to areas of higher productivity alleviates stress on less productive or exhausted
land. Conversely, if the movement of pastoralists is restricted, already marginal land becomes more
overused. Johnson (1975) observes that if pastoralists face a long journey stock deaths increase, and they
must weigh likely losses from the migration against comparable losses were they to stay on suboptimal land.
The creation and maintenance of corridors reinforces co-operation between the agricultural and pastoral
sectors. However, corridors which are too long or too narrow tempt hungry animals to graze on the crops on
either side; pastoralists have to use more labour to keep their herds under control, and the potential for
aggravating the conflict between cultivators and pastoralists is apparent.
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A major exception to this was Central Asia in the Soviet era where an extensive military infrastructure
which controlled pastoral movement was based on unrealistic cost structures. Another curious exception was
Israel post-1967, where extreme militarisation of the Negev led to major constraints on Bedouin ruminant
production, through registration of herds, prohibitions on traditional migrations, and more surreally,
campaigns against black goats (Abu-Rabia 1994).
6.2 Changing herd composition
A long-term recovery strategy and insurance against the impact of future droughts is changing the species in
the herd. Although cattle are prestigious and highly valued in the market, they are vulnerable to drought in
comparison to camels and goats. The relatively high rainfall in the 1960s encouraged pastoralists all across
the Sahel to switch from camels to cattle, even populations such as the Tuareg (in Mali) who have been
historically identified with camel-culture. The droughts of the 1970s demonstrated that this was an unwise
strategy and their recurrence in the 1980s underlined this point.
These types of changes in herd composition can also apply within species. In West Africa, cattle breeds that
specialise in grass are more prestigious than those that can digest a high proportion of browse. However,
where low rainfall or high grazing pressure has changed the species composition of the landscape so as to
favour shrubby vegetation, the herder with cattle that can tolerate a higher proportion of browse in their diet
will survive better. In a concrete example, Ful∫e herders in Nigeria, faced with rapidly vanishing grass in the
semi-arid zone, have switched their herds from the Bunaji breed, which depends on grass, to the Sokoto
Gudali, which can digest browse much more easily (Blench 1999).
Strategies relating to species diversification vary; there are advantages in owning a variety of species, so that
whatever climatic events occur, there will be survivors. For example, the multi-species herd typical of
Mongolia and the Andes may well be a reflection of the extreme climatic variability. However, maintaining
such herds is a luxury that only the wealthier can afford. Herds of different species are generally split up,
most commonly into browsers and grazers, so the available forage can be exploited most effectively.
Within species, herd diversification takes place during a drought. Productive animals, particularly females,
receive priority treatment, whilst the bulk of the herd is sent to find pasture further afield. This allows milk
to be obtained from the subsistence herd, or from relatives, while the rest of the herd does not exhaust the
grazing (Dahl and Hjort, 1976). Larger animals, particularly camels, although resilient in a drought, will die
in numbers after a critical point. After drought, smaller stock reproduce more rapidly, allowing the herd to
recover, and acting as capital which can be exchanged for larger animals later on. Rebuilding a herd of
camels by comparison is a slow process.
6.3 Predation
In the pre-modern era, predation on pastoral herds was a major concern of virtually all pastoralists and a
constant demand on herding labour. The expansion of agriculture and the spread of modern weapons in the
early twentieth century has largely eliminated predators in whole ecosystems, for example, wolves, lynxes
and leopards in circum-Mediterranean systems, hyenas and lions in West Africa. In the Soviet era, militarystyle collective hunts against predators in Central Asia and Siberia substantially reduced the impact of
predation, although elimination was never practical. Predation remains a significant threat in the Andes,
where pumas and foxes often take young animals (Göbel 1997).
However, external changes are affecting views of predation and thus attitudes towards the wholesale
elimination of predators. Many species, such as wolves, bears and snow-leopards, are now seen as
endangered and therefore as the object of conservation efforts rather than as a nuisance to be eliminated.
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Projects have been established in Mongolia, for example, to encourage herders to conserve snow-leopards by
accepting the losses and providing alternative sources of income to compensate for them. In Namibia, where
more traditional livestock ranches are increasingly interspersed with wildlife enclosures, predators such as
leopards and cheetahs are on the increase, partly because a certain level of predation is accepted as necessary
to the health of a wildlife stock. Similarly, in North America and Scandinavia, the re-introduction of wolves
into National Parks has caused considerable controversy, as they inevitably pass beyond the boundaries of
the park and kill livestock outside. Such losses are not acceptable to livestock producers and the rather
mythic status of wolves has allowed them to articulate panic messages somewhat out of proportion to the
wolves’ actual depredations.
The consequence has been a policy war between these competing interests, played out in front of an
interested media. There is little or no doubt that environmentalist and conservation concerns will win out;
the strength of these lobbies across the developed world is constantly growing and they are well-funded and
articulate. Wildlife, where picturesque, can often contribute more than pastoralists to national economies in
hard currency, which is what counts with policymakers. Moreover, it has become clearer that there are ways
to develop interlocking wildlife and pastoralist systems that allow both systems to flourish; such types of coconservation are beginning to appear in East Africa (Bourn & Blench 1999).
6.4 Theft
A problem rarely addressed by livestock services, but which weighs heavily in the investment decisions of
livestock owners, is the prevalence of theft. It is not worth investing in quality animals if the likelihood is
that they will be stolen. Owners will not pay out for supplementary feeds if the only effect of fattening
animals is to increase their attractiveness to thieves.
Livestock raiding has something of a romantic history and in parts of the world, such as the KenyaEthiopian borderlands or Madagascar the successful rustler gains prestige (e.g. Fukui and Turton 1977; Todd
1977; Bollig 1990; Turton 1991). There is, moreover, an argument that this chronic raiding acts to maintain
en ecological balance (e.g. Sweet 1965). However, more commonly theft is practised by urbanised
individuals linked into the market system who can sell their haul rapidly to butchers. Cattle and sheep are the
animals most commonly stolen, because of their relatively high market value and because they can be driven
away. Livestock theft is problematic in administrative terms; national authorities are often unsympathetic to
pastoralists to begin with and perceive the expenditure of policing resources on lost sheep as futile. The
consequence of this is that not only do herders need to allocate considerably more resources on guarding
animals, but they tend to arm themselves and treat stock-raiders to summary justice. This in turn tends to
aggravate the authorities still further as they then see pastoralists as forming unregulated militias.
7. Social and cultural institutions of pastoralism
7.1 Social structures
The basis of pastoral organisation almost everywhere in the world is the clan, a set of patrilineally-related
households traced in theory to an apical ancestor. Such groupings can be very small and the ancestry to a
very shallow time-depth or so great that the ancestral figure is semi-mythical, in which case, the working kin
group is a lineage. The preservation of these genealogies is very important, especially to the aristocratic
strata of nomad society as Khazanov (1984:142) points out, as it legitimates their position. Well-known
exceptions to this rule are the Tuareg, who had matrilineal descent groups in some areas and the subarctic
peoples such as the Saami, Chukchi and Koryak who had neither unilineal descent groups nor elaborate
genealogies.
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One of the most distinctive features of pastoralism in East Africa and the Horn is the system of age-sets.
Among the Boran of Southern Ethiopia, for example, men born within a seven-year cohort fall into named
age-sets and these have rights and privileges within society, as well as acting as a powerful force for
cohesion and a calendrical system (Legesse 1982). Similar systems are found among many neighbouring
peoples as well as among settled Ethiopian peoples (see Beaman 1981 for the Rendille system) and are
probably not distinctive to pastoralism despite their central importance in these societies.
A key aspect of pastoral systems is the strong relationship between wealth in livestock and labour. Herds
that grown beyond a certain size cannot be managed with household labour and outside herders must be
sought. In the twentieth century, this is generally through hired labour, but formerly it was often through
slavery or vassal castes. The great herds of cattle owned by Ful∫e herders in modern Niger in the nineteenth
century were managed by slave labour and many pastoral societies in Africa and the Near East, developed
elaborate caste systems based on slaves and non-slaves. In the case of the Tuareg, for example, society was
divided into;
Imajer.en
Iklan
Izeggar.en
Ineden
nobles
(former) slaves
agricultural labourers
blacksmiths
Marriages between these groups were formerly forbidden and even today remain uncommon. However,
when slaves were freed in the colonial era, they stayed with their original camps for some time, but have
gradually broken away and now form independent households, often remote from their original site so that
traditional authority cannot be brought to bear. Similar systems were found throughout much of the Bedouin
areas (Peters 1990) and in the Horn of Africa.
7.2 Role of women in pastoral society
The role of women among pastoralists has been much debated, in part because pastoral societies are maledominated to a much greater degree than most other subsistence systems. Despite the well-known exception
of the Saharan Tuareg, the great majority of pastoral societies are patrilineal and male-dominated. The
reason for this is much debated, but the root cause appears to be related to the importance of not dispersing
viable herds. In an exogamous system, if women can own significant herds of their own, then on their
marriage they will take these away to a new camp and potentially deplete the herd of an individual
household. Many pastoral societies practise pre-inheritance, the father dispersing the herd among his sons
prior to his death, since the principle of patrilocality means that they will anyway remain in the same
physical herd. In pastoral societies, particularly those affected by Islamic inheritance rules, some animals go
to daughters on the death of the household head, but these are then 'managed' by the woman's brothers (see
Tapper, N. 1991 for the workings of this on the ground).
In most pastoral societies gender roles are strongly marked, and indeed patterns seem extremely similar
across the world (cf. Dahl 1987). Women are typically responsible for milking and dairy processing; they
may or may not sell the milk, but they usually have control over the proceeds to feed the family. Men are
responsible for herding, and selling meat animals and in systems when a herd is split, women usually stay in
a fixed homestead while men go away with the animals.
Pastoral societies typically tend towards monogamy because of the importance of the division of labour. In
other words, for a pastoral household to be viable, there must be wife to carry out key tasks. If there are too
many polygynous households, they will be unviable. There are exceptions to this rule, the Maasai being one
well-known example. The Maasai system of age-grades, where young men are assigned to a social category,
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moran 'warriors', who are not allowed to marry, makes it possible for older men to have several wives. Only
once a young man has graduated from being a moran is he able to marry.
7.3 Pastoral identities
Throughout much of Eurasia, pastoralism is interwoven with the culture of itinerants; other groups who
move around supplying services to fixed communities. The most well-known of these are the Gypsies,
spread from Wales to India under a variety of names and associated with a variety of occupations. Rao
(1982, 1987) has christened these groups 'peripatetics' and described some of their activities, notably those
concerned with crafts. As with the gypsies and horse-coping, some peripatetics play an important role in
livestock trade although they generally do not produce food. These groups are particularly numerous
between Afghanistan and India. Interestingly, they fall into casted, endogamous groups and are often
stereotyped as ethnically distinct in the same way as pastoralists and treated as in the same category by
national governments (Olesen 1994:25). In Afghanistan both pastoral nomads and peripatetics live in tents,
but those of livestock producers are black goat-hair tents while peripatetic tents are white.
7.4 Land tenure and the CPR debate
Pastoral systems have been at the heart of many debates on the nature of Common Pool Resources (CPRs).
While settled farmers usually develop relatively explicit systems of tenure, many pastoral peoples have fluid
systems that are hard to pin down, in keeping with their opportunistic grazing strategies. Where pasture is
extremely patchy and likely to appear in different sites each year, investing heavily in ownership of a
specific piece of land is hardly worthwhile. However, the negative side of this is that farmers can come and
cultivate the land of herders where regularly graze their stock without taking permission. Pastoralists,
because they are generally operating in remote areas without access to schools, rarely have literacy as a tool
to register land claims and so are outcompeted both by farmers and by urban-based ranchers. In Jordan, the
Badia rangelands were the preserve of sheepherders because agriculture was considered to be impossible.
However, a combination of boreholes and new irrigation techniques is pushing farms ever further into
traditional grazing land and government is unwilling to halt this process because of its own political
constituency.
Tenure is thus divided both by ecology and by the potential for agriculture. In much of the snowy steppe,
agriculture is not practical, so pastoralists compete with one another for prime sites. The same is true in the
subarctic regions, where reindeer herders do not interact with farmers. In much of Central Asia, the
command economies over-rode traditional access rights and created mapped and demarcated territories for
collectivised units. These are in the process of being dismantled and more traditional access rights are being
re-asserted. However, legal frameworks for this new situation are only now being evolved.
Pastoralists in all parts of the world are not deemed to have tenure sufficiently strong that it cannot be overridden by the state in the search for minerals. Land can be appropriated for building and transport
infrastructure and generally without compensation. There is no doubt that for pastoralism to survive,
effective tenure must be developed in many parts of the world. This is proving difficult, because few
governments have the political will to protect pastoralists against the vested interest of urban groups. The
usual indicator of tenure in the ranching areas is the fence, a high-investment strategy that is only effective
in countries with specific legal frameworks in place.
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8. Pastoralism and the state
8.1 The edge eats the centre
Once a pastoral society develops beyond clan and lineage organisation, it must develop more elaborate
hierarchical structures. Khazanov (1984:228 ff.) reviews the many theories of the evolution of the state
among nomads, once a subject of much scholarly debate and the source of many improbable historical
typologies. Powerful and extensive states were most common in Asia, where the links between pastoralism
and warfare were well-developed and there was the potential to accumulate enormous storable wealth. In the
subarctic and the semi-arid pastoral zones of Africa, the inability to store wealth other than livestock and the
difficulties of keeping horses (the pre-eminent raiders' animal) alive meant that the large-scale kingdoms
typical of the steppes never developed. Accounts of visitors to the courts of the Khans underline the
enormous wealth and sophistication that had accumulated over time and the ferocious means such rulers
employed to maintain their authority intact. The Mongol empire once stretched from the shores of the
Pacific to Poland, a land empire larger than any other in history (Jagchi & Hyer 1979). It would probably be
inappropriate to link the Inca state to the use of llamas in vertical transhumance; similar systems in the Alps
are historically associated with democratic tendencies.
Nonetheless, a correlated feature of such empires was their inherent instability. Despite their effective
warfare techniques and the rapid evolution of the Mongol Empire, its failure to settle the furthest areas of its
conquest meant they soon shook free their new rulers. Long lines of communication and mobile armies
made dissent and secession all too easy and only by settling and essentially discarding nomadism was it
possible to form a more permanent political institution (Barfield 1989).
In West Africa, the Ful∫e, cattle nomads spread across the Sahelian region, began a Jihad from 1804,
conquering the seven original Hausa kingdoms of today’s northern Nigeria and pushing eastwards to
northern Cameroon. They settled as rulers of the kingdoms they conquered, dispensed with their cattle and
in most cases switched to the language of the peoples of their empire. Meanwhile, their ‘brothers’, those who
still herded cattle migrated still further into Central Africa, impelled onwards by ever-increasing arable
expansion.
8.2 Pastoralists and national borders
Pastoralists, with their military traditions and high mobility, have not historically been loyal subjects of
nation-states. For the same reason, states they have founded tended to be short-lived. This has been
unproblematic until the twentieth century when national borders have begun to play a key role in worldwide
geopolitics and the free movement of livestock has been seen both as a security and health threat on the one
hand and as a potential loss of national wealth on the other. Many West African states, while they depend on
the meat and milk ‘their’ pastoralists produce and benefit from their opportunistic attitudes to national
borders, simultaneously condemn herders for not staying within a confined range (Blench 1996).
Throughout Central Asia, many pastoral peoples have been split by the establishment of states with heavily
defended borders (e.g. Tavakolian 1984). Unlike Africa, where pastoral peoples move around relatively
freely in open, arid spaces, peoples such as the Kazakh and the Mongols have been divided by states with
highly varied policies. Moreover, sensitive border areas were generally closed to outsiders, so information
on pastoral societies in these regions was tightly controlled.
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PART II. Pastoralism and policy issues
9. Pastoral populations and rangelands
9.1 Competition with foragers
The economic importance of rangelands world-wide is extremely variable according to the socio-economic
system in which they are embedded. In developed economies, such as Australia and America, rangelands are
essentially marginal terrain suitable for low-intensity stock-rearing and hunting. In pluralistic economies
such as Brazil, high-density vegetation such as rainforest, of crucial importance to hunter-gatherers and
smallholder farmers, can be all too easily converted to low-fertility savanna of interest to wealthy ranchers.
In Africa and Central Asia, rangelands are essential to the subsistence of pastoralists, foragers and farmers
dependent on rainfed crops. Such groups are generally the most vulnerable groups in the region, both
because they depend on a variable climate to support a necessarily patchy resource, and because tenurial
regimes tend to be more ambiguous in regions often regarded as a common pool resource.
The consequence of this is that there is a gradient of competition for access to rangelands. In developed
economies, rangelands are given over to low-intensity grazing or protected areas. Conflicts that arise, such
as the desire of governments to increase the area of national parks, assert claims for mineral rights or
predation from protected species on livestock, are relatively minor and easily settled. However, in South
America, where rangeland can be created at the expense of the livelihoods of the occupants of the forest,
conflict has been prolonged and violent. The principal means of habitat conversion, burning, is, for practical
purposes, irreversible. Once cleared, neotropical rainforest takes centuries to regenerate.
In Sahelian Africa, India and west-central Asia, competition for rangelands is intense, but, by and large, it is
not usually a case of the wealthy and powerful versus the poor and dispossessed. Increasing population
pressure is tending to push arable farming into more and more marginal areas, especially with the
introduction of modern transport and low-cost irrigation techniques. This in turn places further pressure on
pastoralists and foragers and thus on rangeland vegetation. Although there have been serious doubts about
the long-term impact of ‘overgrazing’ and more emphasis laid on the resilience of rangelands, continuing
intensive pressure implies poor producers of biomass for both livestock and wildlife.
The consequence is very often that the poorest groups are competing with one another for a limited resource.
Across semi-arid Africa and in parts of India, conflict between expanding farmers and pastoralists is an
everyday occurrence; the numbers and political power of the farmers, as well as tenurial regimes more
supportive of agriculture than livestock, ensure that the farmers are generally dominant. At the same time,
foragers and livestock producers may come into conflict, especially in southern Africa. The consequence is
often to drive pastoralists into zones so arid that farmers cannot follow them – placing more pressure on
these fragile environments and exposing the herders to greater risks of climatic uncertainty.
Foragers and pastoralists often live in overlapping territories, especially in Africa and Siberia. Prior to the
twentieth century, land competition was not of major significance and these two interlocking subsistence
strategies could effectively co-exist. However, as human population densities have increased and pastoral
habitats converted, pastoralists are under pressure to define their territories. In Siberia, the system of
managing wild reindeer, was transformed under the Soviet regime into a system of herding within bounded
and fenced territories, thereby excluding such hunting peoples as the Nenets. In Botswana and Namibia,
cattle-keepers such as the Kgalagadi, Herero and Ovimbundu have themselves faced exclusion from whiteowned fenced ranches and have been pushed into further incursions on the hunting territories of the Khoisan.
The Hadza hunter-gatherers of northern Tanzania have seen their traditional hunting territories increasingly
eroded by pastoralists with more access and influence at the level of the administration. At the same time,
the establishment of game fences, intended to exclude migratory herds of wild animals and thereby keep
livestock disease-free, reduced the ability of hunters to follow game, especially across national boundaries.
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One of the options that foragers often take when faced with pressure from outside forces to cease hunting is
to become pastoralists or work with livestock. The Navajo turned to sheep-herding and native Australians
frequently work as stockmen. The Khoikhoi of southern Africa were partly herders at first European contact,
but also engaged in extensive foraging. The impact of European settlement was grim and one of the few
locations where their society survived in altered form was in Namaqualand, the arid region in the extreme
northwest of South Africa and adjacent Namibia. Reserves were created and managed on a communal tenure
system. However, in the early 1970s, a new proposal was made to create the Richtersveld National Park,
effectively sequestrating 80,000 hectares from the Nama (Boonzaier et al. 1996). This reflected as much the
extreme political marginalisation of the Nama as any protection of the minimal wildlife resources of the
region. However, in a reversal of the usual course of events, advocacy groups joined with the Nama to
protest the proposed exclusion. The effect was to halt the park creation until the end of the 1980s when
grazing and foraging rights were conceded (or else compensation for their loss) and employment as rangers
was offered as a priority to Nama.
Hunting and tourism in these regions remains a special case and of variable importance. The rangelands of
west-central Africa, for example, are virtually devoid of large herbivores and infrastructure so unattractive as
to make hunting and tourism insignificant. In eastern and southern Africa, however, wildlife constitutes a
significant element of national income, notably in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The
system of national parks and a highly organised infrastructure means that the greatest proportion of income
accrues directly to the state, rather than to nearby communities. As a result, poaching is rife and an
adversarial relationship between park authorities and villagers is the norm. Although revenue-sharing
systems have been put in place in some areas and heavily promoted by aid and development agencies, their
contribution to livelihoods in these regions remains extremely small.
In Central Asia, the situation is somewhat different, since until recently, all protected areas were reserved by
decree and certainly did not benefit from consultation with the local populations. The paradoxical
consequence was an almost unparalleled level of habitat conservation. Similarly the system of collective
farms was kept going with subsidised inputs, sometimes brought in at uneconomic costs. This had the effect
of reducing pressure on the natural rangelands, as did the central control of animal numbers and relatively
high levels of offtake. Tourism remains a nascent industry, and any income from it extremely volatile,
reflecting the unstable politics of the region. However, the implosion of the collective farms has resulted in
the regeneration of pre-Soviet patterns of pastoralism and grazing, increasing pressure on the rangelands and
bringing herders into potential conflict with the management of poorly-resourced parks and protected areas.
The lack of market infrastructure and the limited range of inputs means that Central Asian pastoralists are
generally much poorer and more vulnerable than those in Africa.
9.2 Pastoralists and the environment
Pastoralists have not historically been perceived to have a good relation with the environment. Accused of
overgrazing and desertification, more recently, they have been seen to be responsible for methane emissions
and low feed-conversion rates. Some of these arguments have little technical validity, but this does not stop
their being used in donor conferences. The most important arguments revolve around overgrazing and land
degradation and the alternative use of rangeland to sustain a broader range of biodiversity.
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Pastoralism may begin in Africa as early as 7000
BC, but its major impact is probably felt by
about 3000 BC in both East and West Africa.
Cattle and sheep do not reach the rangelands of
southern Africa until about 300 AD. The
widespread presence of tsetse would have
constituted a major constraint to livestock in
many regions, at least until trypanotolerant
breeds were developed. Destroying tsetse habitat
in woody vegetation and gallery forest would
have provided an additional incentive for
pastoralists to burn off forest cover. The
twentieth century brought trypanocides,
enhanced veterinary care and eliminated much
tsetse habitat, providing an incentive to
substantially increase herd sizes and thus grazing
pressure (Blench 1995b). Hence the growth of a
large and often problematic literature on range
degradation and overgrazing.
Other literature has focused on range
degradation and vegetation change due to
overgrazing or to climatic variability (Adams,
1996; Behnke, 1994; Doughill & Cox 1995;
Behnke & Abel 1996a,b,c; Blench and Marriage,
1999). Nonetheless, heavy grazing does change
the composition of the vegetation (Hiernaux,
1996). The density of palatable perennial species
falls as they are replaced by less palatable ones,
because their competitive ability declines.
Version: 17 May, 2001
Box 4 Overgrazing in Africa's high-altitude
grasslands
The Mambila Plateau in SE Nigeria is a typical highaltitude grassland of Adamawa. It was first colonised by
Ful∫e pastoralists in the 1890s in the immediate precolonial era (Blench 1991a). From then, waves of herds
appeared from all parts of West Africa, until by the
1930s, colonial officers began to complain that
overstocking would lead to environmental degradation.
These were followed by a series of reports on the
management of the Plateau. None of these
recommendations had any effect on policy and by the
time of the first aerial survey of numbers in 1984, the
cattle population was in the region of 400,000. The signs
of degradation were beginning to be highly visible, but
even so, numbers continued to increase during the
1980s, until a second survey in 1990 estimated there
were some 600,000 cattle. A decade later, in 1999,
numbers have undergone a major crash, and the
ubiquitous bracken and tussocks of inedible grass
suggest that ecological collapse has finally drive away
the vast herds. High-altitude grasslands are not resilient
in the same way as Sahelian rangelands because they do
not have a history of responding to climatic variability
and have not co-evolved with a limited range of
herbivores. In this way, overgrazing can occur and a
potentially rich resource that might be managed
sustainably becomes a barren wasteland.
Source: Author's observations
Another consequence of heavy grazing can be the spread of woody vegetation and the eradication of grassy
areas (Arntzen, 1990). Adams (1996: 6), discussing the Kalahari in Botswana, reports that in ‘low tree and
shrub savanna’ the combination of heavy grazing and the absence of hot grassfires causes the spread of
dense, woody vegetation (bush encroachment). The spread of pure and persistent stands of species – such as
blackthorn – means long-lasting and irreversible decline in species diversity (De Queiroz, 1993b; Dougill
and Cox, 1995). This kind of bush encroachment means a decline in the productivity of the grazing for both
cattle and goats, as well as wild herbivores. Adams (op. cit.) points out that bush encroachment in the
Kalahari is distinct from other forms of vegetation change, both in terms of persistence and its exclusion of
other species.
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Apart from the semi-arid and subhumid savannas, Africa has a smaller number of high-altitude grasslands.
The Ethiopian Plateau constitutes the most extended area, but the highlands of Uganda and Rwanda
represent a similar ecology. In West Africa, the Fouta Djalon in Guinea and the Adamawa grasslands in
Cameroun and Nigeria are comparable grasslands. Unlike the Sahel, the West African grasslands have
historically had relatively low grazing pressure from wild herbivores and none from domestic animals
because the foothills around these plateaux are humid forest that acted until recently to exclude cattle. The
colonisation of these grasslands by pastoralists took place in the mid-to-late nineteenth century when the
expansion of population cleared sufficient areas of tsetse to make it possible to reach them without
unacceptable levels of mortality from trypanosomoses. They represented almost ideal conditions for
pastoralists, with lush grass, little competition with
farmers and reduced disease problems. As a result, Box 5. Keeping Chukchi reindeer herds in check
cattle herds came in increasing numbers, gradually The Chukchi people herd reindeer throughout much
changing the pattern of vegetation until they became of Siberia, east of the Kolyma river. Because of the
almost unusable as a habitat for livestock (Blench importance of matching herd sizes with moss
1998b). The Mambila Plateau in SE Nigeria resources, they have developed a number of
represents a good case history of this type of cycle mechanisms of controlling herd size, somewhat
(See Box 4).
surprising in terms of other pastoral societies. Herds
are regularly spit between family members and the
In silvo-pastoral systems, notably the reindeer-based new herds take off for pastures elsewhere.
systems of Siberia, the potential for overgrazing of ‘Assistants’, i.e. hired herders are paid with stock
mosses and lichens is both very real and long- and can often gather enough animals to form the
recognised by herders. Moreover, the speed at which nucleus of their own herd. ‘Herd capture’, the
reindeer can reproduce means that without intentional mixing of a small herd with a large and
epizootics and blizzards they can soon strip their the consequent disappearance of some animals form
habitat. As a consequence, herders such as the the large herd is tolerated. However, the Chukchi
Chukchi have developed culturally-sanctioned also kill pregnant does in order to prevent them from
systems of destocking (Box 5).
reproducing. At the annual sacrifices, when male
fawns and bucks are killed each must be
Official attempts to encourage pastoralists to accompanied by a ‘wife’ thereby removing further
destock, to substitute 'quality for quantity' have not females from the system.
been conspicuous by their success. Indeed it is fair to
Bogoraz (1902-9) and Leeds (1965)
say that in all non-authoritarian regimes they have
been a complete failure. The reasons for this have been much debated. The traditional view derives from the
'cattle complex' concept first mooted by Herskovitz (1926), that pastoralists view their livestock, especially
cattle, as part of a ritual and prestige nexus and not as a market enterprise and therefore reducing herd
numbers would be equivalent to moving down the social ladder. The alternative view, that pastoralists are
keyed into the market, but they also have elaborate risk-aversion strategies responding to uncertain disease
and climatic regimes gained considerable ground from the 1960s onwards. According to this it is rational for
each individual herder to keep a maximum number of animals in case of epizootics or drought; the more
animals you start with, the more will be left after the disaster.
Various political systems have been unwilling to tolerate this laissez-faire situation and have simply
enforced limits on herd sizes in relation to the determinations of range scientists as to carrying capacity.
Israel, for example, compels Bedouin herders in the Negev to sell any surplus animals beyond a fixed herd
size. Command economies such as for the former Soviet Union and Algeria controlled herd size and
composition through powerful local institutions. The United States, trying to prevent overgrazing in the
Hopi-Navajo region introduced a 'herd reduction' programme (Box 6).
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Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
Pastoralists do not usually manage pastures and
generally do not plant them. Attempts to
encourage the planting of pastures, such as
through ‘fodder banks’ have not met with
significant success.
Version: 17 May, 2001
Box 6. Persuading the Navajo to sell
A dispute between the Hopi and Navajo over the
management of their shared territory goes back as
far as 1882. In 1974, a programme of stock
reduction was initiated, so that land could be
demarcated and a programme of range management
undertaken. To this end, a large-scale purchase
programme was started with stock being bought
from their owners at 150% market price. This was
combined with threats to impound livestock once the
voluntary period ceased. Poverty and unemployment
in this region meant that many herders sold a large
part of their stock. However, the consequence was
that the herds were then unviable, since there was no
immediate impact of range and infrastructure
improvement. This created a cycle of further sales,
household breakdown and increased nutritional
problems as well as conflict with the authorities for
those who tried to outmanoeuvre the system. The
consequence was eventually exacerbation of the
problem the programme was intended to solve.
Wood (1985)
Artificial water sources are now widespread in
many arid and semi-arid rangelands. For example,
in pastoral areas of Australia today there is at least
one artificial waterpoint every 10km (Bennet,
1997: 11). Originally, establishing closely spaced
water sources was intended to avoid the localised
degradation that follows the concentration of many
animals at few sites. Creating this dense network
induced similar grazing patterns over large areas.
The impact on biodiversity was negative because
native species in Australia’s arid and semi-arid
rangelands are adapted to very light or no grazing
pressure. Once biodiversity becomes a
consideration, management should promote
grazing patterns that are spatially heterogeneous
rather than uniform. Fencing tends to be expensive
for extensive areas, whereas water is a powerful
and cheap tool for this purpose. If artificial water points were shut down in areas with a high conservation
priority, grazing pressure would be reduced. Obviously, such a strategy is only applicable where artificial
water sources are numerous and would not apply in Africa or much of South America.
9.3 Competing uses of the world’s rangelands
Until recently, pastoralists were to a certain extent protected by the remoteness of their habitat. Its
inaccessibility meant that it was written off by national governments. However, the evolution of modern
transport and remote-sensing has changed this equation rather dramatically. Remote drylands, mountains and
tundra are often the sites of valuable mineral deposits and new telemetric devices means that their presence
can be detected. Similarly, the rise of the conservation lobby, and the fact that in remote areas, terrestrial
fauna is likely to be better preserved, has created accelerating pressure to declare wildlife or biodiversity
reserves, thereby taking land out of the pastoral orbit.
9.3.1 Pastoralists and the exploitation of mineral resources
Although mineral and oil extraction in the developed world are frequently subject to controversy, the
presence of regulatory frameworks and highly-developed advocacy groups ensure public debate and
eventually pressure to adopt sustainable and environmentally sound practice. This is very much less the case
in the developing world, partly because of the relative economic importance of mineral revenues, with the
consequence that governments are generally not keen to publicise details of either potential income or
environmental impact.
Most developing countries have weak communications and transport infrastructure. The low populations in
arid and semi-arid zones tend to make the opportunity-cost of developing these relatively high. Mining and
oil enterprises therefore set up highly sophisticated telecoms and logistics supply systems which are
independent of local structures. These are effective within the limited context of extraction but their isolation
from the national system can be problematic in the case of community-awareness programmes, or indeed
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disasters. Poor communications and weak CBOs in arid and northern semi-arid zones mean that government
is rarely called to account for deficiencies in the monitoring of mineral extraction enterprises. The
importance of mineral revenues is such that governments often have no regulatory framework in place, or
else do not enforce one that has been enacted.
This is most evident in the former command economies where anxieties over the declining economy have
pressured government to increase mineral extraction rates. Vitebsky (1990) discusses the impact on reindeer
herders of the gas deposits in the Yamal Peninsula in the Soviet Arctic, and similar problems have arisen in
relation to oil extraction in Siberia, for example among the Khanty of the Pim River (Stewart 1994/5).
Reindeer have also been the principal pastoral species affected by escaping radiation. After the Chernobyl
incident of 1986, reindeer and caribou all across the circumpolar regions accumulated such high levels of
radioactivity in their tissues that the meat was unsaleable on the world market. This led to increased levels of
hardship for pastoral peoples across the region, especially as no compensation was forthcoming. In addition,
much unsafe meat was probably locally consumed and health issues relating to Chernobyl will continue to
be of concern for many years to come.
9.3.2 Wildlife and conservation issues
The marginal lands that were previously the province of pastoralists are increasingly coming into focus as
reserves of biodiversity. Their very inaccessibility has permitted the survival of species, especially
macrofauna, eliminated in high-density agricultural areas. Consequently, there is pressure on governments
to declare increasingly large regions as reserved areas, both because of the conservation lobby and the
potential income from tourism (Bourn & Blench 1999). This has probably gone furthest in East Africa where
large mammals are still most abundant and the tourist industry most highly developed.
The immediate consequence is conflict between pastoralists, government and conservation lobbies.
Uncertainties about pastoral tenure have made it difficult for pastoralists to lodge effective land claims and
very often potential grazing land is simply appropriated. Pastoralists then enter conservation areas which
they consider traditional grazing areas and encounter game or forest guards with predictable results. In
marked contrast to the high values placed on wildlife and wilderness in the affluent North, rural
communities in rangeland areas have a long-standing and deep-rooted antipathy towards potentially
dangerous and destructive wild animals (KWS, 1996; Western, 1997).
Two opposing views have evolved in response to this; either that it is correct to assign a high priority to
wildlife both because of the income from tourism and the global importance of the conservation of
biodiversity or that pastoralists have rights and that these should be protected. A widespread position is that
pressure for establishing reserved areas is strong and well-funded and it would be better to make agreements
with both pastoralists and villagers to compensate them for their loss of access to resources through revenuesharing. Such agreements with villagers have been extensively tested in Zimbabwe through the CAMPFIRE
programme6, but developing similar programmes with occupationally specialised pastoralists is altogether
more difficult and although this is in development in East Africa there are no clear examples of success.
Unlike villagers, establishing pastoral access rights in a fluid landuse situation is problematic and a fruitful
source of disputes. Similarly the lack of a central organisation makes effective revenue-sharing more
complex and open to manipulation.
The livelihoods of pastoralists and agro-pastoralists in the semi-arid rangelands of sub-Saharan Africa are
vulnerable to drought, epidemics and loss of access to key natural resources. New perceptions of rangeland
dynamics and the emergence of more community-oriented conservation philosophies have focused attention
on the potential benefits of livestock and wildlife co-existence. Integrated management is an approach that
6
For a long time, CAMPFIRE was seen as a success, and numerous laudatory texts exist. However, the breakdown of
law and order in many areas of rural Zimbabwe and poaching now rife, illustrates the often ephemeral sustainability of
such initiatives.
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can reduce vulnerability, enhance food security and mitigate the negative impacts of wildlife on the
livelihoods of pastoralists and agro-pastoralists.
Interactions between pastoralists and wildlife occur on many levels. The nature and intensity of these
interactions are evolving in response to changes in land use and availability. The general trend in higher
rainfall areas is for the intensification of livestock production, with smaller herds on smaller tracts of land
leading to a movement away from 'pure' pastoralism towards agro-pastoralism (Holden et al., 1997). This is
as much the result of political intervention, as pastoralists attempting to avert risk within a diminishing
resource base in a non-equilibrium environment, by diversifying income sources. Pastoralists may thus be
more willing to incorporate opportunities from wildlife into their livelihood strategies, especially through
community based natural resource management initiatives in areas that possess 'sufficient' wildlife for
sustainable use through consumptive and non-consumptive means.
Predation of livestock and humans is often cited as the major risk by pastoralists (and indeed nonpastoralists) who live near wildlife, particularly women, although, it is argued that such perceptions are
exaggerated (Infield, 1996). Damage to crops and infrastructure by wildlife are also key issues. Simple
protective fencing is easily destroyed by wildlife such as elephants, buffalo and zebra. In theory, both
predation and infrastructural damage can be limited through improved physical protection. However, this is
usually costly at the individual level, even though it may result in better health and performance of livestock
overall.
In practice, the potential of wildlife to contribute to the sustainable rural livelihood strategies of pastoralists
is constrained by many different factors. Perceptions of the costs and benefits of wildlife and the ability to
limit or exploit them vary: national and international wildlife legislation; natural resource tenure; what type
of pastoralists are involved, degree of community homogeneity, quality of institutional management and
gender issues etc. all play a part (Arhem, 1984; Child 1995; Dalal-Clayton, 1989; Taylor, 1993; White,
1992).
Whatever ethical stance is taken, in management terms, the present situation is rather unsatisfactory. Kenya
is one of the few countries where long-term monitoring or both wildlife and livestock populations allows us
to assess change over time. Table 11 shows the change in these population over a period of some twenty
years.
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Table 11 Kenya Rangeland Livestock and Wildlife Population Estimates: 1970–1990s
Est 70s
SE 70s
Est 90s
SE90s
70s-90s %70-90
Buffalo
Camels
Cattle All
Donkey
Eland
Elephant
Gazelle Grant's
Gazelle Thomson's
Gerenuk
Giraffe
Greater Kudu
Impala
Kongoni
Lesser Kudu
Oryx
Ostrich
Topi
Sheep & Goats
Waterbuck
Wildebeest
Zebra Burchell
Zebra Grevy
35,453
6,060
30,187
4,197
551,462 24,636
651,254 33,209
3,319,749 157,958 2,911,496 83,333
95,059 10,884
85,350
5,021
25,775
3,376
19,123
1,242
39,108
6,008
14,923
1,808
247,491 12,407
103,208
3,915
87,086 14,766
31,259
4,269
42,918
1,820
21,418
1,282
62,255
2,808
50,080
2,337
233
99
45
25
116,177
8,930
67,934
3,194
29,606
2,533
18,521
1,054
17,468
1,214
7,751
710
53,653
3,571
25,824
1,950
25,716
1,772
33,871
2,798
93,822 10,977
92,934 18,139
6,473,519 263,793 5,696,021 173,426
12,309
1,476
5,260
733
224,404 49,582
173,354 38,918
138,448 12,643
146,093
9,549
10,364
1,355
4,868
871
-5,266
99,792
-408,254
-9,710
-6,652
-24,185
-144,283
-55,827
-21,500
-12,175
-188
-48,243
-11,085
-9,716
-27,829
8,154
-888
-777,498
-7,049
-51,050
7,645
-5,496
-15%
18%
-12%
-10%
-26%
-62%
-58%
-64%
-50%
-20%
-81%
-42%
-37%
-56%
-52%
32%
-1%
-12%
-57%
-23%
6%
-53%
Total Wildlife
1,262,227
-415,634
-33%
846,652
Stat. Sig.
(p=0.9)
+ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
+ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
-ve
Total Livestock
10,439,789
9,344,121
-1,095,600
-10%
-ve
Including: Baringo, Garissa, Isiolo, Kajiado, Kilifi, Ktui, Kwale, Laikipia, Lamu, Mandera, Marsabit,
Narok, Samburu, Taita Taveta, Tana River Turkana and Wajir Districts (Source: GoK, 1996).
Source: Bourn & Blench (1999)
As the table shows, the only two species showing increases are camels and ostriches, both characteristic of
highly arid environments. In other words, even considerable growth in conservation areas has not slowed the
overall decline of wildlife populations and the pressure on rangelands exerted by cattle, sheep and goats has
also led to a fall in their numbers.
Although wildlife constrains land use for pastoralists, the concept of integrating wildlife into their
sustainable rural livelihood strategies, holds considerable theoretical appeal for marginal semi-arid lands.
These areas are less productive for rainfed agriculture and wildlife is arguably better adapted to the semi-arid
environment than livestock, which is more dependant on water and susceptible to trypanosomosis (Jansen et
al., 1992; Infield, 1996). Therefore, the sustainable utilisation of wildlife may be the most effective way of
exploiting Africa's comparative advantage in this area and can also benefit pastoralists (Cumming, 1990).
The sustainable co-existence of livestock and wildlife in the east African rangelands is a realistic goal, but
only where de facto natural resource managers receive a net benefit from multi-species management, as
opposed to other forms of land use.
In Central Asia, the situation is somewhat different, since until recently, all protected areas were reserved by
decree and certainly did not benefit from consultation with the local populations. The paradoxical
consequence was an almost unparalleled level of habitat conservation. Similarly the system of collective
farms was kept going with subsidised inputs, sometimes brought in at uneconomic costs. This had the effect
of reducing pressure on the natural rangelands, as did the central control of animal numbers and relatively
high levels of offtake. Tourism remains a nascent industry, and any income from it extremely volatile,
reflecting the unstable politics of the region. However, the implosion of the collective farms has resulted in
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the regeneration of pre-Soviet patterns of pastoralism and grazing, increasing pressure on the rangelands and
bringing herders into potential conflict with the management of poorly-resourced parks and protected areas.
The lack of market infrastructure and the limited range of inputs means that Central Asian pastoralists are
generally much poorer and more vulnerable than those in Africa.
The other aspect of Central Asia is the tradition of shooting predators, notably wolves and snow-leopards,
species rather regarded as conservation targets elsewhere. Wildlife organisations have recently begun
operations to try and both develop alternative income generation strategies and develop compensation
schedules for communities to prevent them from killing snow-leopards, accepting the cost of predation. How
well these will work is too early to say, but the strategy depends on considerable external input. Ultimately,
the cost of predation should be balanced by the revenues from conservation if community protection of
species is to take root.
Commercial game ranching has grown out of livestock ranches established in the early colonial period,
especially in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Most such ranches were established on an experimental basis, rather
than for strictly economic purposes. However, Winrock (1992) argues that integrated wildlife-livestock
production systems have the potential to make unique and important contributions to food production,
employment and income generation opportunities throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Multi-species systems
involving mainly game or mixed ranching, safari hunting and tourism are increasing on private and
communally owned land in parts of eastern and southern Africa. In Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia,
Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa, among commercial farmers, between 1020% are involved in game ranching (Cumming, 1990).
The dual use of livestock and wildlife spreads the economic and financial risk associated with their
management, as well as making more efficient use of forage in areas less suitable for livestock ranching.
Depending on marketing arrangements, wildlife can generate greater wealth at lower economic and
environmental costs than livestock and arable agriculture and thus be a profitable rural sector (Kiss, 1990;
Jansen et al., 1992; Cumming and Bond, 1993; Game Ranching Ltd, 1995).
Financial and economic efficiency is related to the absence of competition from other types of land use. In
Zimbabwe better returns on investment are found in Natural Region V (where rainfall is lowest) than in NR's
III and IV (Jansen et al., 1992; Kreuter and Workman, 1992). The relative economic efficiency of game
ranching to livestock production improves with the introduction of safari hunting to game ranches e.g. Iwaba
in the Midlands, the Matesi Area in NR IV, Buffalo Range and Limpopo Intensive Conservation Area in NR
V (Kiss, 1990; Jansen et al. 1992; Child 1995).
10. Biodiversity
10.1 Maintaining livestock biodiversity
An issue of relatively recent concern is the conservation of livestock biodiversity7. Although a concern for
‘rare breeds’ has been a European theme since the 1960s, it was not explicitly either an economic or ethical
enterprise. With the rise of a conception of
The breeds most relevant to biodiversity concerns are those that have co-evolved with a particular
environment and farming system and represent an accumulation of both genetic stock and management
strategies in relation to a particular environment. These have usually taken a long time to evolve and have
characters, such as humidity-resistance, that cannot be easily developed. Breed, however, is a broad church,
covering ornamental breeds of dog and rabbit and also what may be called ‘research station constructs’. For
example, many catalogues of breeds include recently developed crosses between, for example, a local breed
and an exotic. This is particularly the case in the former Soviet Union where many existing ‘breeds’ have no
7
This section has been largely developed from Blench (2001a).
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natural habitat but only persist in fields outside research stations (see Dmitriev & Ernst 1989). The Third
FAO Worldwatch List (Scherf 2000) includes a large number of breeds of turkey and goose in Sub-Saharan
Africa. These are not indigenous species and reading the text, it appears that all are twentieth century
introductions, some of which have never left the research station. There appears to be no significant case for
the conservation of such breeds except at the level of individual country priorities.
Local races and breeds of livestock disappear for a variety of reasons, some representing rational responses
to changing economic, ecological or social conditions, others pressure from government bodies,
development agencies or simply an inappropriate understanding of short-term gains against long-term
viability. Where communities voluntarily replace one breed with another or cease keeping livestock in order
to concentrate on other activities such as tree-crops, it would be inappropriate to pressurise these
communities into conserving breeds; this should be the role of national institutions. Livestock breed
conservation is a public good, both nationally and internationally, and is a long-term investment in future
genetic resources. In many areas in Southern Nigeria, rising prices of tree-crops such as cocoa and palm-oil
have caused the communities to dispense with their traditional dwarf cattle and goats to concentrate on these
profitable crops. This is a perfectly rational medium-term strategy of their part; but it would be short-sighted
of the national government to lose the genetic resource these livestock represent simply because of a
temporary pattern in world trade. As to whether such a strategy is sustainable on the part of government, the
analogy is not with an economic enterprise but an investment against unpredictable future developments.
New antibiotics are expensive to discover and produce, and when discovered they may have be reserved
against future, still unknown epidemics. So it is with genetic resources.
Existing baseline data remains too imprecise to hazard an estimate of the rate of loss, although this is
possible in some developed countries. New breeds are always being created, especially by large livestock
companies and on research stations, but this points to a fundamental asymmetry. A breed that has evolved
over centuries in a particular socio-economic and pathogen niche cannot be ‘replaced’ by a modern breed,
any more than a wild plant or animal that becomes extinct can be recreated in the laboratory.
Table 12. Factors accelerating erosion of livestock biodiversity
Factor
Description
Development
Preference given to high-input, high-output breeds developed for benign
interventions
environments. Commercial interests in donor countries promote use of relatively
temperate-adapted breeds and create unrealistic expectations in developing
countries
Specialisation
Emphasis on a single productive trait, e.g. dairying, leading to exclusion of multipurpose animals
Genetic introgression Crossbreeding and accidental introgression leading to loss of indigenous breeds
Technology
Machinery replaces work animals
Biotechnology
Cryopreservation equipment inadequate to store germplasm of threatened breeds.
Artificial insemination and embryo transfer rapidly displace indigenous breeds.
Political instability
Can eliminate local breeds owned by vulnerable populations
Natural disaster
Floods, drought and epizootics preferentially affect remote or isolated human and
livestock populations
Adapted from Hammond & Leitch (1996)
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Projects and development aid for livestock have historically focused on large ruminants, and tend not to
focus on work animals or small species, ‘micro-livestock’ (to adopt Vietmeyer’s felicitous term). The only
significant exception to this is occasional chicken projects, and even these have been dominated by attempts
to establish large-scale intensive poultry production. These agendas have been wholly set by the priorities
and economies of developed countries, reflecting both their research structures and commercial interests.
The most notorious example of this is probably ILCA (the so-called ‘International Livestock Centre for
Africa’) a CGIAR centre which refused to countenance research on animals other than cattle, sheep and
goats, ignoring key African domesticates and work animals such as donkeys, camels and all types of poultry.
If poverty and sustainable livelihoods are the
key agenda, and even if they are not but the
priority is to work with species important to the
majority of rural farmers, then the evidence is
extremely strong to suggest that these priorities
are very skewed. Most rural households depend
on a scatter of small species for protein, with the
slaughter of cattle or sheep as a very occasional
festival meal. Micro-livestock often do not have
to be fed, do not require substantial labour inputs
and do not require access to land beyond the
backyard. Sale of individual animals can provide
small cash sums without threatening household
capital in the same way as the sales of larger
animals.
Box 7. The expansion of micro-livestock in Nigeria
Livestock production in Nigeria has been historically
dominated by ruminants and these have been the
focus of both veterinary services and animal
production extension. However, an extensive national
survey in 1990-1991 demonstrated that the preceding
decades had seen a significant expansion of backyard
species, both newly introduced and experimentally
domesticated. Among these species were turkeys,
rabbits, guinea-pigs, Achatina snails, turtles and giant
rats. The principal reasons advanced for preferring
these species were their low capital costs, the
simplicity of feeding them with household scraps, the
potential to keep them in confined spaces, the ease
with which they were turned into cash, the absence of
ritual accretions meaning that anyone could keep and
sell them and the low veterinary costs. Poorer
households were diversifying species to match the
diversity of sources of their livelihoods.
Source (RIM, 1992).
In many regions of the world where livestock are
an important element in overall subsistence, the
large ruminants are in the hands of professional
pastoralists or ranchers. Such systems make an
important overall contribution to national meat
and dairy supplies, but often the majority of their
output feeds the cities. Pastoralists in both tropical Africa and Central Asia have historically made
significant investments in breeding races of domestic animal appropriate to the environment they exploit and
are constantly exchanging and adapting bloodlines to meet changing external conditions. Typically, animals
are bred for their ability to survive subclinical pathogens and to digest poor and variable pasture with yields
of meat and milk only a secondary consideration. Local breeds are thus a key element in trying to ensure
food security.
Although traditionally, New World indigenous species were used for a type of transhumant pastoralism, this
has been largely replaced by ranching systems based on Eurasian ruminants. In the New World, much of the
output from South America goes to supply the ‘fast-food’ market of North America. This may be important
in terms of the priorities of the civil servants with whom developers often have to deal but not necessarily
central to the concerns of those at whom their interventions are purportedly aimed.
There is a strong correlation between poverty and a high degree of genetic diversity, both for livestock and
crop plants. This has been subject to two differing interpretations;
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a) poor people keep a biodiverse range of species8 because they do not have access to high-output breeds
and would like to switch to these if resources are available
b) or because a range of species and breeds enables them to continue producing in uncertain
environments and thus to manage risk effectively, as well as using a diverse range of outputs and
permitting flexible allocation of labour
Interpretation a) is clearly favoured by development agencies who wish to promote exotics, crossbreeds and
high-input systems. It also has the advantage of appearing to increase food security. However, interpretation
b) seems to be emerging from several decades of ethnographic study of rural subsistence systems, suggesting
that poor rural households trying to ensure their food security are above all interested in minimising risk.
The risks induced by natural phenomena such as weather anomalies and insect or disease surges have now
been compounded by an increasingly unstable socio-economic environment, where sudden changes in policy
can make their produce uncompetitive. Development agencies have added to risk by rapid changes in policy
and failure to provide long-term support to introduced species or inputs. An analogous situation is found in
the health sector where Western medicine does not replace a diversity of local remedies but is simply added
to them, sometimes with unfortunate effects.
Current approaches to livestock issues in the context of biodiversity are still uncommon, and often ill coordinated. Even the FAO, which is leading on the DADIS initiative, continues to send out free semen from
Friesian cattle under the auspices of another programme, with no clear control on the use to which it will be
put. Large livestock companies have significant political influence, especially in the United States, and
approaches which run counter to their commercial philosophies often get short shrift in international
decision-making. This is particularly striking in the Americas, where American aid and the purchase of
‘modern’ livestock breeds in development projects is still very prevalent. Even in SE Asia, where work is
beginning in earnest on the evaluation of local breeds, development projects involving crossbreeding remain
commonplace. The recent financial collapse in SE Asia and Brazil is likely to demonstrate rather bluntly just
how unsustainable these strategies are, as householders who accepted the blandishments of these projects
will no longer be able to afford the inputs necessary to keep their stock alive.
10.2 Maintaining rangeland biodiversity
Apart from conserving livestock biodiversity, there is the broader issue of maintaining the environments
most pastoralists inhabit, rangelands (Blench 2001b). Rangelands do not represent an ancient climax
vegetation that can be somehow be ‘restored’ to its natural state; those that exist on the world today
represent the result of millennia of intense human activity. Even the grasslands that are thought to be
edaphic such as those in Eastern Africa may well be ancient artefacts. This is not to say their management
and biodiversity is not an issue. For pastoralists the maintenance of high levels of biodiversity in rangelands
may be crucial to their survival strategy. But the extent of rangelands and the sort of biodiversity we wish
them to exhibit are as much political and economic decisions as they are science-driven.
Rangelands, rather like the oceans, depend on setting priorities on a regional basis; grasslands do not stop at
national borders, nor do the animals that exploit them recognise political boundaries. Conservation of
biodiversity in rangelands involves the co-operation of different stakeholders, including foragers,
pastoralists, ranchers, arable farmers, local and national governments and international bodies. Conservation
approaches must recognise that rangelands are physically and institutionally fragmented. As populations
increase the numbers and types of claim on these lands expand, cross-cutting and interlocking with one
another. Institutional environments differ extremely not only from continent to continent, but also within
single countries. Conservation has tended to focus on threatened and endangered species rather than
landscape. However, it is the land owner and land user who have the closest contact with conservation of
8
This does not contradict the previous observation that the highest density of breeds is found in the developed world.
Rural households can map a range of low-input species against diverse capital and labour availability.
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biodiversity, and economically they are likely to be most affected by international programmes. If they see
economic losses for themselves as a result of such programmes, it can be expected that they try to prevent,
or sabotage conservation efforts. Even local governments may lack the will to enforce conservation rules and
laws in such circumstances (Tisdell, 1995: 218).
At the local level, the incentive to conserve biodiversity is often limited, as the benefits are very broadly
distributed. The global community benefits more from the maintenance of genetic diversity than individual
smallholders, at least over the time-period of concern to individual households. Nevertheless, maintenance
or restoration of habitats should be of equal of greater concern, because the best way to minimise species
loss is to maintain the integrity of ecosystem function, and determination of status of each species and
design of conservation measures to meet its needs can be largely avoided. Therefore it is important to create
incentives at the local level to conserve biodiversity. Land owners and users will have to be awarded a larger
share of the total gains from conserving biodiversity. Mechanisms which can be used for this purpose are:
(a) subsidies for conserving biodiversity; (b) payment of royalties on the use of genetic material conserved;
(c) utilisation of conserved areas for tourism with income transfer (Tisdell, 1995).
Rangelands are more perplexing environments than most when it comes to conserving or recreating their
biodiversity. They are not visibly lost in the way of forests, nor do many shelter the headline species that
attract funds and research. Some are characteristic of highly developed economies and have been managed
in ways that do not necessarily elicit sympathy. Yet the role they play in the supporting subsistence
households around the world, and the evident problems that arise when biodiversity is undermined and the
range can no longer respond to extreme conditions argues that greater importance needs to be attached to
rangelands.
11. Improving the livelihoods of pastoralist families and communities
11.1 Disaster management
11.1.1 Drought and the management of climatic anomalies
Livestock can fall victim to two main types of climatic anomaly, droughts and blizzards. These are very
different in their impact on herders, since in blizzards, animals are cut off by snow and often unable to break
through the sheet of ice that forms over the grass to feed. In this situation, a large number of animals are
likely to die simultaneously, irrespective of herders’ strategies and the condition of the stock. Droughts,
however, are cumulative, and the gradual realisation that a drought is in progress causes pastoralists to move
their animals rapidly in search of more favourable conditions. As a consequence, animals die slowly, with
the weaker animals first, and are often sold in advance of likely death to realise some profit.
Droughts, or periods of unusually low rainfall, are part of the expected pattern of precipitation in semi-arid
Africa, and in the past the common response of pastoralists was to move to areas with higher rainfall where
the vegetation persisted. This was no more than an extension of typical intra-annual seasonal movement,
with pastoralists clustered in more humid regions in the dry season and moving to drier zones when the rains
begin to take advantage of the new grass. Pastoralists exist along a gradient of willingness and capacity to
move, and those that shift rapidly and long distances in response to a coming drought are more likely to
conserve their herds. Contributors to Gallais (1977) show that in the Sahelian droughts of the early 1970s,
nomadic pastoralists survived better than their agropastoralist neighbours by moving their herds long
distances.
Recent high-profile media coverage of El Niño and similar climatic anomalies has tended to present an
image of unprecedented climatic crises. In reality, however, there is no unambiguous evidence that the
climate is worsening although distributions are changing, as indeed they have always changed (Blench 1999;
Blench and Marriage 1998, 1999). However, a series of rapid and external changes in the present century
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have led to pastoralists being under unprecedented pressures and thus unable to respond appropriately. A
bundle of factors are making long-distance opportunistic movement increasingly impractical, notably
through the establishment of national frontiers, the expansion of cultivation even in very dry areas, and
continuing increases in total livestock numbers. The consequence is that droughts now cause significant
humanitarian problems and localised degradation, since large numbers of animals converge on certain
pastures, especially around wells. This in turn is responsible for long-term impoverishment among
pastoralists, since they must sell animals cheaply and cannot afford to re-buy them when the drought ends.
At the same time it places extra stress on already ineffectual veterinary services, since weakened animals are
more susceptible to pathogens.
In one sense, these cycles are increasingly understood by national governments, international agencies and
NGOs, with the consequence that effective mechanisms are generally in place to deliver relief supplies to
affected pastoralists. This however, has led to the perception that drought is essentially a humanitarian
problem. As a result, policies to deal with the long-term consequences of drought and to try to prevent the
cycle from simply repeating itself are best described as inadequate. There is considerable historical evidence
that pastoralists who could not succeed in difficult climatic conditions or who lost their herds through
disease simply left the agro-ecological zone and became settled farmers or traders. This was a brutal but
effective mechanism of reducing pressure on resources. However, the provision of food aid has the effect of
keeping in place populations who would otherwise move and initiate a new subsistence strategy.
All over Africa, improved water supply has been seen as the solution to evening out the variability in
precipitation that leads to periodic crashes in livestock numbers through making pasture in waterless regions
accessible. Arid rangelands generally have been the object of extensive well and borehole implantation and
have encouraged herd expansion beyond the capacity of rangelands to support them. In the Somali region, a
strong distinction is made between water from natural sources (gall, saha) and water accessible through
wells (el, sur), boreholes, artificial basins (war) and cisterns (birked). Natural depressions are treated as
accessible to all members of the section owning the land. In all other cases, the resource is controlled by the
groups responsible for maintaining them. In recent times, individual ownership has begun to supersede
collective ownership and controlled water resources are thought of as a source of cash income. Apart from
external programmes, Somali areas in particular have been the subject of local investment to build groups of
birkeds, i.e. cisterns around which settlements often develop (Sugule & Walker 1998). The growth of these
has been phenomenal since the mid-1980s. At the same time, new wells and boreholes have been
constructed throughout Somalia. Some well-owners also have tankers and they sell water to pastoralists in
remote pastures.
Such developments have several consequences; they increase sedentarisation and thus break down the
traditional pattern of seasonal migration between dry and wet season pastures. Unlike camels, cattle and
small ruminants cannot be away from a water-point for more than two days without serious health
consequences. The expansion of water-points also encourages the herding of sale-oriented species, notably
cattle. Cisterns often are associated with range exclosures and privatisation, thereby altering the open-access
pasture system. Sugule & Walker (1998) note that pastoralists are aware of the negative consequences of an
over-insertion of birkeds and they cite an agreement between two clans to restrict the numbers of cisterns.
However, they also observe that there is a growing tendency to cheat on such agreements or at least rewrite
the rules. It seems very unlikely that customary agreements, xeer, can do more than temporarily limit the
growth of birkeds. In times of average of above rainfall, the birked system is generally positive, although as
herds become more static pathogen load increases and veterinary costs are higher. However, pastoralists now
become more vulnerable to stress, and when the rainfall declines, the cisterns empty and the stock die
because alternative water resources cannot be reached. In addition, pastoralists are most likely to have to sell
animals when prices are lowest (in a drought or at the height of the dry season) to buy water when its prices
are highest.
The present responses to drought and policies of governments, agencies and NGOs cluster around restocking
and sedentarisation. Restocking can work on a local scale, although it is expensive in terms of management
and seems to provide no evident insurance against further droughts, which on average seem to occur every
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10 years. Although it is generally agreed that pastoralists are not responsible for ‘overgrazing’ in the way
this was pictured in earlier literature, the inexorable increase of both herds and cultivation has placed
unparalleled pressure on resources. Pastoralists themselves tend to insure against individual risk by
dispersing animals in other herds; this is effective for individual herders especially as protection against
epizootics but does not remove animals from the system. Unless there is more effective strategic thinking
about the long-term consequences of present drought response strategies the cycle of crises is likely to
continue.
11.1.2 Early warning systems: Idea and reality
The other great hope for rangelands has been remote-sensing. It was thought that the use of satellites should
be able to detect pasture availability and abundance well before the usual land-based methods, and national
governments would then be able to direct pastoralists to appropriate sites. In this it joined up with notions of
early warning (see 11.1.2) intended to give relief agencies advance notice of likely crises. Although
considerable resources have been invested in these methods, the results have been at best ambiguous. One
reason is that remote-sensing is only a very crude tool for detecting pasture abundance and frankly cannot
detect quality; pastoralists well know which species their animals eat, and this does not show up on falsecolour images. However, even if this were somehow remedied, the problem of communications
infrastructure remains. Even if information does reach national governments, their own systems of
communication with pastoralists in remote areas are so poorly developed that they are unable in practice to
get the information to producers in a credible form.
The basic idea of early warning systems is extremely attractive. Droughts occur in fragile rangeland areas
quite frequently, and the result is a humanitarian disaster—plainly seen on television images. If we could
know in advance that a drought was about to occur, this would allow us to do two things;
warn the pastoralists to take appropriate action
allow governments or relief agencies to put in place remedial strategies before the disaster occurs
Early warning systems seem to have been driven powerfully by technology, especially from the late 1970s.
As rich, multi- (false)-coloured satellite images of desert areas began to appear, the illusion of omniscience
appeared with them. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, 1999) and the
Spot satellite earth observation system (Spot Image, 1999) could tell pastoralists that vegetation was going
to be in short supply through the mysterious agency of the ‘normalised difference vegetation index’
(Infocarto 1999).
The value of such prediction engines remains controversial but disillusionment also set in from the opposite
end of the equation. It became apparent that;
Pastoralists were ahead of developers and could respond rapidly to subtle shifts in patterns of
rainfall and vegetation. The problems that arose were often political and could not be addressed by
development agencies; their responses included crossing national borders, especially when
insecurity made their usual grazing inaccessible
Governments and most agencies had procedures far too slow and cumbersome to respond in an
effective way to climatological information and deliver it to those who might need it.
It may be, in addition, that there was problem of visibility. There is less exposure and credit to be gained
from preventing something happening than from ‘saving’ people when it does. Early warning predictions put
people in a position of greater knowledge, but does not necessarily equip them with the tools to use such
knowledge. The 1980s phase of disaster response saw something of a dip in the popularity of early warning,
although technical advances in climate modelling have led to some restoration of its credibility (Blench and
Marriage, 1998). There are now numerous websites devoted to providing up-to-date information on such
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climatic anomalies as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and monitoring catastrophic events relevant to food
security. They include, on a global basis, the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning System (FEWS, 1999),
and on a regional level, one for South Africa (South Africa, 1999). Agencies now have somewhat less hubris
about their capacity to respond, but the emphasis has now changed to influencing governments to building in
an awareness of the impact of climatic anomalies in their long-term planning. Variability of climatic
conditions is a reality that needs to be acknowledged and incorporated into government policy, as well as
into individual- or group-level contingency plans.
Although the 1990s saw considerable advances in meteorology, problems remain, both on the technical side
and in terms of packaging and presenting the product. Regional forecasts, such as those made for West and
Southern Africa, provide probabilities about the average rainfall for the coming season which may help
inform choices over seed selection, but as yet say nothing about the timing or distribution of rains. The
relevance to pastoralists is, in any case, dubious. Pastoralism is essentially a reactive subsistence strategy, by
which herds are taken to the areas of greatest productivity in a given year. Pasture depends on factors such as
soil quality and water retention; for the foreseeable future, pastoralists will determine their movements either
by what they observe, or by traditional transhumance routes. At the present, weather forecasting based on
sea surface temperatures and satellite imagery is often too general and zonal to be of any value in a restricted
field of operations. The alternative is thus to look for ground-based indicators, most notably livestock prices
and herd movements, as well as talking to pastoralists (Hesse, 1987; Swift and Umar, 1991). One of the
most well-known of these systems is the Turkana early warning system in Northern Kenya (BuchananSmith, 1992).
Whether technology options have failed rangeland producers remains controversial; their advocates point to
specific successes. However, the long-term record does not seem to be very encouraging, either in the
developed or developing world. This is almost certainly because the decisions pastoralists have to make to
conserve their herd are too local to be captured by regional information systems. In terms of intensifying
water and pasture supply, the usual rules of livestock systems apply; short-term gains do not lead to longterm sustainability. Moreover, changing ideas about the nature of a rangeland resource and importance of
landscape maintenance are leading to long-term transformations of notions of the ultimate goal of pastoral
production.
11.1.3 Security in pastoral zones
§1.4.6 discusses the close relationship between highly mobile pastoralists and warfare. The opposite side of
this coin is that the remoteness of pastoral zones makes them typically in regions where borders are disputed
and where mobile forces can easily conduct guerrilla warfare. The continuing conflict in the Horn of Africa
illustrates this and the consequences for the pastoralists who reside there.
Prior to the establishment of nation-states, inter-ethnic conflict associated with access to grazing and cattleraiding was common, notably in Northern Kenya and Uganda (Fukui and Turton 1977; Bollig 1990; Perner
1993; Hendrickson, Armon & Mearns 1999). But since the 1960s, border disputes and struggles for political
power have meant that warfare has been endemic throughout the region. Increasingly sophisticated weapons
have entered the region, including the familiar AK47, enabling raiders to pursue their objectives with far
more lethal consequences. Somali raiding into NE Kenya has pushed the Turkana westwards and into
confrontation with the Karimojong in Uganda, who in turn are raiding into Sudan. Less numerous and
powerful pastoral peoples have no defences and are either forced to flee their gazing lands or their animals
are stolen and they end up in the camps.
Disputes between nations carried out on an even larger scale can be highly destructive of pastoral enterprises
as Eritrea-Ethiopia border war demonstrated. The sowing of unmarked landmines in pastoral areas can make
whole regions off-limits. Donors are inevitably reluctant to supply even emergency food aid while resources
are being diverted towards trans-boundary military confrontation and enthusiasm to fund long-term
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development is still scarcer. Such conflicts also make the sort of regional planning essential to a coherent
rangelands strategy still more difficult to establish.
11.2 Recovery strategies
11.2.1 Structural features of pastoralism
Pastoralism has some key structural features that differentiate it from other enterprises such as agriculture
and fisheries and which are relevant to making long-term policies (Hogg 1997a). Among these are;
a. Stock recovery. Pastoralism is a way of life and herdowners will invest in rebuilding herds without
external intervention. As a consequence, the trend is always for livestock to exceed range resources.
However, investment costs and recovery rates of pastoral herds are very slow compared with crops.
Moreover, seeds can frequently be sourced externally at relatively low cost; stock adapted to specific
climatic and range conditions is virtually unavailable9.
b. Pastoralists are significantly more vulnerable than cultivators to fluctuations in terms of trade. A
farmer replanting after a bad year can see grain stocks and prices recover in one year. Livestock
owners flooding the market with salvage sales may not see the market recover for up to a decade.
c. Pastoral herds always produce surplus animals, notably immature males and barren females, which can
be eaten or sold to reduce pressure on resources. Nonetheless, the culture of a pastoral society
strongly affects its attitude to the disposal of such animals.
d. Because pastoralists must dispose of operating capital to buy resources when their herds are under
threat (purchased water, fodder), poorer herd owners must sell a greater percentage of their herd to
survive in comparison to richer herders. This increases wealth stratification and makes them more
vulnerable in the next cycle of environmental stress.
e. Crises affect pastoralists in an almost inverse fashion to farmers. When climatic factors reduce crop
yields, market prices are high because of the scarcity value of grains. When the same factors affect the
herders' ability to keep stock alive, prices plummet because of competition with other stockowners
also attempting to sell animals.
Although these principles would seem to follow logically from the nature of the pastoral enterprise, aid and
development agencies have often been slow to adapt policies to the specificity of livestock production, and
development formulae are often applied to an undifferentiated class of poor or vulnerable people. This
section explores experiences of trying to assist pastoralist to recover.
11.2.2 Sedentarisation and land tenure
Tenure and rights of access form an essential component of the analysis of alternative land uses for
pastoralists and agropastoralists, especially in non-equilibrium environments where the availability of
grazing and water varies. The regime experienced by a given stakeholder, affects the pattern of the costs and
benefits of incorporating wildlife into their livelihood strategies.
The pre-colonial system in eastern Africa, was open-access, based on a virtually chronic state of warfare
(Fukui and Turton 1977; Markakis 1989; Bolling 1990; Bol Aken 1991; Mawson 1991; Perner 1993;).
Pasture and grazing rights were sustained by military force rather than any type of consensual system.
Continuing inter-group raiding was as effective in building up herds as investing in improved livestock
productivity, at least as far as the victors were concerned. Where arms have become widespread among
pastoralists, as in Somalia, southern Sudan and adjacent regions of Ethiopia and Kenya, violent conflicts are
continuing to the present.
9
As many restocking programmes have found, livestock that herders are willing to sell elsewhere, especially breeding
females are usually only the poorest quality animals.
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Clearly, there is no merit in perpetuating these systems, and the relative long-term security in the regions
further south suggests that innovative strategies must be sought. The literature divides sharply into two
camps; those proposing that all non-reserved land be converted into private ownership and those proposing
communal tenure systems of different designs. There is now considerable experience of both types of
strategy over the region as a whole. The form of land tenure has significant implications for tenure over
other resources, such as wildlife.
Land tenure regulations in Tanzania are in a state of disarray (Shivji 1994). Compared with Kenya, very few
ranches have been established in Tanzania. One of the few still operating is Mkwaja Ranch on the coast near
Tanga, owned by Amboni Holdings Limited. The southern part of the ranch, which was more of a
wilderness area with abundant wildlife and tsetse, has recently been sold to the Wildlife Division to expand
the Sadaani Game Reserve.
The conflict between nomad and the settled farmer goes back to the earliest written records and is mythically
symbolised in many cultures. Cain slew Abel, the Chinese emperors built the Great Wall to keep out the
marauding hordes, the rulers of Egypt were constantly at were with nomads from the deserts west of the
Nile10. The association of highly mobile pastoralists with raiding and warfare has been crucial in establishing
negative stereotypes throughout history, whether the Twareg of the Sahara, the Mongols in Central Asia, the
cattle-raids poeticised in the Tain or the present-day Somali shifta raiding into northeastern Kenya.
Typically the state sees only the threat and ignores the fact that pastoralists frequently exist on land that is
too fragile or too variable to be intensively used and is moreover a significant supplier of pastoral products
to farmers and urban populations. Government policy tends to favour the agriculturalist and faith in technical
assistance given to farmers is reinforced by ethnic prejudices, since administrators come predominantly from
agricultural backgrounds (Horowitz and Little 1987).
There is therefore a long history of the state attempting to settle pastoral nomads, often with very limited
success. In Iran, for example, during the epoch of Rezâ Shâh (1925-1941) there was a concerted campaign
not only to settle the pastoral nomads but also to eliminate their distinctive culture in terms of language,
dress and authority structures (Digard 1990). During the administrative chaos in the Second World War, the
nomads rapidly reverted to their former migratory patterns, and up to 1960, there was long series of councils
restituting much that was appropriated during the 1920s and 1930s. However, during the rule of Mohamed
Rezâ Shâh, persecution of nomads began anew and leaders of many groups such as the Qashqa’i fled into
exile (Beck 1986). Following the departure of the Shah and the period of uncertainty, many returned to
reform their authority structures. However, within a couple of years, Revolutionary guards were attacking
with Qashqa’i with the same helicopter gunships used by the Shah.
Attempts to settle the pastoralists in the Middle East go back as far as 1910, when King Abdul Aziz moved
Bedouin into Hijra schemes in Saudi Arabia. These centres grew until 1929, when a revolt destroyed them
and by the 1950s they have completely reverted to herding settlements (Chatty 1996:19). Such schemes, far
from being a discouragement, were replicated throughout the region, often under very different political
regimes with very similar results.
Resettlement has had a similarly bad record in the Horn of Africa. Resettlement schemes in Northern Kenya
and Southern Somalia have begun with the best of intentions and failed, because it is impossible to service
any alternative form of employment effectively. Following the 1973-1974 drought, the Somali government
engaged in large-scale settlement schemes for displaced nomads (Samantar 1991). The effect was to give
land tenure to individuals on the scheme contrary to usual patterns of tenure in the region. However, the
work itself was perceived as degrading and as a consequence, almost all men of working age returned to
10
There are references to pastoralists in the deserts west of the Nile Valley in Egyptian records. Ramses III defeated a
Libyan tribe called the I-S-B-T-U usually identified with the Asbytes of Herodotos. The ‘Tehenu’ appear in Vth
Dynasty sources (3200 BC) as livestock keepers of the Western Desert and later numerous other tribes are mentioned
(Vernet and Onrubia-Pintado 1994:56).
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herding or used their improved access to work abroad. The settlement schemes then became more like dry
season encampments populated principally by children, women and old people.
However the conflict between these two groups does not justify one sector being sacrificed to the other,
particularly given their symbiotic relationship between the two. The growing number of pastoralists and
settled farmers who are diversifying into agropastoralism demonstrates the potential complementarity
between herding and farming. Furthermore the scope for further collaboration is evident: inputs such as
fodder, apart from simply crop residues, provide the possibility of greater diversification of herdmanagement techniques.
Even spontaneous sedentarisation does not necessarily entail any increase in production or food security and
may, on the contrary, have the effect of shifting underemployment and hunger to other regions. Economic
and military pressure on the Negev Bedouin has forced many to settle with often disastrous consequences
for their society (Meir 1977). The growing urban population gives rise to greater demand for livestock and
agricultural produce, whilst the labour force in rural areas dwindles, and depopulation of areas suitable for
pastoralism only wastes natural and human resources. Niamir (1991) notes a drain of expertise as young
people move out of the pastoral sector.
The encroachment of cultivation onto land traditionally held and grazed by pastoralists has forced them into
increasingly marginal and unproductive land. Despite this, some interest groups argue that pastoralists are
inherently inefficient and self-destructive, and should be settled, as is the official line in Nigeria, for example
(Awogbade 1981). Besides the cultural damage involved in forcibly settling pastoralists, small-scale
agriculture or urban unemployment does not necessarily offer a lifeline out of poverty.
The fact that nomads are often unwilling to settle suggests (particularly given the role of opportunism and
adaptability in the decision-making process) that it is generally deleterious, except after some near-starvation
critical point. Adverse conditions generally encourage pastoralists to wander more and further afield. If it
were beneficial for pastoralists to settle, this is what they would do and until such time as this, the rationality
of nomadism is evident.
Blame for the impoverishment of pastoralists has been laid at the door of the weather, ‘pastoralist
irrationality’, sedentary farmers, and governments. However, to apportion blame is not to solve the problem,
and a political problem lies as much in the relationships between the parties concerned as in the nature of the
agents themselves. Cullis (1992) has suggested that future work for development lies in advocacy. Conflict
between sedentary and nomadic groups has escalated in recent years in spite of the relationship of symbiosis
and bartering which has been, and remains, essential to both sectors. An analysis which concludes that there
are too many mouths and too little water does not explain the political alliances or address the need for
diversity in order to maintain any part of the system. The temptation to see the world in terms of opposites
rests on the assumption that clear distinctions can be made between sedentary and nomadic people, and
consequently between pastoralists and agriculturists, but this is not borne out by the fluid and adaptable
existences of many groups. The semi-nomadic pastoral populations of the Lahawin in the Sudan, for
example, divide the year into migration and settlement phases, and the mobility of group members is
dependent on the rainfall as well as other factors such as herd size (Gorman and Boosh, 1990). Other
nomadic groups are known to choose an increasingly or decreasingly mobile existence depending on
environmental conditions. Nomadic peoples often live on the land surrounding rainfed agriculture; in wet
years agricultural practices are expanded, and during drier years, people return to pastoralism (Johnson,
1969).
Past external intervention has been informed by northern specialists, but the lessons of the integration of the
pastoral system with other sectors points very forcefully towards the conclusion that future advice and
thinking, whether from within the pastoral sector or without, should take a holistic view of the situation.
Settlement does not reduce the consumption needs of pastoral groups, and the issues of food security and
pressure on resources are not addressed by a policy of sedentarisation.
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Issues of land tenure in the pastoral sector remain a fraught topic. Broadly speaking, prior to the modern era,
traditional tenure in pastoral areas was either loosely framed or non-existent. Where a resource was patchy,
and the pastoralist an opportunistic grazer it made little sense to establish elaborate tenurial regimes. The
exceptions to this were where a valuable and fairly reliable resource was being competed for by a variety of
players. For example, in the inland Niger Delta in Mali, a vast wetlands used for livestock, fisheries and ricegrowing, a complex regime existed in the pre-colonial era to regulate access to pasture. The Beja, living
along the Red Sea Coast of Sudan, seem to have ‘owned’ patches of rangeland for a very long time,
reflecting the antiquity of their settlement in the region. In pastures subject to heavy snow, frameworks grew
up to control access to meadows in the lee of hills where sow depths were the least.
The twentieth century, with the growth of the nation state and widespread demands to codify land
ownership, has compelled pastoralists and others to think more coherently about tenure. In many regions, the
absence of written documents has simply allowed farming and timber interests to take over pastoral land
with any hindrance. This should not be thought of as a problem confined to the developing world; cases in
court at present in Sweden are being brought by timber interests who are gradually eating away at Saami
land and their success is based on the absence of written documents confirming Saami proprietorship. The
irony in this case, of course, is that Scandinavian countries have a reputation for pastoral studies and
projects, and these, conveniently located far away, take an entirely different approach to customary tenure.
Pastoral areas have been `traditionally' managed under common property resource (CPR) management
schemes, although these are really constructs of the colonial era. CPR areas are increasingly being
recognised as complex and highly adaptable systems, involving multi-faceted rights to resources. They vary
from open access, to communal use with reciprocal arrangements, to exclusive use and privatisation. In
communal areas of Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Zambia, 12.5% of the land area is
designated for wildlife use for the benefit of local communities (Kiss, 1990).
Communal areas in the semi-arid rangelands of eastern and southern Africa are under increasing pressure.
Historically, the solution to many of the pressures faced in these areas was thought to lie in privatisation of
communal resources. However, in terms of CBNRM, privatisation of resources can increase conflict
between wildlife and livestock, increase tenure insecurity and gender-based discrimination (Birgegard, 1993;
Hunter et al., 1990; Rutten 1992; Game Ranching Ltd, 1995; Lane and Moorehead, 1994, 1996; Lane,
1997).
Fragmentation of the rangelands complicates the sustainable management of a resource such as wildlife,
especially in non-equilibrium environments (Scoones, 1995, 1996; Lane, 1997; Lane and Moorehead, 1994,
1996). The degree of investment/management in a resource is related to its value; this will vary according to
when and where it is evaluated, as well as who is making that value judgement. For CBNRM schemes to
function, neighbouring landowners may have to organise to join their lands together to manage wildlife and
avoid conflicts over identifying producer communities. Strong institutional management, secure rights of
tenure that build upon existing frameworks and conflict resolution skills are all likely to be important
ingredients for the success of integrating wildlife into the sustainable rural livelihood strategies of
pastoralists. These considerations suggest that larger tracts of land, with clearly defined and secure tenure
rights, are likely to be easier to develop as wildlife management areas. However, this creates an inherent bias
towards nationalisation or privatisation, reinforcing élite interests in commercial ranching or agriculture
(White 1992).
11.2.3 Rethinking pastoral organisation
Pastoralists are not very prone to develop complex social institutions to defend their interests as a group, in
part because their mobility and flexibility makes it hard for such institutions to maintain their coherence over
long periods. The exception to this is when pastoralism is allied with military organisation, as in the case of
the Mongols and other horse-mounted raiders of Central Asia, or in the states established by the Ful∫e in
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West Africa. However, when conquest leads to empire, the necessity to maintain a functioning
administration effectively excludes actual pastoralists. Traditional social organisation thus focuses on the
household and kin group with more nebulous clan entities providing social identity but not necessarily
organisational capacity.
This has seemed highly unsatisfactory to outsiders encountering pastoral societies, for various types of cooperation would seem to be a precondition for development. Pastoralists moving through arable areas are
frequently in conflict with farmers; it seemed logical to form agreements with farmers, to prevent this. The
purchase of drugs, access to water and pasture would seem to be better regulated by local and regional
associations. Moreover, the prejudice against pastoralists in many nation-states might be better combated by
organisations that could effectively articulate their case to government.
In the command economies, the solution to this was relatively simple; through collectivisation, co-operation
and association was simply forced upon people. This had both a good and bad side; it made the delivery of
inputs simple and the organisation of necessarily collective operations such as predator hunts functional. It
evened out the production of winter hay and ensured that the economic burden of herd loss would not fall on
single households. The disadvantage was that the system was heavily subsidised from outside and subject to
arbitrary pricing. As a result, there was no discrimination for competence and unsustainable production
strategies were the rule. Despite the benefits, these systems are gradually collapsing following the fall of
Communism and much more traditional social patterns are re-asserting themselves.
Outside the command economies, principally in Africa and the Middle East, the main tool in the armoury of
developers has been the Pastoral Association (PA). By one means or another, pastoralists were encouraged
to associate and to negotiate collectively with outside bodies for veterinary services, water development etc.
Both the World Bank and regional NGOs such as SOS-Sahel have been involved in the promotion of PAs all
across the Sahel since the 1970s. In East Africa, the system of ‘group ranches’ was developed, principally
for the Maasai, to encourage a more comprehensive system of land ownership and thus investment as well as
to provide centralised systems of livestock dipping. Elsewhere in Africa, Pastoral Associations were more
fluid as governments have not generally had the resources to mount such a large-scale operation as the group
ranches.
Whether PAs have really been successful and indeed how success is to be measured remains moot.
Evaluations or ‘institutional audits’ generally suggest that these associations remain heavily dependent on
external support (e.g. Hesse et al. 1998). Pastoralists were hit very hard by the droughts of the 1970s and
1980s and the rinderpest epizootic of the 1990s. As a consequence, what fragile social capital had been built
up tended to dissipate as individual herdowners scattered. This may well be the problem with any sort of
voluntary association of this type; where promoted by committed individuals it can be successful for some
time. However, the logic of pastoralism is such that in a period of crisis, herds scatter and with them the
associations.
Nonetheless, if pastoralism is to make any effective defence of itself in the coming millennium, it will have
to develop new structures; existing social institutions have not served it well in a new era. It seems likely
that new technology may change the equation in interesting ways. Proposals to use radio to communicate
useful information pastoralists have been on the table for some time but they have generally been blocked by
state control of the airwaves in almost all pastoral areas. Recent times have seen a significant relaxation of
radio licensing in many countries and deregulation may well drive the provision of information services to
pastoralists. Even more important is the evolution of affordable satellite phones probably also supplying
internet access. These may allow pastoralists to link together and to learn about resources and inputs in
remote places. Mobile phones have already transformed communications in many countries dogged by
unreliable landlines and this process has every potential to drive even more far-reaching changes.
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11.2.4 Restocking
Restocking, whether initiated by herders or organised by an external agent, attempts to rehabilitate herders
within their environment rather than suggesting they settle and take up, for example, fish production11.
Rehabilitation relies, though, on there having been a significant change in the environment or in herder
management of it. Returning to the status quo ante serves little purpose and contravenes the principle of
constant readjustment in conditions of disequilibrium. Simply providing pastoralists with animals to replace
those lost during drought does not take account of the fact that the available land, environment and
management has not sustained the level of stocking. Restocking risks providing another hecatomb for the
next drought. The loss of weight from animals during drought is of much less importance than the loss of
animals through starvation, especially if rehabilitation through restocking will replace lost animals. Selling
animals at appropriate points in the drought cycle maintains the possibility of autonomously rebuilding herds
in better times. It is beneficial as a means of management, but is still geared towards maximising herd
numbers.
Restocking is usually thought of as something perpetrated by agencies, but pastoralists have their own
systems of insurance against drought. Herders prepare for drought and epizootics by ‘lending’ their animals
to relatives or friends in exchange for looking after some of their animals in return. If a herd is caught up in a
crisis and suffers high mortality, then the herder calls in these animals to form the nucleus of a new herd.
Even where such an insurance mechanism is not in place, it is quite usual for relatives to lend animals, until
they have produced sufficient offspring for the affected herder to rebuild a viable enterprise. Even so, such
mechanisms were not always successful; hence the suicides of West African pastoralists who lose all their
herds. Restocking by outsiders tends to result in distress sales or slaughtering. When implemented
inappropriately, restocking risks achieving little more than postponing disaster and the decline of
pastoralism, whilst interfering with indigenous recovery systems (Heffernan, 1995).
The need for a viable herd determines the nature of restocking programmes, and a herd which is large and
diverse enough to support a family, providing a taxable surplus for purchasing necessities, is considered
optimal. Despite the obvious weakness that such standards of sustainability are subjectively determined, this
concept informs the level of restocking (Bernus, 1987). In some projects, pastoralists were given money in
place of animals to have more autonomy in restocking. Mace (1989) records some successes with
restocking, while stressing that even following restocking, families with fewer than one hundred goats will
need some additional form of income. Moris (1988) goes further, and from work by Oxfam in Kenya, draws
attention to the need to work within pastoral administrative mechanisms when interventions are made. Many
NGO interventions rely on the provision of smallstock which do not provide food security, as pastoralists are
dependent on the diversity of produce from their herds (Oba, 1992). Toulmin (1987, 1995) has considered
both the drought cycle and restocking responses and concluded that restocking should only take place within
a bundle of drought interventions and that these should be targeted at specific points in the
drought/reconstitution cycle.
In some parts of the world, livestock raiding is a highly developed culture which not only constituted a threat
to viable herds but also was one method of restocking a herd after a drought. Sweet (1965) argued that
camel-raiding in Arabia was part of a larger system that maintained the ecological balance within the region.
In East Africa and Madagascar, cattle-raiding was much more developed than in West Africa (Fukui and
Turton 1977). Needless to say, this is one ‘traditional’ recovery mechanism not usually advocated by aid
agencies, although it remains fairly widespread in the Horn of Africa. In southern Sudan, much of the
conflict has found expression in cattle raiding, undermining food security in the region, and destabilising the
population. The potential for livestock production as well as agriculture is significantly underused, and the
situation is one of a cycle of threats to food security, leading to social upheaval, which in turn results in
further food-security problems.
11
This sounds satirical, but reflects the conclusion of more than one report on pastoralists in the Lake Turkana area of
Northern Kenya.
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11.2.5 Livestock banking
Livestock banking has been proposed on the analogy of cereal banks, to assist producers to carry stock
across the difficult seasons. Livestock banking proposes that the expense of restocking can be spared if,
during parts of the year, animals can be traded in to an independently owned ‘bank’ in return for a token.
The animals are then tended until such time as the pastoralist decides to redeem the tokens. There is,
however, a fundamental asymmetry between grains and animals, in that only the latter require feeding. This
in turn demands a responsible, disinterested, well-established organisation to function as a holding operation
for the stock, which seems, at the least, politically unfeasible. A system by which animals are fed at the
expense of the government during the hardest parts of the year when grain is scarce and expensive seems
improbable. It is not evident how such schemes would be able to fund the feeding of livestock when the
pastoral system has proved incapable. Goldschmidt (1975) proposed a National Livestock Bank for Kenya,
which would make sense if livestock planning were conducted according to very strict economic criteria.
Such ideas have never been put into practice.
Other alternatives might include simply turning the animals into cash and then rebuying when prices are
low. This would undoubtedly be effective for individuals who see a drought coming, but would cease to
work, were it adopted by more than a small fraction of the pastoral community. This, of course is what
livestock traders do all the time, speculating in animals as well as simply directing slaughter stock to the
abattoir, and livestock producers generally despise them for it instead of imitating their model. Livestock
insurance is yet another common proposal, which, despite its apparent attractions, has never been put into
practice. The transaction costs of both registering animals and ensuring against fraud seem to be too high to
make the scheme workable, even assuming pastoralists were willing to pay money up front for an
eventuality that might not occur.
11.2.6 Economic diversification
A key strategy promoted by governments to address the crisis perceived to be afflicting rural areas of Europe
is economic diversification. As the terms of trade move ever further against livestock producers, they are
increasingly urged to diversify to ensure against further declines in the market. Carr (1977) after analysing
the threats to Dasanetch society in Southwest Ethiopia, sets out an entire programme of economic
diversification based on locally available resources. This is an old story with traditional pastoralists;
catastrophe, whether climatic or epizootic enforces economic and often social change. However, for
pastoralists within their ecozonal niche this is often not easy, because they are there precisely because of the
remoteness of the region and the problematic climate. Projects to encourage diversification have thus often
met with a rather stony response. Bollig (1997:82) discussing the Himba of northern Namibia, notes they
conduct almost no outside activities and even their gardens are meant more as market buffers than as riskaversion strategies.
The diversification of income, or engagement in temporary paid labour is an indirect means of restocking.
Money gained in other sectors can be channelled into pastoralism, particularly after a drought when animal
numbers are low and prices high (Horowitz and Little 1987). The integration of pastoralism with other
sectors thus benefits the pastoralists’ own restocking agenda; this, argue the authors, should be supported as
alternatives to herding available to pastoralists are not likely to be as socially, ecologically or economically
effective in the short to medium term. Large fluctuations in herd numbers can create ‘green desertification’
which occurs when livestock numbers are no longer capable of keeping back woody bush encroachments
(Heffernan 1995).
Among the Bedouin of the Near East, however, economic diversification has become so extreme that
dependence on sheep production is more symbolic than actual in many cases. Lancaster (1981) and Abu67
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Rabia (1994) describe how the Jordanian and Negev Bedouin have increasingly taken up a variety of
seasonal and permanent employment outside the pastoral sector and are investing in permanent housing,
maintaining and perhaps even cementing their social structure while effectively discarding herding. This
process is slower in remoter areas but in Oman, for example, Chatty (1996) found a relationship among the
Harasiis pastoralists between smaller flocks and degree of dependence on wage labour.
12. Who should address these policies and issues?
12.1 Pastoralists in national, regional and global perspective
Pastoralists pose a number of problems for policymakers in relation to their transnational status. Unlike
farmers, who are largely tied to the boundaries of the nation-state, pastoralists tend to cross borders freely in
their quest for forage, whatever the wishes and policy of individual countries (Blench 1996). Pastoralists in
Arabia have switched from being romantic figures of the desert representing tradition and freedom to
becoming a ‘national problem’ (Chatty 1996:15). Most countries with an extensive pastoral sector have
limited resources both to service the pastoralists and to police their frontiers. Individual countries inevitably
want to see pastoralists as ‘their’ citizens, an enthusiasm which pastoralists exploit willingly, often by
holding identity cards for several countries at once.
It is logical, therefore, to treat pastoralism on a regional basis, to draw up common policies in relation to
health, forage and water resources, subsidies on feed etc. However, such an approach runs exactly counter to
the burgeoning ideology of the nation-state and it has rarely been possible to develop such regional policy
initiatives, let alone implement them effectively. Health provides a good example of this; with the JP-15
campaigns in the 1960s, it was possible to effectively eliminate rinderpest from Sub-Saharan Africa.
However, to prevent the return of the disease a co-ordinated programme of vaccination of young stock had
to be maintained. This was never feasible, with the result that 1984-5 saw a West Africa-wide rinderpest
epizootic that killed up to one-third of the animals (see e.g. Nwosu 1987).
The primary task, then is to co-ordinate approaches, to persuade research and development agencies not to
subvert each others’ policies with ill-considered projects. Second is propagating an understanding of the
significance of long-term sustainability in livestock projects, why it is that preliminary results after two
years cannot apparently show impressive increases in productivity, while after ten years, the rural
householders may be more impoverished than at the start of the project. As so often, what may be standing
in the way of effective development is other development projects.
12.2 Key re-orientation of policy towards pastoralists
12.2.1 Constructing policy: telling the truth
No agency dealing with pastoralists does not now pay lip-service to the concept of participation; gone are
the former top-down mandarins and bureaucrats to be replaced by the listening fieldworker. Pastoralists
gather, express their problems, preferably by drawing conceptual maps in the dust, and solutions emerge,
preferably based on the indigenous knowledge they have been hoarding these last few millennia. Agency or
NGO then joins with pastoralist –happy cows and their owners appear in the annual report. At the inevitable
workshop another victory for the participatory approach is announced; luckily no ‘top-down’ advocates
appear.
Without some key realworld input the reader might be forgiven for thinking that things were never better for
pastoralists. But as the evidence suggests, things are far otherwise. War and famine preferentially displace
and impoverish pastoralists as their herds are obvious targets for hungry soldiers. Agricultural expansion
increasingly cuts into pastoral land and cultivators extract the water feeding pastoral wells. Collapses in the
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command economies have created widespread impoverishment of pastoralists because no corresponding
infrastructure was established as a safety-net. Examples of governments shifting to pastoralist-friendly
policies are few and far between12.
The reason for this is that it is not in the interest of agencies concerned with pastoral development to identify
national trends and policies as the source of pastoralists’ woes. A neat project with no loose ends ideally
involves a defined region or subset of population and includes elements of co-operation and improved social
cohesion in additional to technical inputs. For this reason, various types of association all too frequently
feature on the menu of options.
Unpalatable as it is, it may be time to skewer these untruths. Pastoralists, by the nature of their occupation,
form loose and flexible social groupings. The closer they come to sedentarisation on a cline, the more likely
they are to form cohesive social structures. But pastoralists are also opportunists and whenever a visitor
arrives to suggest a project they listen in case something useful may emerge. But inevitably, no matter what
they say to a passing development expert, they will do whatever seems expedient for their herds in the light
of the current situation.
Relations between pastoralists, governments and developers thus come close to institutionalised dishonesty;
many governments depend on the milk and meat from their pastoral sector to feed urban populations,
although they are often unwilling to acknowledge this. Pastoralists have an inbred distrust of national
governments and a dismaying unwillingness to pay more than lip-service to the values of the nation-state.
Governments all too often repay them by violence and coercion, a consequence of their incomprehension.
Such phenomena are not confined to the developing world; the treatment of gypsies in Europe suggest that
highly developed societies feel equally threatened by mobile populations who do not subscribe to their
values.
Governments are usually controlled by settled populations who regard mobile pastoralists as a threat or as
the location of famines and emergencies. As a consequence, both governments and food-aid providers have
tended to characterise arid rangelands as basket cases, requiring assistance at regular intervals, but not as
potential zones for livestock and commercial development. This is reflected both in government policies and
internally within MLAs where drylands are argued to be low return and therefore low-priority. Since the
failures in African rangelands in the 1970s, investment in pastoralism by MLAs has been at very low levels.
As a consequence, there is very limited recent experience and furthermore, much that has been learnt about
pastoralists and their relation to rangeland ecology in the academic sphere has made no transfer at all to
project design or emergency relief.
The consequence in turn is that pastoral peoples in rangelands feel they are neglected by government and are
thus hostile to it, even when there is no larger conflict in progress. Relations between state and pastoralists
thus tend to be confrontational at the best of times. The lack of infrastructural development makes it
increasingly difficult for pastoralists to meet the hygiene demands of international livestock trade and thus to
generate income other than by low-level local sales. Lack of government in remote areas makes possible the
spread of modern weapons and thus pastoralists attempt to gain access to pasture by force rather than
negotiation.
What must be recognised is that any sort of rational policy process involves some element of top-down
imposition and some element of consultation and participation. Governments have access to regional
information on climate, disease, feed supplies and water resources while pastoralists can provide a dense
account of local conditions. It is obviously in the interest of governments to make as much of this
information as possible available to pastoralists and to collate and synthesise their comments and
12
One exception to this might be the oil-rich states of the Gulf who have given considerable financial assistance to their
remaining pastoral populations. However, the result is not only unviable production systems that exist only within a
bubble of subsidies but with the additional irony that the countries in question do not need the meat and milk produced
by the pastoralists and give this assistance essentially from sentiment.
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suggestions. But there will always be practical barriers since pastoral areas tend to be remote and
inaccessible. Governments must make policy and resource decisions on less than perfect information and
almost certainly some sector will be disadvantaged. This is inevitable in the real world; the key task is to
make information flow between sectors as effectively as possible to try and minimise the impact on
individual groups.
12.2.2 Rethinking policy clusters
Apart from key questions of who should be making policy and what mechanisms should be used to support
it, policies towards pastoralists are themselves in dire need of reform. This is in part because key players in a
position to influence the policy reform process are usually both highly conservative and commonly
problematically close to the agendas of large modern livestock companies. Some clusters of policy reform
revolve around;
The general perception that livestock production is a poor gamble in development terms compared
with increased crop production
That animal protein is best supplied by monogastrics because extensive production is wasteful
The idea that pastoralists, as vulnerable people in fragile environments, are better consigned to relief
agencies than dealt with as a significant economic proposition.
The notion that unfamiliar land tenure systems are not tenure systems at all and that national
governments have the right to expropriate land for conservation, mineral extraction or marginal
farming
More specifically, however, policy re-orientation should tackle the following;
The tendency to ignore ‘minor’ species, camels, yaks, reindeer, llama, in favour of cattle, sheep and
pigs.
The calculation of the economic viability of projects in terms of single trait characteristics rather
than total household support characteristics
The estimation of the viability of production systems over short periods of time, which inevitably
advantages introduced breeds.
Ignorance of the value and significance of livestock and rangeland biodiversity and its role in
increasing productivity in uncertain environments
The future of pastoralism will depend heavily on political decisions made by national governments
managing significant grassland zones. Enclosed pastures are unlikely to see any significant extension, but
conditions for existing pastoralists will become more difficult with land expropriation by both farmers and
conservation lobbies. Working with pastoralists, based on a more sympathetic understanding of their
production systems, could act both to protect their lifeways and to continue their capacity to produce protein
on otherwise marginal land.
Experience to date suggests that technical inputs will only have a very limited impact on overall output. The
key in the next millennium will be major policy re-orientation. Elements likely to become important are;
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Production of niche products, either unusual species or breeds, or meat and milk free from
contaminants
Crop-livestock integration, the effective use of pastoral outputs in mixed farming, particularly
the extension of work animals
Co-conservation, the development of interlocking strategies to link conservation of wild fauna
and flora with pastoral production
The expansion of ecologically-sensitive low-volume tourism, using pastoralists to provide
services, particularly in the area of indigenous knowledge
12.3 Who should be doing what?
12.3.1 Intervention versus information dissemination
Traditionally at this point it is usual to conclude that developing countries need policy assistance and there
are a wealth of international agencies, think-tanks and consultants ready to jump in and offer this advice. It is
worth remembering, however, that much of the policy already in place results from this same process and
one legitimate response would be to ask whether another proposed paradigm shift would be any more
ephemeral than previous re-engineering. It is also clear that many countries have benefited from not taking
international advice on pastoralism, livestock biodiversity, dairy production, traditional remedies and the
like and have conserved a store of indigenous skills and knowledge which would perhaps otherwise have
been jettisoned. It is useful to remember that the great reverence in which ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ is held is
very recent and hardly backed up by the detailed field research that would actually contextualise such
knowledge.
All interventions, whether ‘top-down’ or ‘participatory’ are problematic in retrospect. Over time, they have a
poor record of bettering the lives of those they are intended to assist. At the same, with the world rapidly
stratifying into ‘information-rich’ and ‘information-poor’ societies, it should be clear that pastoralists are
bound to fall into the latter category. This follows both from the inaccessible regions in which they live and
the structured confrontation with national governments that is so common. The consequence is that
pastoralists will fall ever further behind in their capacity to deal with the modern world, whether it be in
understanding livestock markets, gaining access to effective drugs or articulating their opposition to land
expropriation.
The role therefore of both multi-lateral agencies and NGOs should thus be increasingly re-oriented towards
information dissemination, instead of asking what we can do for them, asking what pastoralists might do for
themselves with access to greater information. It may seem perverse to be recommending yet more
information flow when there seems already to be an overload in this area. Indeed the problem is often
choosing between a variety of sources whose quality is difficult to assess. But this is very much the
perspective of the wired individual with the internet at their disposal. Most pastoralists and many who make
policy decisions at the local level have extremely weak access to information, especially in electronic forms.
Such information as might be useful is often contained in lengthy reports written in tortured English and is
consigned to the back shelf along with all the other worthy documents. Better policies for pastoralism can
flow from more accessible, better-presented information. The consequence of this is;
a. Wider translation and synthesis of existing materials
b. Consideration given to all types of media, notably radio, internet, CD-ROM, video and DVD.
c. Much greater attention paid to style, and quality of visual material
d. Development both of meta-resources and quality filters
e. Improved feedback mechanisms between pastoral producers and agencies, governments and NGOs
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12.3.2 Remedying uneven research
It should be clear from the above accounts that research and policy developments in pastoralism are
extremely uneven. Pastoralists benefit from accessibility, picturesqueness and the dominant language of the
country in which they happen to reside. A bibliography of the Turkana or the Saami would probably fill
several fat volumes, whereas it is hard to track down a single substantive reference to some Indian or
Ethiopian pastoral peoples. A pastoral programme should try for global comprehensiveness, ensuring that at
least some information is available for pastoral peoples throughout the world and that valuable but antique
monographs are updated.
Increasing penetration of tertiary education makes it more and more possible for pastoralist research to be
carried out by a member of the pastoral group itself; the key here is probably a small application of funds in
the right place as well as an option for translation and dissemination of the product. The role of multi-lateral
agencies should thus be to identify gaps in the coverage and arrange opportunities for such gaps to be filled
as well as making the product available to other pastoral specialists throughout the world.
12.3.3 Practical support
The promotion of pastoral production will undoubtedly remain controversial, but the argument that it is an
effective use of land that cannot otherwise be used for agriculture, suggests that governments and others will
continue to invest in it. If this is to be a productive enterprise, as opposed to a simply humanitarian project,
then linking understanding with action will have to become more effective. This in turn means trying to root
out entrenched attitudes, which probably do more harm than anything large herds of herbivores can achieve.
This section has begun by suggesting the type of support to the pastoral sector, but it is also useful to know
what support would be most valuable. The following suggestions emerge from the body of this review;
The process of changing the policy and attitudes of governments towards pastoralists through
education, publicity, studies, etc., must continue and develop paying attention to new media.
Drought-response policies and mechanisms, as with other policies towards pastoralists, must be
discussed and set at a regional level. The most crucial elements in this are co-ordination in
protection against epizootics and the siting of water points.
Regional decisions should determine the quality and type of services available to livestock
producers and ensure that these have some comparability.
The relevance of levels of insecurity and the effect these have on the decisions of livestock
producers must be recognised—no matter how politically unpalatable these may be.
Forced sedentarisation is both ethically dubious and unlikely to succeed. However, neither
government nor NGOs need respond to a mythical ethical imperative to restore some fictional status
quo.
International agencies have a significant role both in combating misinformation and diffusing
accurate information as it becomes available. This is relevant both in terms of countries with semiarid regions and in donor countries.
Technological developments will substantially improve the modelling of climatic events in the
coming years, and international agencies should have a major role in making the results available
rapidly and effectively, as well as in convincing governments of their relevance.
The collapse of notions of land degradation and carrying capacity should not be used to justify
simply increasing pressure on resources. Further research should generate models that can be used to
monitor access and predict likely bottlenecks in resource availability.
Pastoralism, almost by definition, is an ecozonal phenomenon that is not bounded by the nation-state. Unless
it is redefined as a regional issue, both technically and in terms of its institutions, it may be a significant
casualty of the early twenty-first century.
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13. Conclusion and recommendations
13.1 Why has pastoralism survived?
Given the forces ranged against it, it is perhaps surprising that pastoralism has survived at all. However,
pastoral production systems do have some features in their favour;
Flexibility
Low costs
Freedom of movement
Light regulatory environment
Operate in regions unsuitable for agriculture
Pastoralists have a long-term flexibility derived from their ability to exploit patchy resources. It has often
been observed that the more ‘nomadic’ pastoralists are, the better they are able to survive climatic
catastrophes such as blizzards and droughts (see for example, the accounts in Gallais (1985) of the Sahelian
drought of the early 1970s). However, they are also able to switch species (as Jordanian Bedu have switched
almost entirely from camels to sheep in the period 1970-1995), main saleable output (as Ful∫e in the Igbo
areas of Nigeria have switched from dairying to meat production) or even entirely out of pastoralism for a
period.
When pastoralists come up against highly efficient modern era livestock industries they face major price
competition for their products especially as these may often be dumped, sometimes by the same nations
offering pastoralists emergency assistance with another arm. However, pastoralists do not have to meet
sometimes onerous hygiene costs, packaging, transport and tariffs. Moreover, the single most important cost
to all intensive systems is investment in land itself, both enclosing it and maintaining its productivity, a cost
that pastoralists do not bear, except on the rare occasions when they destock to conserve forage.
The problems that pastoralists face are as much social and political as economic and resource-based. Just as
medieval empires saw themselves constantly threatened by nomads on the frontier, so the modern nationstate has the stereotype that nomadic peoples are both backward, archaic and also a political threat. The
arguments advanced by researchers concerning the potential for pastoralists to contribute to national
productivity and inter-relate to settled farmers are over-ridden by concerns about their constant movement
and thus a failure to control them both in economic and political terms. One consequence is often neglect of
infrastructure in remote areas and consequently these concerns become a self-fulfilling prophecy; the
nomads then do turn to opposing the state.
13.2 Key trends in twentieth century pastoralism
Whatever the future of pastoralism, its present shape has evolved under pressure from very distinctive
twentieth century influences, making impossible any return to some prior imagined golden era. These factors
are summarised in Table 13;
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Table 13. Key factors shaping twentieth century pastoralism
Factor
Impact
Modern veterinary medicine
Increases in productivity and greatly enlarged herds
Modern weapons
Major decline in predator threats, increasingly violent ethnic conflict
and high levels of insecurity
Enclaving
Collapse of traditional ‘safety-nets’ in terms of long-distance
migration in periods of climatic extremes
International pressure for hygiene in Declining market for pastoralist products
slaughtering and dairying
Declining prestige of dairy products Terms of trade running constantly against pastoral livelihoods
World market in livestock products Governments import cheap meat, milk etc. to satisfy urban demand
at expense of pastoral sector
Ideological interference by the state Inappropriate social and management strategies adopted and
maintained by a combination of subsidised inputs and implied
violence
Alternative calls on pastoral labour Pressure for children to go to school and younger people to earn
cash outside the pastoral economy
Modern transportation infrastructure Replaces systems where transport is a major element of economic
production (llamas, horses)
Introduction of high-input, high- Makes pastoralists dependent on effective infrastructure where input
output exotic breeds
supply is irregular, creating periodic crises
Emergency relief, restocking and Keeps non-viable households in pastoral areas, thereby accelerating
rehabilitation programmes
the cycle of deficits
Conservation lobby
Pressure to turn previously pastoral land over to reserved wildlife/
biodiversity regions with corresponding hard currency income from
tourism
Encroachment on rangeland
Rangeland is being eliminated through the use of politically
attractive but often uneconomic irrigation systems
Many of these new situations are being replicated in various regions of the world; the factors that have
impacted so heavily on African pastoralists are affecting those in Central Asia. It would be gratifying if there
were some ‘read-across’, some sense that lessons learnt in one geographic area and time-frame can be
absorbed in the policy-making structures of another.
13.3 Where is pastoralism headed?
Evidence as to the future of pastoralism is generally discouraging; throughout Africa and the Near East
pastoralists are being driven into ever more marginal areas through the gradual expansion of arable terrain.
Transport and enclosed livestock production are forcing out the remaining pastoralists in the Americas and
the circum-Mediterranean region. The marginal lands that were previously the province of pastoralists are
increasingly coming into focus as reserves of biodiversity. In Central Asia, decollectivisation and the
consequent loss of subsidised infrastructure provided by the former Soviet regime has paradoxically brought
about a return of more traditional systems. At the same time, however, the veterinary services are declining,
and market prices for livestock products now reflect the access problems of much of the region. The
consequence has been accelerating impoverishment in many countries; a situation intermittently remedied by
mineral revenues but not through the development of pastoral systems.
Pastoralism is likely to simply disappear in any region where it competes with agriculture. Nonetheless, it is
increasingly being realised that politically popular but unsustainable development of rangelands, often
dependent on the mining of fossil water, is not a long-term development strategy and in some decades
pastoralists may reclaim such land. The ancient North African development of much of the northern Sahara
through large irrigation channels is today only an archaeological curiosity in a pastoral zone. Pastoralists
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remain a resource, a system of producing meat and milk cheaply in land that is otherwise hard to exploit and
as such will still persist in some form. This resource can be protected and managed effectively or ignored
and allowed to decline. Government policies are very unlikely to be uniform in this respect and pastoralists
are thus likely to gravitate to regions where conditions are most favourable. The key is thus to disseminate
improved understanding of pastoral society as broadly as possible, making both policy and the effective
management of natural resources as widespread as possible.
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APPENDIX I: The origin of pastoral species
Appendix Table 1. Domestic animals and their wild counterparts
DOMESTIC FORM
Common
MAMMALS
CARNIVORA
Dog
PERISSODACTYLA
Horse
Donkey
ARTIODACTYLA
Pig
Llama
WILD PROGENITOR
DATE AND REGION OF FIRST
DISTRIBUTION
DOMESTICATION
PROGENITOR
Scientific
DATE
PLACE
Scientific
Common
Canis familiaris
Wolf
Canis lupus
Equus caballus
Equus asinus
Wild horse
African ass
Equus ferus
Equus Africanus
Sus domesticus
Lama lama
Wild boar
Guanaco ?
Sus scrofa
Possibly lama guanicoe
Alpaca
Lama pacos
Dromedary
Bactrian camel
Reindeer
Water buffalo
Cattle (taurine)
Cattle (zebu)
Yak
Goat
Sheep
Camelus dromedarius
Camelus bactrianus
Rangifer tarandus
Bubalus bubalis
Bos taurus
Bos indicus
Poephagus grunniens
Capra hircus
Ovis aries
12 000BC Iraq
3500BC S Ukraine
4000BC Egypt
7000BC Turkey
4000BC Andes: Lake Junin and
? Lake Titicaca regions
Guanaco ?
Lama sp.
4000BC Andes:
Lake
Junin
region
Dromedary
Camelus sp.
3000BC W Asia
Bactrian camel Camelus ferus
3000BC Central Asia
Caribou
Rangifer tarandus
? ?
Wild buffalo
Bubalus arnee
Not known China/ SE Asia
Aurochs
Bos primigenius
6200BC Turkey
—
Bos primigenius namadicus <4000 BC India ?
Yak
Poephagus mutus
Not known Not known
Wild goat
Capra aegagrus
7-8000BC W Asia
Mouflon
Ovis orientalis
7-8000BC W Asia
76
OF
WILD
N Hemisphere
Russia, Central Asia
N Africa, possibly W Asia
Europe, Asia and N Africa
S. America: Andes
S. America: Andes
Asia, possibly N Africa
Russia, Central Asia
Arctic, sub-Arctic
India, SE Asia
Europe, Asia, N Africa
India/ SE Asia
Tibet, Himalayas
W Asia
W Asia
Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
DOMESTIC FORM
Version: 17 May, 2001
WILD PROGENITOR
DATE AND REGION OF FIRST
DOMESTICATION
DISTRIBUTION
PROGENITOR
BIRDS
ANSERIFORMES
Goose
Anser anser
Greylag goose
Anser anser
<500BC Europe, Central Asia
Chinese goose
Anser cygnoides
Swan goose
Anser cygnoides
<500BC ? China
Muscovy duck
Cairina moschata
Mallard duck
Anas platyrhynchos
500BC
Sources: Groombridge (1992:390), Browman (1989:265)
77
OF
WILD
N Europe, N Asia to NW
Africa
Europe, Asia, N America,
N Africa
Mexico to Peru and
Uruguay
Europe, Asia, N America,
N Africa
Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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APPENDIX II: Pastoralism with monogastric species
Ducks and geese
Duck herding is quite widespread in Tamil Nadu, South India. Duck producers are so lacking in capital
that they purchase ducklings from traders in return for a contract to sell the eggs produced back to the
traders. Ducks feed mainly on freshly harvested rice paddies, which benefits farmers, as they loosen the
soil, eat weeds and insects and drop manure. The ducks are nowadays moved between farms on trucks,
although formerly they were herded. Traders pass to buy the crop of eggs once a week and the ducks can
be sold for meat after two or three years. With careful management, these sharecroppers can become
independent producers after several years.
(Adapted from Nambi 1999)
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Appendix III: Worldwide Tables of pastoral peoples
Table 14. Africa
Phylum
Branch
Language
Group
Afroasiatic
Omotic
Cushitic
Hamar
Bedauye
Somaali
Afar
Borana
Rendille
Hamar
Beja
Somaali
Afar
Borana
Rendille
S.W. Ethiopia
E. Sudan
Somalia
Somalia/Djibouti
Ethiopia/Kenya
Kenya
Gabra
Yedina
Touareg
Semitic
Gabra
Yedina
Tamasheq
Berber
Arabic
Saharan
Kanuri
Kenya
Lake Chad
Central Sahara
Maghreb
N.E. Nigeria to Sudan
Lake Chad region
Libya
Sudan
Sudan
Sudan
Mauretania
W. and N. of Lake Chad
Camels
Camels
Camels
Cattle, sheep, goats
Camels, sheep,
goats
Camels
Cattle
Camels
Cattle, sheep, goats
Cattle, sheep, goats
Camels
Camels
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Camels
Cattle, Camels
Chadic
Berber
NiloSaharan
Kuburi, Sugurti
Teda (Tubu)
N.E. Borno/ Niger
Nigeria/Niger/Chad
Chad/Sudan
Cattle
Camels, donkeys
Cattle, camels
Atlantic
Maa
il-Camus
Turkana
Karimojong
Jie
Shilluk
Anywak
Dinka
Nuer
Atuot
Didinga
Murle
Fulfulde
Maasai
Samburu
Turkana
Karimojong
Jie
Shilluk
Anywak
Dinka
Nuer
Atuot
Didinga
Murle
Ful∫e
Kenya/Tanzania
N. Kenya
N. Kenya
N.E. Uganda
N.E. Uganda
S. Sudan
S. Sudan/ Ethiopia
S. Sudan
S. Sudan
S. Sudan
S. Sudan
S. Sudan
Senegambia-Sudan
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Various
Benue-Congo
Benue-Congo
Khoi
ociHerero
ovaHimba
Khoi
Herero
Himba
Khoi †
Namibia, Botswana
Namibia
Southern Africa
Cattle
Cattle
Cattle
Surmic
Khoisan
Baggara/Shuwa
Uled Suliman
Rgeybat
Shukriya
Rashaida
Kerana
Moors
Main Pastoral
Species
Cattle, sheep, goats
Kanembu
Teda/Daza
Zaghawa
E. Sudanic
Nilotic
NigerCongo
Location
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Table 15. Europe
Phylum
Branch
Group
Location
Indo-European
Slavonic
Hispanic
Vlach
Spanish
Basque
Bosnia, Macedonia
Northern Spain
Vasconic
Main Pastoral Species
Sheep
Small ruminants
Sheep
Table 16. Near East and West Asia
Phylum
Indo-European
Semitic
Branch
Group
Baxtyari
Pashtun
Uzbek
Lur
Zuri
Sādāt
Baluch
Arab
Tāheri
Kurd
Shahsevan
Location
Iran
Iran
Uzbekistan, Iran
Iran
Iran
Iran
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran
Iran
Iran
Iran, Iraq, Turkey
Iran
80
Main Pastoral Species
Sheep
Sheep
Sheep
Sheep
Sheep
Sheep
Sheep, camels
Sheep
Sheep
Sheep
Sheep
Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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Table 17. India and Himalaya
Phylum
Branch
Tibetan
Group
Location
Gaddi
Chang Pa
Ahar
Gadariya
Ahir
Gwala
Gaura
Gowari
Bharwad
Dhangar
Gavli
Golla
Kuruba
Idaiyan [Yadava]
Toda
Bhopa
Chopan
Bakkarwal
Gujjar lGojar]
Banihārā
Rebari
Raika
Himachal Pradesh
Ladakh
Uttar Pradesh
Uttar Pradesh
Uttar Pradesh
Bihar, Bengal
Orissa
Madhya Pradesh
Gujarat
Maharashtra
Maharashtra
Andhra Pradesh
Mysore, Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu
Main Pastoral Species
Yaks, small ruminants
Yaks, small ruminants
Small ruminants
Small ruminants
Small ruminants
Small ruminants
Jammu & Kashmir
Jammu & Kashmir
Rajasthan, Kashmir
Rajasthan, Kashmir
Rajasthan, Gujarat
Rajasthan
Small ruminants
Small ruminants
Cows, buffalo
Cows, buffalo
Camel
Camel
Location
Main Pastoral Species
Table 18. Central Asia and Far East
Phylum
Branch
Group
Altaic
Mongolic
Mongol
Buryat
Kazak(h)
Kyrgyz
Turkmen
Tajik
Satan
Turkic
Mongolia, China, Russia
Russia
Mongolia, Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Turkmenistan
Tajikistan
Mongolia
Cattle, camel, yak, sheep, goat
Cattle, sheep, goat
Sheep, horse, cattle, camel
Sheep, goat
Sheep, goat
Sheep, goat
Reindeer
Table 19. Subarctic
Phylum
Branch
Group
Altaic
Turkic
Turkic
Finnic
Dolgan
Sakha [Yakut]
Saami
Komi
Nenets
Chukchi
Finno-Ugric
Chukchi
Location
Finland to Kola peninsula
Kola peninsula
Siberia
Chukotka
81
Main Pastoral Species
Reindeer
Cattle
Reindeer
Reindeer
Reindeer
Reindeer
Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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Table 20. New World
Phylum
Eskimo-Aleut
Vasconic
Athabaskan
Athabaskan
Branch
Group
Inupiat
Basque
Navajo
Apache
Aymara
Quechua
Location
Alaska
Mid-west
Mid-west
Mid-west
Andes
Andes
82
Main Pastoral Species
reindeer
sheep
sheep
cattle
llama, vicuna, sheep
llama, vicuna, sheep
Roger Blench: Pastoralists in the new millennium
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Electronic resources
ODI
http://www.odi.org.uk/pdn/index.html -Electronic versions of Pastoral Network papers over some twenty
years covering a wide range of pastoral topics.
UNDP
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Hornet/past0698.html -Describes the system of Somali water
points and the consequences of uncontrolled borehole digging.
USAID
http://www.info.usaid.gov/fews/fews.html - FEWS: Famine Early Warning System.
http://www.info.usaid.gov/HORN/GHAI/cycle/nextstep.html - GHAI (Feb 1999). Next steps for the
Inter-Governmental Authority on Drought and Desertification including regional integration, early
warning and local capacity building. The Greater Horn of Africa Initiative, United States Agency for
International Development.
Links to Universities and Research Centres
http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/I-M/idry/Esrcreport.html -SCIDR (Feb 1999). 'Environmental
change and poverty in Kalahari pastoral systems.' Full report of research activities and results. Sheffield
Centre for International Drylands Research.
http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/80458e/80458E08.htm#11 -As part of a summary of a book on
ecology in general, two sections describe pastoralism on the Iranian plateau and in Afghanistan.
http://wwwparent.qub.ac.uk/geosci/teaching/modules/geog/ggy203/lect6/environment.html -QUB (Feb
1999). Environments in transition: Aridification and desertification. Geography teaching modules,
Queen's University of Belfast.
Rangelands
http://cnrit.tamu.edu/SRM - website for the US-based Society for Range Management
http://www.forages.css.orst.edu - website for the Forage Information System maintained by Oregon
State University
http://www.icimod.org.sg/focus/rangelands/range_toc.htm -A very comprehensive site describing
Himalayan pastoralism with particular attention to rangelands and biodiversity conservation.
http://agronomy.ucdavis.edu/calrng/pub.htm -A newsletter called, "Rangeland Communities" a
newsletter about rangeland ecosystems, people and management put out by the University of California
Cooperative Extension.
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