Extensive Pastoral Livestock Systems: Issues and Options for the Future

Abstract

"Pastoralist production, the use of extensive grazing in rangelands for livestock production, 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, 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 vulnerability."