The Role of Mobility with the Risk Management Strategies of Pastoralists and Agro-Pastoralists

Abstract

"African livestock owners pursue their livelihoods in a dynamic and risky environment. The external dynamic processes that affect livestock keeping include population growth and migration, changes in exchange relations, intensification of crop cultivation, expansion of crop cultivation, and changes in property rights to croplands, natural pastures, watering points and transhumance routes. There are also a number of dynamic, and stochastic, processes that influence livestock keeping in the shorter-term, such as fluctuations in rainfall and market conditions. Together these long-term and short-term processes shape the production and investment strategies of individual livestock keepers and the institutional arrangements that define property arrangements among livestock keepers and their neighbours.

"These dynamic and risky processes affect human welfare and environmental quality, some of which were discussed in detail at the Woburn and Matopos Workshops hosted by the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1990 and 1992. Attention focused on the short-term dynamics of rainfall, forage availability and livestock production, and on the dynamic relationships between ecological change and livestock numbers."