Rangeland degradation consists of a reduction in the quantity or nutritional quality of the vegetation available for grazing. The prospect of increased rangeland degradation is common to all dryland areas. In particular, the deterioration is more advanced in semi-arid and sub-humid areas than in arid areas.
Since the major droughts of the 1970s, combating rangeland degradation has been on the agenda of the development community. Following the United Nations Conference on Desertification in 1977, a number of studies were commissioned, and substantial research continues to be performed in this area.
Although the figures regarding the depletion and overuse of the world’s rangelands remain sobering, it is important to recognize that both the rangelands and range users are inherently resilient and dynamic.
Causes
of rangeland degradation include climatic conditions causing drought
and human factors leading to the overuse of natural resources.
Increasingly, the combination of both factors may be cited as the primary
cause of the global degradation of rangelands. The effects of climate
change and human pressures on the soil include a depletion of soil nutrients,
with a decline in water retention, which ultimately causes a breakdown
in soil structure. Intensification of land use without proper management
reduces productivity, which may lead to further agricultural expansion
in even more marginal areas. This expansion ultimately results in the
soil erosion of large swaths of rangeland.
Human factors contributing to range degradation
- Population growth
- Market expansion
- Inappropriate policy initiatives
- Overgrazing
- Encroachment by subsistence farmers
- Collection of firewood
IFAD has developed a number of innovative and demand-driven approaches to combating range degradation. Fundamental to IFAD’s success has been the recognition that, since the problems of the rangelands are complex and multidimensional, they are not amenable to quick and easy fixes. Hence, if sustainable progress is to be achieved, the responsibility for change must be in the hands of the communities and households themselves.
IFAD projects have promoted two broad approaches to the problem of combating rangeland degradation:
- Grazing management activities, which focus on livestock range use.
- Land improvement activities, which focus on soil and vegetation.
The objectives of grazing management projects are to prevent both underuse and overuse of specific areas of the rangeland. Approaches vary depending on the problem encountered. For example:
- If certain locations are underutilized, then a coordinated rotational grazing plan may be introduced (e.g. Mongolia).
- If other areas are badly degraded, then a period of land resting may be necessary (e.g. Morocco).
- If the basic problem is related to land tenure uncertainty, fencing may be a viable option (e.g. China), although, in pastoralist production systems, fencing inhibits mobility and often leads to conflict.
- Alternatively, if there are simply too many animals on the pasture, then no grazing management programme can be effective without a prior or concurrent destocking initiative.
Under a rotational grazing management system, livestock are continuously moved among pastures, to avoid excessive use of individual rangeland areas. Since nomadic pastoralists tend to cover long distances in their annual migrations, the effective implementation of rotational grazing requires a high degree of coordination among participatory herder organizations strong enough to enforce the rules and access rights to resources. Community compliance may be encouraged by the strong traditions that often exist of rotational grazing.
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Land resting involves setting aside a particular area in order to allow the land to regenerate vegetative cover. However, one potential problem observed in the application of land resting is that success is ultimately dependent on the level of pressure on feed resources in the area. In localities facing severe feed shortages due to climatic or population pressures, it is likely that the practice of land resting will prove very difficult to implement. Consequently, land resting as an intervention requires full community support.
Fencing does not necessarily equate to legal ownership of a piece of land. The intention is to ensure improved range management by guaranteeing the regular access of a household or group of households to a specific area. Because fencing also limits the mobility of herds, it could prevent access to vital dry season grazing reserves. Policies and projects that inhibit pastoral mobility are likely to damage livestock production systems in the long term because of the negative impact on both vegetation and livestock productivity.
In addition, fencing is likely to have a negative impact on the poor, who are particularly dependent on communal range resources. Richer herders, who can better afford to pay for desirable land and fencing material, can capture both private and public benefits. In many cases, herders who were the first to fence their land still continued to exploit the communal range resources and save their own land for times of low pasture availability. The net losers in this scenario are the poor, who are faced with increased competition for forage resources from reduced pasture. In an effort to combat this tendency, credit schemes allowing farmers and herders to purchase fencing have been offered in a number of projects, including the Northern Pasture and Livestock Development Project and the Qinghai/Hainan Prefecture Agricultural Development Project, both in China.
Careful examination of the causes of destocking is an important tool in post-disaster rehabilitation. The majority of losses are usually caused by climate fluctuations and poor animal health. In addition, stock depletion is influenced by economic, political and social factors. Destocking as a disaster relief and natural resource management approach is the act of reducing the number of animals through sale or slaughter.
IFAD’s experience indicates that induced destocking requires high investment in logistics and technical support, and is only possible in favourable climatic and ecological conditions. Therefore, in the absence of drought contingency plans (e.g. feed reserves, efficient marketing and meat processing facilities, mobility and access to other productive pastures), the herders suffer from high losses and are faced with rather difficult circumstances during the subsequent years of very slow herd reconstitution. The majority of the pastoralists, especially smallholders, have no options other than selling animals at very low prices in order to purchase food grains at very high prices. The weaker animals are normally salvaged. Once the rainfall improves, the decapitalised smallholders cannot return to herding without external support.
| Case Study: Experiences in rotational grazing and land resting in Morocco |
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| Rotational grazing |
Land resting |
| Action Implementation of rotational grazing in the 3.1 million ha project area by 34 herder cooperatives. Issues Coordination of the rotational grazing component proved problematic because:
Lesson Learned Need for full participation of the users and co-operatives. This was achieved by establishing democratically and legally sanctioned "ethnolineal" cooperatives on the basis of tribal structures and ancestral rights to rangeland use. |
Action Cooperatives created 450 000 ha reserves from degraded land through land resting. Compensation was provided to herders in the form of barley or concentrate feed at an annual equivalent of 30 kg of barley per hectare. Issues The compensation was well below the return to herders from grazing the area. Lessons Learned Although small, the compensation had a strong psychological impact on the herders. The offer of compensation was proof that the Government had acknowledged their right to the rangelands that they had been using for centuries. |
| Source: Livestock and Pasture Development Project in the Eastern Region of Morocco |
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Land improvement methods include:
- Planting
- Seeding
- Fertilizer application
- Scarification
- Reforestation
- Shelter-belt planting
- Sand dune stabilization
IFAD projects have applied land improvement technologies relatively infrequently, partly due to donor reservations regarding sustainability and cost-effectiveness.
- Sustainability depends on effective grazing management and long-term herder commitment and participation. The aim increasingly has been to encourage the clients themselves, through empowerment of associations and training, to introduce land improvement measures.
- Expensive technologies may be beyond the reach of IFAD’s target group. For example, the Qinghai/Hainan Prefecture Agricultural Development Project in China attempted to apply fertilizer to range areas in order to improve forage. In this case, the implementation of the technology produced disappointing results, and the project later abandoned the objective of applying fertilizer to open rangeland, promoting it only in some fenced areas.
Conclusions from IFAD’s Experience
Community
empowerment is crucial to effective range management. The majority
of problems reported in project documents relate to ways of improving
client participation.
- At the community level, IFAD projects continue to strengthen the capacities of participatory local organizations in order to promote the use of range management technologies. For example, in Morocco, cooperatives were built upon the historical associations of lineage and the ethos of sharing and cooperation. By encouraging customary frameworks, the project was able to build consensus and empower communities to control their own environments.
- Project initiatives must be demand-driven. The communities themselves
should identify the technologies as appropriate responses to their
pressing socio-economic needs, in harmony with the biophysical resources
of their habitats.
IFAD has also promoted range management by influencing national legislative frameworks.
- At the governmental level, IFAD projects can help to identify policies likely to have a negative effect on the attainment of environmental goals.
- Recent projects in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Mongolia have helped
to establish legal frameworks for range users in order to develop
a more equitable distribution of livestock through incremental taxation
limiting excessive herd ownership by individual families.
Rangeland projects should adopt, in the design and implementation stages, more flexible approaches that are responsive to modifications. Such approaches will enable them to respond to the changing problems, priorities, resource situations and strategies of herders living in a complex and dynamic environment.
