From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

4 RISK AND VULNERABILITY AFRICA’S PASTORALISTSPastoralism in the arid and semi-arid regions of Africa evolved inresponse to long-term climate change. When the Sahara entered aperiod of prolonged desiccation some 7,000 years ago, mobile livestockherding – pastoralism – enabled people to adapt to an increasinglyarid and unpredictable environment. 115 ‘Shocks’ such as drought arenot rare events but part of the natural order, and the reason whypastoral communities live the way that they do.Pastoralists have highly effective coping strategies to make themresilient to such risks. They integrate livestock husbandry with otheractivities such as farming and the extraction of minerals, dry-landtimber, and forest products such as honey and gum. They co-existwith the wild animals so vital to tourism, and provide important‘environmental services’ such as protecting dry-land forests and watercatchments and maintaining wildlife dispersal zones outside ofnational parks. 116 In the Shinyanga region of Tanzania, Sukumaagro-pastoralists who own more than two million cattle in the regionhave, with support, reforested an estimated 250,000 hectares of oncedegraded land. 117Mobility is at the core of pastoral life, and is crucial to managingrisk in harsh and unpredictable environments. By moving their cattle,goats, and sheep and negotiating the sharing and maintenance ofscarce pasture and water, communities survive off large areas of rangelandthat lack permanent water sources. However, while pastoralists haveshown their durability, they remain socially and politically marginalisedand have experienced increasing disruption, vulnerability, andsuffering in recent years. Despite the increasing frequency of drought,the gravity of the current situation for pastoralist communities stemsmore from years of neglect and misunderstanding by central governmentsthan from the unpredictability of rainfall.Government action in pastoral areas has often been hostile,overtly orotherwise, guided by a paradigm of rangeland management importedfrom the very different environmental conditions of North America.Officials and ‘experts’ believed that pastoralism was irrational andoutdated, that land should be individually, not communally owned,that pastoralists should be settled, and that ‘development’ would follow.They saw pastoralism as environmentally damaging, backward, andunproductive.269