Grasslands of the World.pdf - Disasters and Conflicts - UNEP

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Figure 10.1
Extent of grasslands in the Russian Federation.
Grasslands of the world
the empires of Rome and even nearby Byzantium made very few inroads into
what would develop, at the start of this millennium, into the Russian heartland.
The only, yet major, exceptions were invasions by the Huns in the fourth and
by the Mongols in the thirteenth century, but these emerged from the same
long stretch of steppe, near its far eastern fringe .
This vast Eurasian plain – with taiga in the north, forest in the middle
and the steppe as its southern flank – stretches over 10 000 km from west
to (south)east, from the Baltic Sea and crosses the Dnepr, Don and Volga
rivers, deep into Siberia across the Urals, which convention has designated
as the border between Europe and Asia (Figure 10.1). Most of the country’s
farm land is in the so-called “fertile triangle”, with its base along the western
border from the Baltic to the Black Sea and that tapers eastward to the
southern Urals, where it narrows to a strip about 400 km wide extending
across the southwestern fringes of Siberia.
This chapter discusses the steppe; an overall description of Russian pastures
and ruminant production systems is given in the Country Pasture Profile
for the Russian Federation (Blagoveshchenskii et al., 2002), to be found on
the FAO Grassland Web site .
THE STEPPE IN PERSPECTIVE
Truly virgin steppe has become a rarity, especially west of the Urals. The
last major onslaught took place in the 1950s, when huge campaigns to raise
agricultural production led to 43 million hectares of steppe being sacrificed to
the plough, seemingly for ever (Maslov, 1999). It virtually meant the end of the
virgin steppe in the Volga region, in Kazakhstan and western Siberia. The land
put to the plough rivalled in size the whole of Canada’s agricultural area.
As part of the collateral damage, interest in and knowledge of the steppe as
a natural resource became rare in the eyes of the authorities, and faded as the