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

Grassland perspectives 463
Chapter 12
Grassland perspectives
INTRODUCTION
Most high quality grassland is now converted to crops , mixed farming or
artificial pastures, so extensive grazing is a way of making economic use of
grassland that is not suited to more intensive agricultural enterprises. It follows
that investment in such grasslands should be kept to the minimum necessary
for their profitable and sustainable exploitation by livestock, whether they be
managed commercially or traditionally.
GRASSLAND SYSTEMS
The main chapters have reviewed a wide and representative variety of grasslands
in a range of climates, from cold continental to the Equator. Five – eastern
Africa , southern Africa, Mongolia , the Tibetan Steppe and the Russian Steppe –
are ancient grazing lands . The remaining four have been settled and stocked
in relatively recent times: Patagonia , the Campos , central North America and
Australia . Some are used by traditional, partly subsistence systems ; eastern
Africa and part of southern Africa are managed traditionally; and Mongolia
has reverted to subsistence herding . Patagonia, the Campos, the Great Plains
and Australia are managed commercially. Three areas, Mongolia, the Tibetan
Plateau and Russia , have undergone collectivization and decollectivization
during the past century. Most of the systems described have some interaction
with crop production and fodder production or agropastoralism, for, at
farm or regional level, grazing lands and crop production are often mutually
dependent, but Mongolia, Tibet Autonomous Region, China and, to a lesser
degree, Patagonia are purely pastoral .
Of the systems described briefly in Chapter 11, West Africa and Madagascar
are tropical , traditional systems; North Africa , the Syrian Arab Republic and
Jordan are subtropical semi -arid areas where transhumant herding had been
traditional but where breakdown of traditional authority and grazing systems ,
aggravated by sedentarization, cheap cereals and motor transport, has led to very
severe pasture degradation . The South American systems – the Gran Chaco , the
Pampas and the Llanos – are commercial systems of relatively recent settlement.
Central Asia and China (at least its northern and western grazing lands ), which
are contiguous, were areas of transhumant herding, but systems have been disturbed,
first by collectivization and then by decollectivization, which has followed
very different paths in the two areas. The Hindu Kush-Himalaya zone,
which has both sedentary and transhumant systems on the same grasslands, is
under severe stress due to population increase. Turkey was a pastoral country,
but much of the grasslands have been developed for increasingly commercial