Nomads

Pastoral Nomads

Herding in many parts of the world requires moving animals to the best pastures, particularly if herds are large. Pastures in dry and semiarid lands may be inaccessible outside the rainy season for want of water, and pastures in temperate mountains and cold regions may be closed in winter. Good herd and pasture management will require moving stock according to the availability of pasture. Nomadic pastoralism is practiced in the drier regions of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, as well as mountainous regions of South America and Europe. There are no clear estimates of nomadic pastoralists' numbers, but global populations could be about30–50 million.

It is useful to distinguish between nomadic pastoralists, who can move to a wide variety of places within a given range according to the availability of pasture, and transhumant pastoralists, who move between fixed places each season. This is particularly appropriate in mountainous regions, or in less arid rangelands where precipitation is more predictable. However, providing a robust categorization of the pattern of movements is not straightforward. Within one group in one area, the type of stock moved, the herding arrangements employed, and the reciprocal access arrangements to pasture can be enormously diverse.

Pastoral nomads are generally marked by their specialized production systems, which focus principally on livestock products that are sold or exchanged for agricultural crops and other goods. Their trade and[Page 1746]pasturing arrangements can rely upon longstanding, but individually negotiated, exchanges. In West Africa, for example, the southerly migration of the pastoral Fulani is facilitated by arrangements with local farmers to graze their cattle on the crop residues in fields.

Pastoral nomads have faced increasing pressure on their pastures, in particular because their seasonal use is rarely well recognized in formal law. In East Africa, there is a long history of pastoralists being evicted from their lands in the face of development or conservation projects. Land titling now threatens further subdivision and possible restrictions on movement. In Mongolia, however, the collapse of collectivized agriculture has seen the revival of nomadic practices.

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