This activity focuses on the ‘livestock assets of pastoralists’ as if they are disconnected from pastoral systems.

It consists of:

• coordinating modern and customary weather forecasting practices and early warning systems;
• promoting private sector and government collaboration (public–private partnerships, or PPP) to develop infrastructure that ensures timely access to pastoral products by the market;
• implementing climate-change adaptation strategies, including changing the behavior of communities, based on model practices for reducing vulnerability to drought;
• developing index-based animal insurance services.

COMMENTARY

1. Develop pastoralists’ livestock assets? The description of this activity does not provide an explanation of what constitutes ‘livestock assets’ in pastoral systems, suggesting that the meaning is taken as self-evident. When considered in relation to the natural environment, as in this activity, the notion of ‘livestock assets’ in pastoral systems needs to include much more than simply numbers and the commercial value of livestock. It needs to include functional characteristics at the level of both individual animals and the herd, functional to securing good performance under pastoral ecological and management conditions — for example, traits and skills, including complex learned behaviors inheritable by non-genetic means, herd organization and composition, and a capacity for variability in the face of variable environmental conditions and inputs.[1]
2. Markets that reduce risk? One of the main actions under this implementation activity, allegedly taken in order to reduce pastoralists’ vulnerability to disasters, is ‘private and government collaboration (PPP) that ensures timely market access to pastoral products and creates permanent and seasonal markets that reduce risk’. An explanation of how the market is going to reduce the risk of disaster, or reduce pastoralists’ vulnerability to it, is not offered. On the other hand, how markets have exacerbated famines in the past – by syphoning food away from disaster-stricken areas with low purchasing power to areas with higher purchasing power – is a well-studied phenomenon.[2]
3. Strengthening pastoralists’ capability to manage disasters, but overlooking mobility? Strengthening pastoralists’ capability to manage disaster, and ‘strengthening customary practices of drought resistance mechanisms [sic] [and] strengthening customary climate disaster adaptation capabilities of pastoralists’ are part of this implementation activity. The core of such practices and capabilities in pastoral systems is mobility. Elsewhere, the policy acknowledges the link between pastoral mobility and resilience (p.15). It seems therefore a major oversight that this implementation activity makes no mention of pastoral mobility.

[1] S. Krätli and F. Provenza, ‘Crossbreeding or Not Crossbreeding? That Is Not the Question’ (contribution to the Domestic Animal Diversity forum of FAO DAD-Net, January 12, 2021); B.A. Kaufmann, C.G.  Hülsebusch, and S. Krätli, ‘Pastoral Livestock Systems’, in P. Ferranti, E.M. Berry, and J.R. Anderson (eds.), Encyclopedia of Food Security and Sustainability, Vol. 3 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2018).

[2] A. Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001).

1.2 Improving pastoral areas water resources development and management and increasing benefits of pastoralists (p.38) »