Pastures – The Mongolian Life Support System is Rapidly Shrinking
Not only Yondon, Ganaa, Garid and the herders in the radio drama series “Love
and Greed in the Valley of the Cashmere Goats” are worried about pasture
degradation. In a
13 min “Selfie Talk” on their Facebook page “Shrinking Mongolia”, the
Mongolian National Federation of
Pasture User Groups (MNFPUG) has recently invited
experts, practitioners, actors and herders to talk about the real cause of
pasture land degradation and what to do about it.
“Don't sit back
and think of the grazing issue as something that doesn't concern you … Every
moment that passes without your attention, our land is becoming a desert and
shrinking day by day. Please join the #Shrinking Mongolia campaign to protect
our grasslands, which are inseparable from the air we breathe, the food we eat,
our daily consumption, and a healthy life” states one herder in the
podcast-style video clip full of facts. Researchers have determined that there
are many factors that contribute to the degradation of pastures, and started
talking about legal regulations more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, no
action has been taken by the government but the number of livestock, especially
cashmere goats, has increased over the years. According to the National
Statistical Office, the livestock population in Mongolia was around 24,7
million in 1990, while it was around 71 million in 2019. At the same time, the
idealized but unsustainable image of the ’1,000 animal herder’ is still dominant business model. To make things
worse, the overgrazing of pasture
lands have been aggravated by climate change, which affects about 75% of
Mongolia’s territory, and an estimated 160,000 nomadic herder
families in 20 out of 21 Mongolian provinces.
As pastures are the source of life not only for herders
but for all of Mongolia, pastoralists in some provinces have taken up
initiatives on their own. On
the MNFPUG website “Green Mongolia”, reports can be found on Responsible
Nomads Code of Practice or Resilience-based
Rangeland Management. supported by
the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Science-led
upgrading of soum livestock focuses on the upgrading soum livestock productivity
along with increased fodder supply, and providing training and advice to
herders and livestock enterprises to adjust the number of livestock to the carrying
capacity of natural pastures. The reduction of herds is often achieved through the sale of livestock
for meat at growing age – as is also recommended in the context of the “Love
and Greed” radio drama.