中国欧盟经理人协会 EU-China Managers Association

Germany and France have called on the European Union to consider banning speculative trading in credit default swaps and set up a compulsory register of derivatives trading

As if the healthcare debate could not get any more difficult, Democrats are coping with a series of ethical controversies, writes Anna Fifield

Burma has published new election laws that in effect deny Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned opposition leader and Nobel laureate, any future formal political role in the country

The exiled Tibetan leader expressed solidarity and support for the Muslim people of western China’s Xinjiang region, which was hit by bloody riots last year, saying they had suffered ‘increased oppression’

Indonesian police have killed a most-wanted Islamist terror suspect in a shoot out capping a series of raids against a new militant network ahead of a visit next week by US President Barack Obama

British minister optimistic about restructuring conglomerate’s $26bn debts despite specific terms yet to be tabled, as creditors upbeat about avoiding a ‘haircut’ on principal

Gordon Brown has confirmed the Budget will be held on March 24 in what is expected to be his government’s last major political event before the start of the general election campaign

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process resumes, after a fashion

IT WAS a wretched beginning to what had been hailed as the hopeful resumption of peace talks, albeit indirect ones, between the Israelis and Palestinians under the aegis of an American mediator. Barely had America’s vice-president, Joe Biden, begun a visit to Israel to herald a new era of compromise and goodwill than it was announced, as if deliberately to poison the mood, that 1,600 new houses would be built for Jewish settlers in a big Jewish suburb in the Israeli-annexed eastern part of Jerusalem that Palestinians see as their fledgling state’s future capital. Palestinian politicians were united in fury. Arabs and other peacemaking outsiders viewed the action as the illest of omens. Mr Biden sharply “condemned” the action as “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”

A sheepish-looking Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, let his aides claim implausibly that he had been unaware of the building decision. The next day his minister of interior dismissed it as a “routine, technical” step, while conceding that the timing was unfortunate, and apologised. Unsurprisingly, the incident increased scepticism towards the promised new round of talks. ...

Nomadic pastoralism boosts African economies and protects livestock from drought. So why is it under threat? Ced Hesse explains.

Mobile-livestock keeping, or pastoralism, plays a critical role in the economic prosperity of Africa’s drylands. Across east and west Africa, an estimated 50 million livestock producers support their families, their communities, and a massive meat, skins and hides industry based on animals that are fed solely on natural dryland pastures. Where other land-use systems are failing in the face of global climate change, mobile-livestock keeping is generating huge national and regional economic benefits.

Today’s pastoralists download the latest market prices for cattle on their mobile phones, use cheap Chinese motorbikes to reach distant herds or lost camels and trek their livestock thousands of kilometres by foot, truck or ship to trade them nationally and internationally. Prevalent perceptions of pastoralists are that they are a minority, out of touch with the rest of the world and practicing an archaic and outmoded lifestyle. The reality is that pastoralists are fully integrated with wider global processes.

But moving is now becoming a serious problem. Grazing lands are being taken over for other uses and access to water and markets is increasingly difficult. With reduced mobility the economic profitability of livestock keeping is being critically undermined. Animals are producing less meat, less milk and are more susceptible to drought and disease. This is contributing to poverty, resource degradation and conflict.

New thinking, new policies and innovative practices for pastoralist mobility are beginning to take root in many parts of dryland Africa. The African Union and other regional institutions are recognising the huge benefits to be reaped from supporting livestock mobility. This is encouraging several governments to develop informed, progressive policies that reflect the needs of modern pastoralism.

Crosshead: Why move?

Essentially, pastoralists move to take their animals to places where they can find the best quality grazing. It is the scattering of different pastures over different places at different times that makes mobile-livestock keeping so productive in what is otherwise a difficult environment. To sedentary-livestock keepers, who rely on uniformity and economies of scale, randomly variable concentrations of nutrients on the range would be a serious constraint to productivity. But to pastoralists, who are mobile and maintain populations of selectively feeding animals, it represents a resource.

Modern ranching is often believed to be an improvement over traditional livestock management. But research in Ethiopia, Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe comparing the productivity of ranching against pastoralism all came to the same conclusion: pastoralism consistently outperforms ranching and to a quite significant degree. Whether measured in terms of meat production, generating energy (calories) or providing cash, pastoralism gives a higher return per hectare of land than ranching.

In east Africa, the intra-regional livestock trade is a major and growing industry, with an annual value in excess of US$65 million (444 million yuan). The profitability of this trade is dependent on livestock being mobile, particularly across borders. In many countries of the Sahel, livestock’s contribution to total agricultural GDP is above 40%. These figures are sizable, and yet they still fail to capture the full contribution of pastoral production systems to national economies. National accounts are based only on the value of final products such as meat and hides and leave out the many social, security and ecological benefits mobile-livestock production adds.

During periods of drought or disaster, mobility becomes absolutely essential for pastoralists, when they are forced to move in order to survive. Drought is a normal occurrence in drylands, and is a key reason why mobile-livestock keeping, rather than crops, is the production strategy of choice.

Crosshead: Obstacles

Pastoralists are increasingly constrained. Farms frequently block access to their grazing areas; national border controls hinder their trade patterns; and the areas they traditionally preserve for times of drought are now national parks or agricultural schemes. In other areas national government policies actively encourage pastoralists to settle and be “modern”. These policies are often driven by unfounded perceptions that pastoralism is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. Alternative land uses, including large-scale agriculture and national parks, are believed to bring in more national revenues and to have less environmental impact. But this is not evidence based.

Farming is one of the biggest challenges to pastoral mobility. The slow but inexorable advance of family farms, combined in places with the establishment of large-scale commercial farming, is swallowing up vast areas of grazing lands. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has called for a moratorium on the expansion of large mechanised farms in Sudan's central semi-arid regions, sounding a warning that it was a “future flashpoint” for conflict between farmers and pastoralists. Northern Sudan’s huge commercial farms have been blamed for fuelling conflict and for environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

Particularly in east Africa, the loss of land to national parks, game reserves, hunting blocks and conservation severely restricts pastoral mobility as much of this land either consists of critical dry- or wet-season grazing or cuts across seasonal migration routes. The creation of Uganda’s Kidepo Valley National Park in the 1960s, on the border with Sudan and Kenya, severely restricts the movement of the Toposa from southern Sudan to dry-season grazing in Kaabong district, northern Uganda. Within Kaabong District, Dodoth pastoralists have also lost critical wet-season grazing in the north-eastern Timu forest when it was declared a forest reserve in 2000, according to research by Michael Godwin Wantsusi of the Karamoja Agro-Pastoral Development Programme. Yet a lot of evidence suggests that pastoralism is far more compatible with wildlife than other forms of land use, particularly crop farming.

Both non-pastoralists and pastoralists are enclosing the rangelands. From the Borana in southern Ethiopia, to the Fulani in Niger and Burkina Faso and Somali groups in Somaliland, a territory in the Horn of Africa, pastoral families are fencing grazing land. Poverty, due to shrinking herd sizes, is driving thousands of pastoral families throughout east and west Africa to fence off the rangelands to practice rain-fed agriculture and, where water is available, dry-season gardening. Others are enclosing land from a fear of losing out as more and more land is taken or are seeking to protect the rangeland from farming or the cutting of trees for charcoal.

It is not known how much former pastoralist-grazing land has been lost overall but much of it is in the form of wheat farms, sugar farms, irrigated tobacco, cotton and sorghum schemes, flower and vegetable farms, game and cattle ranches, national parks and forest reserves. And it is not just the sheer extent of the lost land that is so important; it is the nature of that lost land that is critical. Much of the alienation concerns strategic areas such as wetlands or riverine forests. Here, because of higher and more stable moisture, pastures of higher nutritional content can be found, particularly in the dry season when the surrounding range is dry and poor.

These areas represent “islands” of high-quality pasture where livestock feed until the arrival of new, fresh grass with the next rainy season. The loss of these areas undermines the profitability and resilience of the whole pastoral system. Little research has been carried out to calculate the economic and environmental impacts the loss of these areas has had on national economies, and whether the expected benefits from the new land-use systems are greater than the benefits lost as a result of displacing pastoralism.

Conflicts are also a major block to mobility, altering grazing patterns, reducing productivity and increasing environmental degradation. The enduring conflicts in Chad and Sudan mean pastoralists move together in larger groups for security but have subsequently found it more difficult to access high quality pasture and water. Sudan’s conflict with Egypt also reduced access to key grazing areas for Beja pastoralists in Red Sea state, north-west Sudan. Where grazing areas cannot be accessed, the under-utilisation of pasture leads to bush encroachment. Where pastoralists become squeezed into smaller grazing areas, competition for a dwindling resource increases and conflict becomes inevitable and self-perpetuating.

Across the drylands inappropriate policies are blocking livestock mobility. Enduring perceptions of pastoralism as an outdated, economically inefficient and environmentally destructive land-use system continue to drive rangeland and livestock policy in much of Africa. Yet, none of these perceptions are evidence-based, informed by past failure or reflect current scientific knowledge of the dynamics in dryland environments and livelihood systems. Nor are they designed with the participation of pastoral communities. These persistent beliefs must be left behind in the twentieth century.


Ced Hesse is principal researcher in the climate-change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Co-authors of this piece were Saverio Kratli, Izzy Birch and Magda Nassef.

An earlier version of this article was published in book form by the IIED as “Modern and mobile: The future of livestock production in Africa’s drylands”. It is summarised and used here with permission.

NEXT: recognising global advantages

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Art dealers are slow to catch on to the value of branding

VIPs criss-crossed Manhattan last week to attend museum shows, conference panels, champagne brunches, curator tours and the stands of nearly 500 galleries exhibiting in 11 fairs. The week was vibrant but confusing due to poor co-operation between event organisers and some amateur branding.

The first problem was an illogical association of name and place. Every March the Armory Show sets up shop in New York. This year, the Art Dealers' Association of America (ADAA) decided to hold its smaller but more prestigious fair in the same week. While the ADAA's exhibition took place in the historic Armory building on Park Avenue, the Armory Show was held in two piers on the Hudson River. “It must drive them as crazy as it drives us,” admitted Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, the Armory Show's communications director. ...

Turkey’s two-year saga of on-off negotiations with the International Monetary Fund ended as prime minister says country can “stand on its own feet”

Lady Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, hit back at her critics, by blaming rivalry among the EU’s institutions for slow progress in establishing the bloc’s new diplomatic service

Iran’s president acknowledges for the first time that Afghan and Pakistani intelligence helped his government to hunt down the leader of an ethnic opposition movement

China reported 45.7 per cent growth in exports for February from a year earlier, providing fresh evidence of a robust recovery in an economy poised to overtake Japan in size

Living costs in big cities

PARIS is the most expensive city to live in according to the latest survey from Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company to The Economist. The survey assesses the cost of living by comparing housing, food, clothing, transport and utility bills and the like in 132 cities around the world. Tokyo comes second, up from sixth place a year ago. The fall in Russia's currency against the dollar has made Moscow cheaper than it once was.

...

Germany and France are stepping up pressure for urgent EU action to tighten regulation in sovereign debt markets – in particular of credit default swaps – in the wake of the Greek crisis

Suspected Islamist militants have attacked the office of a US-based Christian aid agency in Pakistan with a bomb and gunfire, killing 5 people, police say

AIG reluctantly hands its crown as America’s global life insurer to MetLife

ANOTHER week, another opportunity for AIG’s rivals to expand at the American insurer’s expense. Days after sealing a $35.5 billion deal for its Asian life-insurance operations with Britain’s Prudential, the firm, which is being dismembered to recoup bail-out costs, agreed on March 8th to sell another crown jewel, Alico. The acquisition propels New York-based MetLife, which is paying $15.5 billion, into the industry’s global elite. Though it is the biggest life insurer in America, where its Snoopy logo is ubiquitous, it has been tentative abroad. Alico will give it a presence in 64 countries, up from 17 now, taking its non-American revenue from 15% of the total to 40%.

The biggest leap will be in Japan, the world’s second-largest life market, in which Alico is a top-tier competitor. But MetLife’s boss, Robert Henrikson (who took over in 2006 from Robert Benmosche, now AIG’s chief executive), also has his eye on the faster-growing markets in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America that make up almost a quarter of Alico’s business. Another attraction is its distribution network: 60,000 agents, brokers and other local middlemen. ...

Israel reveals plans to build a further 1,600 housing units in a Jewish settlement in occupied East Jerusalem – dealing a blow to the US-led effort to restart peace talks

Senators in the banking committee have agreed in principle to a partially pre-funded ‘resolution authority’ to wind down a failing bank holding company, favouring a structure that would levy a $50bn charge on the industry