Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands: From Clans to Workers to Ranchers
| Autor: | C. Kerven, Roy Behnke, Sally Robinson |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences Pastoralism Wildlife Nomadic pastoralism lcsh:TX341-641 Kazakh Horticulture Management Monitoring Policy and Law 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences Soviet Union pastoral mobility Clan kinship 0105 earth and related environmental sciences Global and Planetary Change Ecology lcsh:TP368-456 business.industry Agroforestry environmental impacts Animal husbandry language.human_language Kazakhstan lcsh:Food processing and manufacture Geography language Livestock history Rangeland business Agronomy and Crop Science lcsh:Nutrition. Foods and food supply Food Science |
| Zdroj: | Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Vol 4 (2021) |
| DOI: | 10.3389/fsufs.2020.590401/full |
| Popis: | The Eurasian rangelands contain the world’s largest contiguous pasture area, grazed for millennia by mobile pastoralists’ livestock. This paper reviews evidence from one Eurasian country, Kazakhstan, of how nomadic pastoralism developed from some 5,000 years ago to the present. We consider a timespan from pre-industrial, socialist and capitalist periods, during which pastoral social formations shifted from clans, to state employees to private farm families and ranchers. The aim is to understand how events over the last hundred years have led to sequential dissolution and re-formation of the social units necessary to manage livestock across the geographical scale of spatially heterogenous and seasonally variable ecosystems. It is argued that the social scale of extensive livestock management must be tailored to the geographical scale of the biotic and abiotic conditions. The paper briefly appraises archaeological data indicating the long duration of mobile pastoralism in the Kazakh rangelands. The middle sections then provide an overview of how events from the late 17th C onwards unravelled the relationships between Kazakh nomads’ socio-economic units of livestock management and the rangeland environment. At present, mobile animal husbandry is not feasible for the majority of Kazakh livestock owners, who operate solely within small family units without state support. These reformulated post-Soviet livestock grazing patterns are still undergoing rapid change, influencing the balance between vegetation communities, wildlife and carbon, as ecological publications show. In conclusion, there is trend that by concentrating capital and landed resources onto a minority of large-scale pastoralists, a few can re-extensify through mobility in combination with selective intensification, such as more reliance on cultivated feed. Unfortunately, current state and international efforts are leaving out the majority of small-scale livestock owners and their livestock who are unable to adopt either practice at sufficient scale, leading to more environmental damage and social inequity in the future. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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