Article: Land Use, the Environment and Development in Post-socialist Mongolia Flashcards
What the article is about?
It describes the economic policies that have transformed the pastoral sector in post-socialist Mongolia, and their impact on pastoral land use.
The policies reflect the influence of development economists from the Asian Development Bank advising the Mongolian government, and their conviction that exclusive private rights to land are a necessary precondition of an efficient rural market economy.
These assumptions stand in marked contrast to indigenous Mongolian conceptions of rights over land, and the policy debate reflects the contested nature of knowledge of the Mongolian environment.
They may actually be exacerbating problems of pasture degradation, instead of preventing damage to the resource base — a misunderstanding of the nature of Mongolian pastoralism and the conditions that have made it viable in the past. International development agencies give little appreciation for Mongolian traditions in the actual institutions that successfully conducted pastoralism until recently, the concrete embodiment of Mongolian pastoral knowledge.
Environmentalist agendas promote western conservationist ideology, establishing and expanding protected areas to harbour wildlife and biodiversity. Mongolian practices tend to be cast as “traditions” to be utilized for the greater goal of conservation as conceived of in western terms, rather than seen as part of wider social and political institutions of land use.
Collapse of Soviet-backed state socialism, the Mongolian state carried out political reforms….
early 1990s:
- A multi-party electoral system, while the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), the old “communist” ruling party, was confirmed in office, the state embraced a broadly liberal, market-oriented agenda.
- Radical policies were devised aiming to create a market economy.
- The economic advice the government received, with other Soviet-block countries, resembled the stabilization and structural reform packages that the IMF and the WB recommended for poor countries in the 1970s and 1980s: Including the privatization of public assets, price liberalization, cutting state subsidies and expenditure, currency convertibility, and the rapid introduction of markets.
- These policy recommendations were based on the notion that reform must “emancipate” the economy from the political structure, and allow it to assume its latent “natural” form, composed of private property and the market.
- In the state socialist period, rural collectives (negdel) had managed pastoralism and the use of grazing land. These were dissolved, and their livestock, vehicles and other assets divided between the members. This dramatically altered the nature of the pastoral sector, breaking up the concentrated herd ownership, large-scale movement systems and specialist support operations the collectives had organized. It also trebled the number of workers directly reliant on pastoralism for their livelihood from 1989 less than 18% (of the working popularion) to 1998, 50%. Livestock numbers have risen since decollectivization as pastoralists rely upon their herds for their subsistence and build herds to try and improve their food security.
- From 1990 to 1998 the national herd increased as the efficiency of pastoralism has declined.
- By 1998 survival rates of offspring had fallen and livestock totals were only able to rise because levels of marketing and consumption had declined.
- Exports of livestock and livestock produce have collapsed, and incomes, public services and living standards have declined dramatically.
- Many pastoralists stress the relative wealth, security and convenience that the collective period offered in comparison with the shortages and uncertainty of the “age of the market”.
- This was one of the reasons for the landslide electoral victory of the “communist” MPRP in 2000 election.
- The reform process has been shaped by the notion, central to the economic advice that Mongolia received, that an efficient market economy required the private ownership of economic assets. This logic was also applied to land and the government was strongly advised to introduce legislation to allow the private ownership of land so as to bring Mongolia into line with international economic orthodoxy.
- However, the legislation remains deeply controversial in Mongolia, with long history of public access to land and where the agricultural sector is dominated by mobile pastoralism. Laws and measures have been introduced to allow the personal allocation of land to pastoral and agricultural households. Patterns of pastoral land use have been changing as a result of reform, and the impact these changes are having on the grassland environment has become an important issue in the policy debate. In this climate Mongolia may be able to learn from the experience of neighbouring regions with very similar steppe environments. In Inner Mongolia, China, and Buryatia, Russia, pastoral Mongolian populations have had their systems of land use transformed by different respective national policies. Both these regions now appear to be facing very serious problems of pastoral degradation, and the experiences of these neighbours may offer some insights into the difficulties that may result from current trends. There seems good reason to think that the highly mobile systems that Mongolia retained are not as damaging for grassland as more static methods adopted in Inner Mongolia and Buryatia. More pressing short-term problems with the nature of the pastoral sector created by a decade of reforms, which now faces unprecedented difficulties and is beginning to fail to provide basic food security for a growing number of households. The dissolution of the collective farms made former collective and state workers directly dependent on smallholdings of livestock. In the harsh winter and spring of 1999–2000 Mongolia lost around 10% of its national herd. Losses in some regions were much higher and half the livestock in some districts died. Some lost all their livestock and many more have been pushed below the poverty line. The seriousness of these losses and the underlying problem of barely viable herding households resulted from the atomized and demechanized pastoral sector to have emerged from a decade of reforms.
Privatization, Pastoralism and Land
Between 1950s and 1990s virtually all Mongolian pastoralists worked for collectives or state farms. These were large organizations, managing pastoralism in an entire local government district (sum). The collectives generally included something in the order of a thousand households, about half of which typically worked in a central settlement, and the rest being mobile pastoralists living in encampments throughout the district. These pastoral households were organized into production brigades and sections, assigned livestock to herd, and were paid a regular income. They would move with their livestock in an annual cycle to different seasonal pastures, and could make additional moves if necessary. The collectives owned the bulk of the livestock of the district but herding households were allowed 50 or sometimes 75 livestock of their own to supply domestic needs.
The territory of the sum contained a number of different areas of pasture used in winter, spring, summer and autumn. Within these areas the brigades and sections had allocated seasonal pastures. Families “owned” no land as such but usually made use of a recognized area of pasture within the areas allocated to their group, and of these the use of winter pastures were most exclusive and associated with given households. Winter and spring are the most difficult times of the year for livestock, when climatic conditions are harshest and available forage is at its lowest. Winter campsites were well-established sites used each year by given households, usually with animal shelters and stockpiles of dried dung for heating. Someone grazing their animals near another’s winter site had to leave sufficient land untouched for the household(s) assigned to it to feed their animals over the winter months. The other seasonal pastures were not generally firmly divided between households, and there were few restrictions on exactly where families could camp within the seasonal pastures allocated to their group.
The negdels and their subsections were dissolved when Mongolia privatized state and collective enterprises in 1991–93. This was done by issuing share coupons, which could be used by employees to claim a share of the enterprise as their private property. Livestock, machinery and other agricultural resources were distributed between the members, about half of whom were typically not pastoralists but other specialist support staff. The land, however, remained a public resource used by local pastoralists, and was, theoretically, regulated by local government.
This was seen as anomalous by economists of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and other advisors to the Mongolian government. The registration and titling of land are thought to be necessary preconditions for an effective market in land, and such a market is assumed to be the best way of realizing the productive potential of land. In this discourse private agricultural and pastoral producers are bound to maximize the returns on their investments and land is cast as another economic asset that producers must own in order to protect and invest in it. The ADB strongly advocated a new Land Law which would allow the private ownership of land. The idea that private ownership was necessary to protect land from degradation is an old theme in the debate over public land. The notion that common land was liable to be over-exploited and degraded X private ownership of land, or something formally like it. By combining interest in both land and livestock an owner would have an interest in maintaining the potential of the land and preventing overgrazing. In the 1970s this reasoning was applied to pastoral use of common land.
The approach was widely rejected by pastoral specialists who found that the model was a poor guide to understanding the public-access grazing systems found in most existing pastoral societies, in which land use was generally limited by a variety of social and environmental constraints. Recent ecological research has even questioned the underlying assumption that pasture degradation is bound to take place when the “carrying capacity” of pastureland is exceeded. In areas with relatively constant amounts of annual precipitation and vegetation grazing systems can be treated as “equilibrial” systems in which too many animals will disrupt this balance between livestock and land and degrade the resource base. However, in areas with very low and variable rainfall, the amount of vegetation available in a given place varies so much from year to year that the yields cannot meaningfully be treated as variations around an equilibrial norm. This “disequilibrial” model of grazing systems suggests that it may be meaningless to try and work out an optimal carrying capacity for livestock per unit of pastureland. The implication was that mobility and opportunism can be the best response to this sort of ecological system, local variation being so significant that it makes sense for pastoralists to be able to move their livestock to areas where conditions are good. Study of rainfall patterns suggests that a third or more of Mongolia has the sort of inter-annual variability of precipitation that would make it “disequilibrial”. Research of this sort provides sound ecological reasons for the success of time-tested pastoral systems of high-mobility land use.
Mongolian attitudes towards land reflect the long history of flexible access to large areas of grazing land, regulated by local political authorities. The prospect of outright private ownership of land is widely rejected by pastoralists and much of the Mongolian public in general. However, many herders have also become increasingly concerned with protecting their use-rights to pastures, since the tight control of land use that local officials used to exercise in the past has decayed since decollectivization; but the notion that land could be bought-up and owned outright by individuals, particularly outsiders, remains deeply unpopular. After 3 years of often heated debate, the supporters of land privatization, including the ADB, were forced to compromise. In order to get the bill through the parliament in 1994, the more contentious clauses concerning outright private ownership were dropped from the law; but another piece of legislation, the Land Payments Law, was developed, by which “possession” of campsites and pastures would be leased to individuals by the state.
This side-stepped the issue of outright ownership, but still allowed for exclusive private rights to land. “Certificates of possession” could be issued to individuals and companies, giving them long-term exclusive access to land. In 1998 the implementation of these provisions began, but in May 1999 the bill came under attack when it was reviewed in a meeting of the parliamentary standing com- mittee on environment and rural development. MPs expressed fears that the best pasture land would be acquired by rich landowners to the detriment of poorer herders. Others accused the government of pursuing the legislation at the bidding of the ADB in return for large loans. The serving Prime Minister, J. Narantsatsralt, found it necessary to deny publicly the charge of ADB influence. “The ADB loan and the development, approval and implementation of the law are two separate things”.
To date, however, Mongolian local administrations have been slow to allocate grazing land. Most sum appear to have only issued certificates for campsites, esp. winter-. These are point locations rather than swathes of land, but they entail an implicit right to pasture of several kilometres’ radius around the site. In a sense, so far the certification simply legitimizes existing use-rights to the seasonal pastures that households had been allocated in the past. The law was designed, however, to go much further than this, and implementation has only just begun.
Pastoralism in Historical Perspective
At first glance it may appear that the dissolution of collectives would be bound to release pastoralists from the imposed constraints of a state structure, permit wider and more flexible movement, and return pastoralism to its “traditional” form. In fact it has largely had the opposite effects.
From the 16th Century until the 20th century, Mongolia was divided into administrative districts called “banners” ruled by hereditary lords or, in some cases, Buddhist monasteries. The common subjects were tied to these politico-territorial units and were required to render service to local authorities. Pastoral families generally moved to different seasonal pastures with their livestock in an annual cycle, and land use was regulated by banner officials. The Buddhist church, nobility, imperial administration and some very rich commoners owned large numbers of livestock which were herded for them by subjects and servants who generally received a share of the animal produce in return. Overall patterns of land use were managed by the noble or ecclesiastical district authorities. The operations organized by the large herd-owners could be highly sophisticated and involved specialist herders moving large, single-species herds to selected pastures so as to make best use of the local ecological resources at given times of the year.
When the pro-Soviet MPRP came to power their early attempts at collectivization in the late 1920s and early 1930s were so unpopular they had to be abandoned. However, in the 1940s and 1950s collectivization succeeded. In the pastoral sector that emerged collective farms and state farms each managed pastoral or agricultural activity in a rural district. The sum generally consisted of a central settlement of a few hundred households and a large area of grassland used as pasture by the specialist pastoral households, most of them living in mobile felt yurts herding the collective or state farm livestock and a smaller number of their personal animals. Although the new sum districts were generally smaller than the earlier banners, and in some regions there was some reduction in the distance of seasonal moves, in general the pastoralists remained highly mobile. They moved to seasonal pastures throughout the year and when necessary made use of the pastoral technique of otor, by which livestock are repeatedly moved over distant and lesser-used pastures at times of fodder shortage as a method of intensively feeding them. The collectives also maintained machinery for transportation and hay-cutting services that were used to support pastoralism. Herding households were generally moved on the longest legs of the annual migration by collective trucks, and hay was delivered to help feed livestock during the difficult months of winter and early spring. This co-ordination and support of pastoralism was generally viewed as the positive aspect of the old system by herders, and has been sorely missed since the advent of the “age of the market”.
Pastoralism as a Socio-technical System
“socio-technical system” = “distinctive technological activity that stems from the linkage of techniques and material culture to the social co-ordination of labour”.
technical practices as part of wider social linkages x unilineal models of development whereby technology tends to inevitably evolve to successively higher stages.
By seeing technology as inextricably bound-up with social forms, this approach makes it easier to see why efficient productive techniques may be lost as a result of political and social change.
Sri Lankan agriculture in the colonial era: the existing village system of water supply tanks was destroyed by the British administration’s obsession with the eradication of multiple claims to land, which it thought discouraged investment in land and agriculture. The titling of land abrogated the ability of local leaders to adjust landholdings to changing water supplies and undermined the basis for the coordination of labour to maintain canals and dams. The result was the decay and collapse of a sophisticated system of irrigated agriculture.
Social and technical forms were also shown to be inextricably linked in Lansing’s study of Balinese irrigation systems, which revealed the ways in which water temples were central to the successful co-ordination of irrigation at a regional level.
As a heuristic device the socio-technical systems approach can also be applied to Inner Asian pastoralism. Just as an irrigation scheme requires the integration of complex social and material systems, so mobile pastoral techniques are part of larger socio-political systems. A series of specific techniques and instruments had been developed by pastoralists working in the Inner Asian environment. These included a form of highly portable housing, the ger or yurt, with its lightweight stove, techniques such as seasonal moves and otor foraging forays, a wide repertoire of specialist skills, and a host of other devices such as the uurga pole-lasoo and carefully shaped emeel saddle.
The primary site of these skills, tools and techniques was generally the pastoral household, but a second and frequently more important context was the larger pastoral activities that the household was engaged in. In a complex and stratified society such as Mongolia, pastoralism has long had to fulfil two types of requirements. Firstly, to provide produce for pastoral households themselves—the “domestic subsistence” role; secondly, to provide good levels of return in terms of produce from the herds belonging to pastoral e ́lites—the “yield-focused” role.
These two roles overlapped and supported each other, to some extent.
Domestic subsistence activities were oriented towards satisfying household requirements, and were characterized by each pastoral family owning and herding relatively small numbers of several species of domestic livestock. The various species provided different necessities for the pastoralist; sheep and goats for meat and winter clothing, cattle for milk, horses for riding and camels for transportation. As these were the personal livestock of the family, not herded for others under contractual obligation, the produce went directly to the working household. The yield-focused activities were based on the ownership of large numbers of animals by a single agency: in the state socialist period the negdel collective or state farm; in the pre-revolutionary period a noble family, ecclesiastical institution, local government office, or rich commoner. In each case it made use of economies of scale in that large herds could be herded with little more labour than small ones.
This mode was characterized by the owner having their livestock herded by other pastoral households, and often involved the specialized care of large single-species herds. The herding households had contractual obligations to supply a certain quota of produce and kept the surplus for themselves. In the pre-collective period this was called to “place herds”.
By the late 19th Century most of the Mongolian e ́lite was in debt to Chinese merchant firms.
In the pre-revolutionary period much of the produce of the districts ruled by the princes and senior lamas was expended on servicing this debt. The orientation of such herd-owners was towards the Chinese market, mediated by their debts to merchants, and rich herd-owners had every reason to extract the maximum surplus from the livestock economy.
When this neo-feudal social order was abolished in the 1920s some of the livestock was redistributed among herding households. This transferred livestock from the yield-focused sphere of the large owners to the domestic subsistence role, and the surplus animals that had been extracted by the old e ́lite could be accumulated by pastoralists. Total numbers of livestock increased more than doubled between 1918 and 1940.
Subsistence pastoralists and wealthy yield-focused herd-owners did not necessarily have conflicting interests. The existence of specialist herding seems to have allowed smaller producers to place some of their stock with these larger herds, so benefiting from economies of scale. Furthermore, the feudal district authorities also organized other specialist activities of benefit to the whole community, such as the cultivation of wheat. This agriculture was often an assigned feudal duty for specialist households. The introduction of the negdel collectives again concentrated the ownership of livestock, this time to an unprecedented degree. The collective owned all the livestock of a district except for a relatively small number that were permitted each household as their personal animals. It also controlled the movement of the various pastoral encampments, and specialist households would be assigned herds of particular species and sometimes a given age group. With the introduction of the collectives it was as if the yield-focused specialist mode had expanded to include all of the pastoralists and most of the livestock. The small remaining sector dominated by domestic production was represented by the small numbers of private animals which herders were allowed to keep.
Both neo-feudal and collective systems managed to procure and export large amounts of livestock. Exports of meat and livestock fell rapidly with the dissolution of the collectives—and has hardly improved since then.
In some respects the conceptual shift from neo-feudal to collective rights to land was not very radical. In both feudal and collective periods there were centralized, commandist politico-economic units that regulated residence and the use of pasture. Normal citizens, in both periods, had legal duties to their leaders. In the feudal period this consisted of providing livestock and produce, and might include acting as servants, or performing military service.
In the collectives the duty of members was to fulfil the production targets set by the farm (as well as performing military service). It is significant that the everyday term used for collective or state animals was “alban mal” (“official” or “duty” animals) and the root of this term is “alba”—the feudal obligation owed by pre-revolutionary subjects to their lord.
The term for a common citizen or serf was “albat”—meaning ‘one with duty’. When the collectives were introduced to Mongolia they were widely perceived by local pastoralists as being a new form of local government, and their combination of political and economic functions was a familiar organizational form. The dissolution of the collectives, then, while undoubtedly removing a coercive bureaucratic structure, also collapsed the large-scale operations along with the institutional frames that sustained them, and simply expanded the domestic subsistence sector, which has a significantly different orientation and socio-technical characteristics. Rather than specialist, large-scale, single-species herding oriented to high off-take, the subsistence form entails herding different species to satisfy domestic requirements, and tends to be oriented towards long-term food security so that households aim to increase herd sizes at the expense of marketing and consumption.
The New Pastoral Sector and Environmental Variation
Decollectivization made many of the workers in the sum centres unemployed, and provided many of them with some livestock instead.24 This is affecting the patterns of pastoral land use as many of these “new herders” still have dwellings in the settlement at the sum centre and tend to be much less mobile than the established herding households who were part of specialized herding brigades in the collective. One common coping strategy is for such households to have some or all of their livestock herded by relatives or friends among the pastoral families in more distant pastures for part or all of the year. However, the dissolution of the collective motor pools and a dramatic increase in fuel costs have also made seasonal movement much more difficult for established pastoral families, who have increasingly had to rely on animal transport. The organization of otor movement, and the regulation of access to pasture, which had been overseen by collective and state farm officials, declined. Many herding families began to move less as a result of privatization, not only because of the difficulty of transportation but also, in some cases, for fear that their best pastures might be used by others if they vacated them.
A small stratum of wealthy pastoralists has emerged since the reforms, and it may be that rich herd-owners will be able to re-establish some larger pastoral operations that reap the benefits of economies of scale and extensive systems of pastoral movement. In 1992 there were reported to be seven households with more than 1000 head of livestock. By 1998 this number had risen to 955, of which 33 had more than 2000 animals. Although these are still very modest holdings in comparison with the rich of the pre-revolutionary period, some owners have been able to achieve a rapid growth in their herds. The richest of these, Henmedeh of Sergelen sum near Ulaanbaatar, had accumulated 2385 animals by the end of 1995, and had over 2800 in 1999. In 1996 Henmedeh employed four herdsmen, and by 1999 had expanded his operation to include seven hired herders who worked for him under contractual arrangements very similar to the historical sureg tavih relations.27 Henmedeh owned and maintained a truck and jeep, and he and his employees maintained a wider system of pastoral movement than most of the other nearby households. It might be that in the future an increasing number of wealthy owners like Henmedeh will accumulate sufficiently large livestock holdings to establish intermediate-scale pastoral operations, drawing on the labour of poorer pastoral households. However, it is likely to take a very long time for such operations to become large enough to include the bulk of pastoral households or encompass the majority of grazing land. But these wealthy and successful pastoralists represent a very small minority. In 1998, only 2% of herding households owned more than 500 livestock, and the majority of herding families are struggling to subsist on the income from very small herds. In 1998, 60% of herding households (165 000) had fewer than 100 animals, 37% (102 000) had fewer than 50 and about 12% (32 000) had fewer than 10.28 More than two-thirds of livestock-owning households owned fewer than 150 domestic animals—the sort of herd size needed to successfully make a sustainable livelihood in pastoralism.
The new pastoral sector has proved to be extremely vulnerable to the adverse climatic conditions that are a feature of life on the Mongolian steppe. This was made tragically clear in the winter of 1999 and the spring of 2000 when Mongolia lost some three million livestock, almost one-tenth of the national total. This zud (disaster caused by severe weather) was the result of an unusually dry summer followed by a savagely cold winter in which temperatures dropped as low as 46°C. The disappointingly low levels of vegetation in the summer of 1999 made it difficult for herdsmen to ensure livestock had the fat reserves they needed to survive the freezing winter months. The following spring fresh vegetation growth came late, so that livestock fatalities continued to climb to three million by the end of July. There has also been a negative impact on livestock reproduction and specialists estimate that if one includes the reduction in the number of livestock born this year the true losses are nearer six million. The bulk of the livestock deaths were concentrated in four aimags (provinces), Dundgov’, O ̈ vo ̈ rhangai, Zavhan and Uvs. Dundgov’ was particularly badly affected, losing more than a quarter of its livestock. Across the country some two thousand households were left without any livestock whatever, and many more were left with unviably small herds.
The tragic reality is that although the year was unusually difficult, the crisis was entirely predictable. Severe climatic conditions of this sort occur periodically in Mongo- lia, and a number of measures had been developed to mitigate their effects. Mobility was an important technique; herds were moved from the most badly affected localities to areas where conditions were better. This could be done rapidly in the collective era as managers could use teams of trucks and co-ordinate movements centrally. The collectives and state farms also stockpiled hay which could be used to provide extra fodder for exhausted animals, and this also relied upon the motor pools for distribution to pastoral encampments.
Viewing pastoralism as a socio-technical system, the recent market-oriented reforms can be seen to have disassembled an existing integrated pastoral system and created an atomized pastoral sector of subsistence-oriented pastoral producer households. The originally exogenous technological elements such as trucks and hay-cutting machinery, that had been relatively successfully integrated into the collective structures, were detached and fragmented. High-mobility systems of extensive land use have decayed, and the results have been a pastoral sector poorly adapted to the Mongolian environ- ment—as the extent of losses in the 1999–2000 zud has demonstrated.
The livestock losses themselves are in fact less important than their differential effects on the livelihoods of pastoral households. Even in the worst affected regions, Dundgov’ and O ̈ vo ̈ rhangai, total herd numbers could be expected to recover in a few years. However, the new pattern of livestock ownership has made over 274 000 households directly dependent on their own herds for their subsistence. Livestock losses are not evenly distributed; some herds were wiped out entirely, and the poorest households have so few livestock to begin with that they are vulnerable to any sort of loss. In the collective era even these dramatic levels of livestock loss, should they have somehow occurred, would not have threatened the basic food security of pastoralists; but the tiny, independent pastoral producers that have been created by the privatization of pastoralism now face starvation if their livestock die.
Lessons from Neighbouring Regions
There are parallels between the decollectivization of Mongolian pastoralism and the experience of the neighbouring region of Inner Mongolia, China. Pastoralists there were collectivized in the late 1950s, but the People’s Communes, as the Chinese collectives were termed, were dismantled in the early 1980s, and the livestock distributed between pastoral households. As bad luck would have it, Inner Mongolia also experienced a zud in the winter of 1983–84, in which around three million animals died. The north-eastern regions were particularly badly affected, in some districts more than half the livestock perished. The result was that many pastoral households lost all their livestock and began to work as hired hands for wealthier families. Other pastoral- ists did better, and were able to afford their own trucks, tractors and hired help. In purely economic terms, Inner Mongolia was left in a much better situation than Mongolia. The Chinese state, unlike the Soviet one, saw no reason to undertake political reform and instead it continued to pursue its own version of “market socialism”. Since the mid-1980s, China’s strong and continuous economic growth has meant that demand has stayed high, prices for pastoral products remained favourable and pastoralists had comparatively good access to markets. There was no collapse of Chinese industry or other sectors of the economy, so the pastoral sector did not have to soak up large numbers of “new herders” as the Mongolian sector did. However, in other ways Inner Mongolia provides a negative example for Mongolian policy-makers. By the 1980s a series of studies by Chinese specialists concluded that pasture degra- dation had become a serious problem, estimating that more than one-third of Inner Mongolian grassland has been degraded to some extent. The worst problems were found in the semi-pastoral regions such as Ihe Jao and Chifeng, where it is estimated that more than 75% of the pasture is degraded. The Chinese administration assumed that this degradation was the result of over- grazing, and that pastoralists were keeping too many animals. At first glance it might seem the most logical explanation. The number of livestock had risen quickly in the Commune period, from around 17 million head in 1957 to over 32 million in 1980. This rapid expansion was largely the result of increasing numbers of the fast-breeding sheep and goats rather than larger livestock such as horses, cattle and camels. It was achieved by increasing haymaking facilities and winter animal sheds, and by strictly limiting the number of livestock that Mongolian pastoral families were allowed to consume. However, it is by no means clear that high livestock totals alone have been the principal cause of pasture degradation. Indeed, it appears that in the past the number of livestock in Inner Mongolia was almost as high as current levels. Historical material from the 1930s suggests that at that time Inner Mongolia supported around 10 million large animals (cattle, horses and camels) and seven million small animals (sheep and goats). This is the equivalent of 67 million standard “sheep units”, only a little less than the total of 72 million reached in the early 1990s. However, the old pattern involved a much smaller proportion of sheep and goats in the total herd, and the livestock were kept using much more mobile systems of pastoral movement. The relatively low numbers of livestock in Inner Mongolia at the advent of Communist control of the region was not typical—the Sino-Japanese war had greatly depleted livestock numbers in the late 1930s and 1940s. The post-war rise in total livestock numbers can be seen as a recovery in herd sizes during a period of peace. This gave the impression, however, that livestock numbers had reached unprecedentedly high levels in the last few decades. Since the 1930s some of the best pasture land has been lost to haymaking and agriculture, and the evidence suggests that systems of pastoral manage- ment play a more important role in maintaining good pastures than simple ceilings on livestock densities. The policies introduced since decollectivization appear to be making matters worse. After the division and allocation of livestock to herding households in the early 1980s, the administration sought to apply a similar policy to land. At first only haymaking fields were divided, but by the early 1990s even grazing land had been divided into individual allocations for each household, using long-term leases.34 The justification for these measures appears to have been to avert a “tragedy of the commons”. Individual allocations of pasture, it was argued, would induce pastoral- ists to preserve the pasture by limiting their herd sizes, and the administration has encouraged pastoralists to fence their land allocations where they can afford to do so. But it appears that these land-allocation policies are not preventing pasture degradation. Indeed, there are indications that the new pattern of land use is exacerbating the problem.35 Large-scale pastoral movements between seasonal pas- tures have been largely eliminated by the land allocations and changing attitudes, and there has been a corresponding decline in the use of the traditional pastoral technique of otor. The effect has been to increase the amount of hay being cut to feed to the livestock, to increase the tendency for livestock to graze in one location all year round and to intensify the concentrations of animals in certain areas. These were identified as major reasons for the deterioration of pasture by the pastoralists and local officials who were consulted in a major comparative study of pastoralism across Inner Asia carried out in the mid-1990s.36 Ecological studies also show that grazing regimes in which livestock continuously graze the same pastures can be much more damaging to the thin steppe soils of Mongolia than systems of pasture rotation.37 However, the Inner Mongolian administration continues to promote the enclosure of grassland using fences, although recent studies have emphasized the negative effects of reducing mobility and flexibility in this way. Williams (1996, p. 307), for example, describes grassland enclosure as the “catalyst of land degradation in Inner Mongolia”. Another negative example is provided by the pastoral sector in Buryatia, Russia, which borders Mongolia to the north. During the Soviet period the Buryat collective farms introduced sedentary agro-industrial methods of livestock rearing to the region, based on the Russian model. Livestock were kept relatively immobile on bounded pastures, and heavy machinery and chemical fertilizers were used to cultivate fodder crops and grain where possible. This appears to have badly damaged the steppe soils; local studies suggest that more than 75% of pastures in some regions have been degraded. The land ploughed for agriculture has also been damaged, and the official estimate is that more than 84% of the region’s arable land has undergone degradation to some degree.38 In light of the experience of its two neighbours, Mongolia has good reason to be cautious about the merits of both large-scale mechanized mixed farming models and allocations of small plots of pasture to individual households.
Narratives of Environmental Disaster
Land degradation has become an increasingly significant issue in the debate over Mongolian policy development. Estimates as to the extent and severity of the problem vary enormously. Sheehy (1996, p. 54), who has wide experience of rangeland research in both Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, considered the general consensus among specialists was that around 7% of pasture land has experienced some sort of ecological degradation as a result of human-induced activities.39 However, some accounts portray overgrazing as a major threat that has already degraded a large percentage of the nation’s grazing land.40 The ADB (1992, p. 185) warned that desert in the country’s southern region may be advancing by as much as 500 m/year and quotes a Mongolian Academy of Sciences estimate that around 33% of grasslands are overgrazed. A joint UNDP and Mongolian government action plan published in 1999 speaks of “almost half” of the nation’s grazing land being considered damaged.41 The UNDP (2000, p. 2) goes further still and makes use of a 1996 ADB estimate that 70% of pasture is degraded. This “narrative of environmental disaster” has been implicitly used to advocate exclusive private rights to land. The ADB (1994, p. 33) claimed, for example, that the introduction of private land would “protect land from damage or degradation”. However, despite the various more or less alarmist estimates, there is little doubt among specialists that to date Mongolia has had a much less severe problem of pasture degradation than Inner Mongolia or Buryatia.
The wide range of estimates of the scale of pastoral degradation underlines the lack of uniformity within the “development discourse”, and indicates that the approaches of different strands within the broader international “expert” community are sometimes incompatible. However, the concerns of both liberal economists and some conserva- tionists overlap on the issue of overgrazing. The familiar narrative of environmental destruction has been utilized by both camps to justify the emphasis on individuated private rights to land on the one hand, and protected areas where the grazing of livestock will be monitored and restricted on the other. This influence has led the Mongolian government to double the already extensive amount of land in protected areas from around 5.5m to 12.3m hectares, and there are calls to double this again in the future.
The UNDP Mongolia Environmental Trust Fund (METF), for example, identifies overgrazing as the first of a series of key threats to the Mongolian ecosystem, followed by excessive logging and firewood collection, a “lack of adequate transport policies”, “poaching”, trade in endangered species and a number of other familiar themes. The “lack of adequate transport policies” is an interesting example of the way in which the Mongolian state is portrayed as lacking competency and in need of development expertise—further “knowledge exports” from the developed world. Most Mongolian roads are not surfaced, but are simply trails across the steppe. In many places these become deeply rutted and drivers find better routes to one side of these sections, cutting tracks through the thin topsoil and causing the problem to spread. The result is wide swathes of bare earth in some places, and a series of parallel trails in others. This problem has long been recognized in Mongolia, and the generally accepted solution is to build surfaced roads, which drivers invariably use wherever they are available. The use of legislation to keep drivers on appallingly bad roads over hundreds of miles of empty steppe is seen as largely impractical, for good reason. Road-building is a particular priority for the Mongolian government for a number of reasons, and in 1999 they managed to win about US$150 million in direct aid and soft loans from donor nations for infrastructural investment, much of this for the road-building programme.43 However, in the narrative of METF this situation changes from being primarily a problem of investment and resources into one of policy failure. There are some fairly obvious reasons why this should be so, paying for road-building on any scale would quickly swallow up the entire METF budget, whereas the funding of consultancies, workshops and conferences is relatively affordable and generates the sort of “knowledge product” that can be fed back into the environmental and developmental debate. It is also likely to appeal to the circles of experts and activists who form the primary audience for the METF material.
Similarly, top of the list of priorities for projects to be funded by the METF is the wider propagation of conservationist ideology, under the heading “public awareness and education”. This, it is noted, “is a more attainable objective in Mongolia than in most countries because of the cultural tradition of responsibility and reverence for nature”, however, “greater public understanding of the issues and causes of environ- mental degradation needs to permeate through all sectors of society”. This narrative presumes ignorance on the part of the Mongolian subjects of development, but casts them as receptive as a result of their “cultural tradition”. In the case of unauthorized hunting, METF explains, “herders are the main culprits and their traditional lifestyle adds to the problem—they are used to a free way of life and have little knowledge of regulations. Reaching these groups and educating them is a major undertaking”. In fact, until the late 1990s educational coverage was virtually complete, and pastoral life has long been framed by the regulation of negdel and sum local government apparatus, so that until relatively recently levels of social control were high. In this narrative there seems to be little room for the possibility that rural residents might themselves be the best judges of the nature and causes of environmental change, or that weakened modes of governance and local institutions might be more important contributory factors than a lack of knowledge.44 The experience of Inner Mongolia and Buryatia suggests that the major threat to the steppe environment may be the unintended consequences of discursive formations that ignore or assume the inadequacy of indigenous Mongolian institutional and socio-technical forms.
Conclusion
Historically, extensive pastoralism throughout Inner Asia has entailed flexible access to large areas of grazing land, and this meant a different configuration of rights over resources than in agricultural society. Rather than absolute individual ownership, mobile pastoralists depended upon public access to resources under the jurisdiction of a local political authority that regulated their use.
In the post-socialist era Mongolia has become the subject of both neo-classical economic and conservationist discourse. The result has been that international agencies have advocated two types of policy objectives with respect to land use. The dominant economic advice has been to create private ownership rights over land, or at least the leasing of land to private individuals and agencies. The main objectives of conservation- ist agencies have been the introduction and extension of national parks and protected areas to conserve fauna and flora, and the promotion of conservationist ideology through education and publicity campaigns.
The privatization of Mongolian land would be the final chapter in the story of liberal market reforms that have seen collective and state property as a barrier to development.
Breaking up the pastoral collectives, however, created a less mobile, less efficient and largely subsistence-oriented livestock sector that has begun to fail to provide food security for large numbers of the poorest herding households. In retrospect it seems that the policy advice the Mongolian state received was poorly adapted to its social and environmental circumstances. By considering Mongolian mobile pastoralism as a socio-technical activity in its own right, however, it is clear that in pre-revolutionary and collective eras jural and socio-political frameworks allowed Mongolian e ́lites to con- struct successfully large-scale pastoral operations that made use of wide pastoral movement, limited herd sizes and generated large surpulses for export. These systems also appear to have been relatively successful at avoiding the severe problems of pasture degradation reported in neighbouring steppe regions with more static patterns of livestock raising. When these systems were dismantled and livestock distributed, as happened in the 1930s and then in the 1990s, the result in each case was rising livestock numbers, a fall in herd off-take and a reduction in overall mobility.
The assumption that a market in exclusive private rights to land is the best way to release its potential productivity requires critical and careful re-evaluation. Subjecting mobile pastoralism to the sorts of policies considered appropriate for mixed farming and intensive livestock-rearing, such as the division and allocation of land to individual households, propels Mongolian pastoralism in a new direction. So far the experience of Inner Mongolia suggests that far from safeguarding the land from damage, this may have very negative impacts on the pastoral environment.
An obsession with unambiguous and exclusive rights to land may undermine the skills, techniques, institutions and co-ordination of labour needed for successful exten- sive pastoralism. Just as in the Sri Lankan case described by Pfaffenburger, the introduction of a novel economic and jural regime has eliminated many of the pre-existing socio-technical systems constructed by the previous regime. As Fairhead (1993) notes, some of the most important forms of local knowledge for the productive use of resources may not be readily assessable to formulation and integration within broader bodies of “scientific” knowledge. It is all the more important, therefore, that reformers be sensitive to the possible advantages of existing practices and the institutional frames within which they exist, as these may not prove to be easily reconstituted from bodies of abstract knowledge.
It is not clear yet whether Mongolia will proceed with individual allocation of pasture land, particularly in the present political climate. The victory of the MPRP in the July 2000 parliamentary elections suggests that Mongolia may become more cautious and gradualist in its implementation of market reforms. However, it does appear that without support the poorer households, with small numbers of livestock, little access to transportation and low amounts of domestic labour, will have difficulty maintaining systems of wide pastoral movement in any case, even where pasture land is not divided into individual allocations.
In the current economic climate it may no longer be realistic to expect sufficient investment in the pastoral sector for the establishment of large pastoral enterprises with their own motor pools and mechanized hay production facilities; but the retention of large-scale pastoral movement systems that include the majority of pastoralists may require public institutions to take a lead in providing transportational support for pastoralists and the co-ordination of pasture use. These might also be able to provide the basis for the coordination of labour for the maintenance of public resources such as wells, and the organization of mechanized hay production. Significant investment in improved transportation services for pastoralists might not only bolster environmentally sustainable systems of large-scale pasture rotation, but also might benefit livestock processing industries by facilitating their purchase of livestock products at competitive
prices.
