Pastoralism is a specialised form of natural resource management, adapted to ecosystems defined as marginal, characterised by a limited, variable and unpredictable agro-ecological resource endowment. These can vary from African dry lands to central Asian steppes to European mountains, to Andean plateaux. In order to make use of these territories, pastoralists critically rely on mobile livestock rearing; this is the factor that distinguishes them from other rural communities. Pastoralism is thus not only an economic activity aimed at animal production, but a while livelihood systems and a lifestyle in its own….
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https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5789pastoralism_development_pathways_rev2.pdf
Personally, I found pastoral issues very indispensable when talking about development.As the article tried to raise, especially with in the Ethiopian context, whose substantail land mass is covered by pastoral community, pastoralism is a very viable meanse to sustain livelyhoods in thse dry land areas.Unfortunately, polcy making is at a cross road.The government is villejizing a substantial part of the pastoral community, which is targeted at making pastoralism unsustainable. The highlanders themselves are not able to secure at leas their food.Therefore, the policy implication is that, pastoralists should not be forced to settle so long as,the system is adapted to the management of dryland ecologies in a sustainable means. Therefore, so long as the post MDG era is SDG, which highly requires a radical transformation from unsustainable livelyhood means to a more sustainable ones, policy making shold go in such a contunum which puts pastoralism at its centre.