Pastoralism: A critical asset for food security under global climate change

Pastoralism is often written off as an unsustainable system. This paper takes a closer look at this position and examines the role that pastoralism plays in relation to food security, particularly in a future in which climate variability features more prominently. We focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where problems around food security are supposed to be more alarming and which is now also in the spotlight of development policies concerned with global food security (e.g., World Bank, 2009). The economic rationality and ecological sustainability of pastoral systems are amply documented (Homewood, 2008) and are attracting new attention vis-à-vis emerging interests in resilience and adaptability (e.g., African Union, 2010). However, there is still a deeply rooted apprehensiveness in rural development circles at national and international levels, that investments in securing pastoralism hold back development rather than promoting it, both with regard to the people in pastoralism and to the livestock sector as a whole (with important exceptions, for example, the African Union Policy Framework on Pastoralim; African Union, 2010). In the 21st century, this concern intersects with four crisis scenarios that have come to dominate global agricultural policies: the ecological crisis around the degradation of agricultural land, now accompanied by new alarms for greenhouse gas emissions and climate change; the fuel crisis which transformed allegedly “empty” and “resource-poor” drylands into a soughtafter asset for producing biofuel or securing the subsidies associated with governments’ pledges for green energy; the fi nancial crisis, as the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the U.S. and in Europe in 2005–2006 made commodities index funds, including those for agricultural land and grains, an attractive alternative for investors; and fi nally the food crisis, as alarm over food-price volatility during the 2007–2008 spike highlighted the dependency of agricultural commodity prices on the oil price and the infl uence of the global fi nancial market. At the crossroads of these scenarios lies the ongoing global undertaking of incorporating communal land into commodity markets, especially in Africa, legitimized, in ways that are disturbingly recalling of colonial times, by arguments that link entitlement to “natural” resources to the relative “potential” of production systems. Narratives of chronic food security in pastoral drylands, underpinned by the presupposition of pastoralism’s structural low-productivity and endemic vulnerability should be read against this background (Levine, 2011). In this article, we look beyond these general narratives, where pastoralism and the drylands often serve as a negative benchmark while remaining marginal to the main concern. We start by addressing the economic importance of pastoral production in arid and semiarid areas in Africa compared with other production systems in the same conditions. Second, we focus on the pastoral system of production and provide evidence of the contribution it makes to food security in these areas. Third, we consider the current and prospective constraints to the realization of the potential of pastoral production in relation to food insecurity. Finally, we examine a range of options that might enhance the contribution pastoral production is able to make, both to food security and economic prosperity in the region, and potentially elsewhere.