For the nomads, even in their modern-day incarnation of being quite settled half the time, life would be impossible with the horse. Seemingly content with very little. In grassland lore, the horse is known as the most versatile animal, the sheep as the most important. At first, the loss of two million livestock out of 33 million does not appear to be a disaster for this small population of 2.6 million people, spread out over a vast landscape. However, animals represent not only a way of life but are their source of food, transport and access to health and education.
Livestock are currency.
So, the herders who have lost all their livestock and those who already had only a subsistence existence, the future is bleak. Many face a lack of food with no prospect of any improvement in the coming months. The affected herders are facing their biggest challenge for survival since the sudden shift to a market economy ten years ago. In 1990, a faulty strategy of privatisation and a series of external economic shocks impacted on the Mongolian economy creating waves of unemployment and plunging the rural communities into poverty. Failure by Government to adequately identify problems in the policy of privatisation and its impact on the herders, combined with the impact of the natural hazards, has exposed these herders to a future of chronic poverty.