Grazing Fee Regimes

It has been suggested that on some communal rangelands it would be appropriate to establish systems of local management based on:

- management fees per animal kept that are adjusted by the previous year's rainfall (or any other convenient proxy for rain conditions) - higher for poor rainfall, lower for good rainfall
- the recycling of those fees as subsidies to marketing in poor years

The effect of such schemes would be to offer a strong incentive to offtake in years where range resources are scarce. In principle, such schemes could be self-managing through community-level institutions and at least in principle, self-financing, although they would be more likely to work if adjusted to include subsidies on offtake coming from central government, in the cause of environmental conservation.

Documented experiences of putting such schemes into operation are not known. They would need:

- careful participatory planning to get institutional design right
- careful financial planning to balance levels of fees and subsidies against rainfall probabilities
- detailed consideration of land tenure issues, and whether the rangeland could really be considered as a bounded area suitable to management by a defined group, or whether there were outside claims that needed to be taken into account.

Related Policy Options

- Strengthening Local Natural Resource Management
- Drought Management Policies

Key References

Abel, N.O.J. and Blaikie, P.M. 1990. Land Degradation, Stocking rates and Conservation Policies in the Communal Rangelands of Botswana and Zimbabwe. ODI Pastoral Development Network Paper 29a.

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