Overview of Policy Options for Grazing Systems

In arid and semi-arid grazing systems based on communal tenure (general definitions of grazing systems), inappropriate policies have significantly contributed to environmental degradation, principally overgrazing. These have included misplaced subsidies on drought relief and cropping inputs, inappropriate exchange rate and export policies, and under-investment/lack of encouragement of banking institutions. Most of all they include inappropriate land tenure policies and a failure to support (or an attempt to suppress) traditional pastoralist natural resource management.

Policy options for these systems therefore centre on the strengthening of local resource management institutions, including the promotion/strengthening of conflict resolution mechanisms, and a strengthening of the "tracking" production strategy through the putting in place of improved and equitable support for destocking in time of drought. Financial policies including cost recovery for water and animal services, and the ending of subsidies on feed and cropping inputs. Finally, although the rationality of pastoralist production is increasingly recognised, it is undoubtedly subject to human demographic pressures, and there will be a need for policies that create non-livestock based employment to relive such pressures (click here for discussion of overgrazing policy pressures and policy options).

Sedentarisation of pastoralists, whether as an explicit policy or a spontaneous process, also raises specific policy issues.

In these and other grazing systems there are also policy pressures contributing to and policy options for mitigating, loss of faunal biodiversity (click here for discussion of wildlife biodiversity policy pressures and options).

In ranching and grassland farming systems, particularly in the humid tropics, the main environmental concerns are to do with replacement of forest by pasture, to which financial policies, inappropriate land-titling policies and
road development have all arguably contributed. Policy options here centre on the removal of incentives for deforestation, but include the establishment of protected areas (click here for discussion of deforestation policy pressures and policy options).

Humid tropical pastures are prone to various forms of degradation, which represent both a direct negative impact and an indirect one in that exhaustion of pastures encourages further advance of the forest frontier. Policy options here, as for privately owned pastures in other agro-ecosystems, include land taxation and, research and extension for land intensification. Following recent scientific work, incentive schemes for carbon sequestration through improved pastures may be worth putting in place (click here for pasture use and maintenance policy pressures and policy options).

Policy pressures and policy options for highland grazing systems, and temperate grazing systems within developing or transitional countries (such as Central Asia) depend largely on the mode of tenure. Where communal land tenure prevails, policy issues are broadly similar to those in semi-arid systems (click here for discussion of overgrazing policy pressures and policy options). In ranching systems, policy issues are broadly similar to those humid systems (click here for pasture use and maintenance policy pressures and policy options).
.
Proceed to matrix of policy options and systems

> > [Livestock & Environment Toolbox Home]