Geography Reference
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climate-tracking strategy (in which herd sizes are constantly modulated to the prevailing
conditions), or a risk-minimizing low-stocking approach (in which stock is kept below
the long-term capacity to avoid causing damage during poor years). But both transporta-
tion access and market mechanisms are far from being sufficiently developed to allow
pastoralists to adopt the first strategy: it simply is not possible to increase or decrease
herd sizes with the nimbleness that would be required to track yearly variation. And few
pastoralists would willingly adopt the low-stocking strategy when, as newly empowered
actors in a market setting, they encounter alternative (and more easily fungible) ways
to store wealth than in grass. In addition, the livestock-grassland interaction appears to
be characterized by a substantial time lag: even with the best of intentions, a pastoralist
is unlikely to realize he has exceeded the regenerative capability of his pasture until he
has already done so for a few years. And the response of his pasture to lowered livestock
density may not occur quickly or, indeed, at all: rather than existing only along a linear
gradient ending at an ungrazed climax, grasslands may exist in a multitude of stable states,
and poor management during a previous era could doom later pastoralists to living within
a degraded system regardless of their own decisions.
Further, the Chinese attempt to encourage sustainability through an individual-family
ranching model is compromised by other aspects of policy that act to weaken the very
clarity of property rights that the household responsibility system attempts to build. Priva-
tization seeks to forge a tighter link between responsibility for the resource and accrual
of benefits, but this linkage is continually sabotaged by the remnants of “the big iron rice
bowl” ( da tiefanwan ) mentality, in which paternalistic government, if not welcomed or
trusted, is still seen as a reliable last resort to rescue individual entrepreneurs who have
made bad decisions. 84 More directly, the security of usufruct rights is constantly under
siege—even when legally protected—by an intrusive and meddlesome government that
always retains the power to revoke grazing rights, or change overall policy without con-
sultation. 85
Conservative husbandry of grasslands under a private-property-mimicking system
seems likely if the feedback loop between grassland health and the ability to generate
wealth is a strong and direct one. However, it appears that the feedback loop is loose,
flexible, and characterized by considerable time-lags. At least under conditions in which
government regulators do not enforce theoretically existing herd limits (true in all places
I have visited), the pastoralist can always temporarily compensate for reduced yield per
animal by increasing herd size. Replacement of palatable by unpalatable plant species,
or nutritious grasses with poisonous forbs, is not a process that occurs overnight, or
even within a few years. Pastoralists appear to be capable of improving their livelihoods
temporarily while degrading the capital on which their yearly income is based. Such
near-sighted behavior hardly seems unique to the western Chinese pastoralist; it takes
little imagination to produce analogues in other cultures and economies.
Faced with a desire to raise the funds necessary to send his daughter to school in the
county town a few hours away (a move that may require increasing yearly livestock sales,
herd size, and thus a gradual diminution of grassland productivity), it is not necessarily
an environmentally irresponsible pastoralist who opts for school over lighter grazing.
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