Agricultural Settlement and Land Use in Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 563

trast, the Rereya and Ourika tribes graze the pastures of the Moroccan High Atlas ac-
cording to a highly scripted agdal system of reserved rights. Each agdal contains vari-
ous subsistence cultivation and grazing niches (riparian, slope, rainshadow, etc.). They
tend sheep on open pastures, but cattle must be corralled and fed with locally harves-
ted forage. The owners may partition unused allotments to others, but local feed must
remain within the agdal. Unused corrals are dismantled, and the rights are assumed by
others.
Foraging practices are dynamic and change over time. Although isolated and highly
mobile, herders respond to changing market demands, improved transportation, tech-
nological improvements, and migration. They are similarly not ignorant or reluctant to
pursue promising opportunities to improve their income, which alters the consumption
of resources. For example, grazing zomo dairy cows in mid-elevation Himalayan godes
(individual foraging plots) is currently giving way to less labor-intensive yak breeding
at the higher elevations. The Nepali herders found that yaks earn more money with less
effort. Although they still tend some zomo near their permanent foothill settlements,
this new strategy of favoring yaks transfers grazing pressure from their former mid-el-
evation godes to the lower and higher pastures. In the Tigray Highlands of northern
Ethiopia, transhumant herders are adjusting their traditional routes to accommodate
such disparate new demands as school enrollment for their young herd boys and reser-
voir development (Nyssen et al. 2009).
FIGURE 11.13 A lone shepherd boy tends goats and sheep in the Pamir Mountains of western
Tajikistan. (Photo by S. F. Cunha.)