As usual, introduction of market reforms spells disaster for the commons.. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/business/global/08iht-rbogcash.html ------------------------------------------------------snip In a study funded by the World Bank, Dennis Sheehy, a rancher from Oregon with a doctorate in range management, last year measured two of Mongolia’s four major ecological zones — desert and forest steppe — to determine changes in the composition of species compared with an earlier study made in 1997.
Mr. Sheehy found a 34 percent loss in plant species in the Gobi Desert and about a 30 percent loss in Mongolia’s forest steppe. “Two conditions have created the loss in species: the proportion of goats in the herd in the last 10 to 12 years, and the areas are becoming increasingly arid,” Mr. Sheehy said. “The plant species that had disappeared were most palatable to all livestock, but especially to goats,” he added. “There are too many of them.” The problem with goats is not only what they eat. In arid regions, their sharp hooves have been accused by environmentalists of piercing the soil surface, known technically as the cryptobiotic crust, a tangle of gray-brown material composed of fungi, mosses, lichens and bacteria which helps to retain moisture. Once the crust is torn, strong northwesterly winds carry away the sand underneath in dust storms that are contributing to the spread of the desert, according to a 2003 World Bank report. Still, large parts of Mongolia remain in good shape, notably in the eastern parts of the country, and some researchers, including Andrei Marin, a doctoral student preparing a thesis on climate-change adaptation at the Institute of Geography, part of the University of Bergen in Norway, caution against jumping to conclusions about cause and effect. Mr. Marin says the 10-year timetable for Mr. Sheehy’s comparative study may be too short to measure environmental shifts, and a 25-year span would be more meaningful. The reasons goats are proliferating are as much about nurture as nature, Mr. Marin said by telephone from Bergen. When the country shifted from a planned socialist economy to a market economy and a parliamentary democracy, it largely retreated from supporting the livestock industry, leading herders to increase the size of the goat herd to finance rising expenses, he said. “Government subsidies for transportation, boarding schools and a hay reserve have disappeared to a large extent,” he said. Adding some complexity to the debate, land degradation, as a term, lacks a precise and widely accepted definition, and environmentalists urge a note of caution when discussing it. “There are seven different ways to measure desertification in Mongolia,” said Tony Whitten, a biodiversity specialist with the World Bank in East Asia and the Pacific. Yet another layer of the problem is the dysfunctionality of Mongolia’s cashmere marketing. China is the largest buyer of Mongolia’s raw and washed cashmere by far, taking an estimated two-thirds of all exports — one-third legally and one-third smuggled to avoid export taxes. Facing such a dominant buyer, Mongolian traders tend to get the short end of the bargain even in good times, accepting prices far below market value for high-quality fleeces and passing on the pain to the producers; and in the past year, times have not been good. As the global economic crisis shrank Chinese clothing exports, Chinese cashmere purchases effectively ground to a halt, just as another rain failure was pushing the herders into longer and more expensive migrations in search of grazing land. -raghu. -- Eat the rich, the poor are tough and stringy. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
