Nomadism in Mongolia-The - best place - last

This piece was writing exactly 10 year and appeared in the Economist as Christmas Special. Quiet interesting read.

Nomadism in Mongolia

The - best place - last

As Mongolia shows, nomadic pastoralism and private land just don't mix

Dec 19th 2002 | SUMBER, DORNOD | from the print edition

IT IS what is underfoot that counts. Very roughly, between the Ural mountains in the west and the Amur river on the Sino-Russian border, and between the latitudes of Lake Baikal in the north and the Chang Tang plateau of Tibet to the south, lies a land too arid usually for forest or even field. Some of it is mountain and much is desert, but most of it is steppe: the vast grasslands of Inner Asia.

The foot or so of soil below the steppe's deceptive surface holds tens of thousands of years' worth of fertility, the product of grasses' ability to turn to biomass the energy of the fierce but brief summer's sun. Squirrel-tail barley, needlegrass, a clutch of fescues, Tatary buckwheat, plains lovegrass and wild oats: the rooting networks of these grasses seek out and trap moisture and nutrients. Dead roots are broken down and added to the store of humus.

Above ground, some grasses of the steppe, like needlegrass, are sod-forming: they put out surface runners that trap moisture and smother bare ground. Forbs—the non-grasses such as herbs and wildflowers—bring up nutrients from deeper down, or, if they are leguminous, fix in the soil essential nitrogen from the air. An ungrazed summer pasture is no monotony: it is a riot of rippling grasses and flowering gentian, cinquefoil, yellow-rattle, motherwort and Syrian rue.

In his history of grass, Graham Harvey describes the prairie, America's equivalent of the Asian steppe, before settlers waged war on it by overgrazing or ploughing it up: it was a “biological powerhouse, rich in wildlife and with a productivity no modern farming system could match.” Inner Asia's steppes may never have boasted the 60m bison that white settlers on the prairies estimated there to be in the 1860s, quickly slaughtered to near-extinction. But rock-carved reliefs 11,000 feet (3,350 metres) up on one mountain pass in the Altai mountains, near to the modern Mongolian border with Russia and China, depict a presumably Turkic race following great herds of wild animals on their migration—gazelles, argalli sheep, reindeer, wild horses—much as American-Indians followed the bison.

Until as recently as the 1960s, Inner Mongolia, by then part of the People's Republic of China, still had the huge herds of gazelle and wild ass that so astounded European explorers-cum-hunters at the end of the 19th century. Even today, the rolling empty eastern steppe of Mongolia proper looks like the prairie ocean must have done when it caused American settlers, heading west in their prairie schooners, to gasp and wonder about carrying on. The range of gazelle has shrunk greatly in recent decades, but in this part of the country 1.5m of them still graze, in migratory herds that run right round the horizon. Such is the biological powerhouse of the steppe.

It is a powerhouse that humans have long tapped by raising livestock; indeed, it is on the steppe that the sheep, the goat, the camel and the horse were all first domesticated. The rest of the world soon got to hear about the horse-bound nomads' success at domestication, particularly after the invention of the compound bow made of horn, and of the stirrup, which allowed the mounted nomadic warrior to fire behind him and then escape—the deadly Parthian shot. Huns originating from modern-day Mongolia struck fear into the fifth-century Roman Empire. From the 13th century, the Mongols founded dynasties in China, Persia and India. Stirrings on the steppe sent ripples around the globe. Edward Gibbon, in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, writes that:

In the year 1238 the inhabitants of Gothia (Sweden) and Frise were prevented by their fear of the Tartars from sending, as usual, their ships to the herring-fishery on the coast of England; and as there was no exportation, forty or fifty of these fish were sold for a shilling. It is whimsical enough that the orders of a Mogul khan, who reigned on the borders of China, should have lowered the price of herrings in the English market.

Genghis Khan's homeland is in modern-day Mongolia, a country the size of France and Spain combined that sits at the heart of Inner Asia, with perhaps the world's finest and most extensive remaining grasslands. Its pastoralists no longer strike fear near and far, but their household techniques for raising livestock would, in their essentials, be recognisable to a Mongol from the great conqueror's time. Pastoral nomads in Mongolia still use a felt tent with wooden frame, a ger, which keeps out the heat in summer and protects from the cold in winter—Mongolia's continental climate has the world's greatest extremes of temperature. Ager is perfectly round not only to create the greatest space out of the least material, but also to stand up to the fierce katabatic winds, which whistle round it rather than topple it over.

The social divisions of the ger—left as you enter for the guests, opposite the door for the family head, right for the rest of the family—are unchanged, and so are the divisions of labour. Men are responsible for the raising of livestock: their herding, castration and slaughter, and (a job that the younger men relish) the breaking-in of horses. Women oversee the household, the raising of children, the milking and the making of dairy products: yogurt, butter, hard cheese, milk-vodka and the noble airag, fermented mare's milk.

The 27m livestock in Mongolia—the cow has been added to the mix, with yaks on higher pastures—outnumber the population tenfold. Nomadic pastoralists care for the bulk of these animals. Indeed, nowhere is the economy so tied to nomadic pastoralism as in Mongolia. And never have so many Mongolians—a third of the population, nearly double the number a decade ago—practised it as today.

It is tempting to regard nomads as the medieval Europeans and Chinese did: fierce, free and independent of a constraining, higher authority. Such an impression is reinforced by the sight of any Mongolian herder at sunset galloping back to his camp, in full song; by the Mongolian marriage ceremony, which is a ritualised form of abduction; or by the sight of two young lovers' horses by a cave or concealing rock, the man's urgaa (his pole-lassoo) stuck in the ground to demand privacy but presumably also to boast of sexual conquest.

A giant steppe for a man; a small steppe for a hordeAlamy

Mongolia's political history certainly seems to support a romantic notion of their independence. Mongolia owes its political existence to a struggle by a pastoral society against the encroachments of an agrarian one, as David Sneath, a pastoral specialist at Cambridge University, points out. In the late 19th century, pastoralists in Inner Mongolia failed to stop the appropriation of the best land by Chinese agriculturalists; that failure prompted an armed struggle—led by many who had fled from Inner Mongolia—for the independence of Outer Mongolia. After over two centuries of subjugation by China's Manchu rulers, and the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Outer Mongolia declared independence. A revolutionary Communist state, the second ever, was created in 1924, under Soviet tutelage; it set about the destruction of feudal and monastic seats of power.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago, Mongolians embraced liberal democracy with gusto (albeit declaring the illiberal Genghis Khan as their refound hero). The Russians, whose stooges instigated genocidal purges in Mongolia of Buddhist lamas, intellectuals and rich herders in the 1930s, have largely been forgiven; the distrust of Chinese intentions remains as visceral as ever.

Today, the state and its citizens, even townspeople, still identify with nomadism and the horse. Witness the minister and the ambassador who, besuited, jumped up on horseback for a gallop after lunch with this correspondent just outside the capital, Ulan Bator, before heading back to the office. The official Mongolian tourism website, which lists ten reasons for visiting the country, says it all. Reason number six is “No fences”. You can still ride the 3,000 kilometres (1,900 miles) from west to east without encountering a single man-made impediment. Mongolia is a strange thing: a free-market economy with public ownership of land. But how long can the two continue to co-exist?

The call of the wild

To understand how land ownership touches nomadic life, however, it is important to unpack the exaggerated notion of the nomads' freedom from higher authority. For pastoralism has always depended upon a political authority to regulate access to pastures. As William of Rubreck, a 13th-century Franciscan monk, put it:

Every captain, according to whether he has more or fewer men under him, knows the limit of his pastorage and where to feed his flocks in winter, summer, spring and autumn.

Under the Manchus, Mongolia was split into 83 districts called hoshuu, (meaning banner), within which herdsmen were assigned to smaller units, sum (arrow), and sub-units, bag. As Mr Sneath says:

The territory of the hoshuu generally contained a number of different areas of pasture used in winter, spring, summer and autumn. These seasonal pastures were divided between various sums and bags, and within these areas the individual households had customary use-rights to particular pastures. In effect this meant that each family owned no land as such but had a recognised area of pasture that it used in the different seasons, and of these the rights to the exclusive use of winter pasture (ovoljoo) tended to be the most strictly enforced.

It was not such a great leap from the Manchu system to the pastoral collectives under socialism, called negdel, that were set up in the late 1940s and 1950s. In feudal days, most herders looked after animals belonging either to aristocratic or to monastic masters, while raising livestock for private consumption. Under collectivisation, the state was the master; a number of private livestock were still allowed. The shift from collectivisation to a market economy, Mr Sneath argues, was in many ways a far more wrenching change, one that undermined or destroyed institutions that had long sustained nomadic pastoralism, particularly ones that spread risk and reaped economies of scale.

With democracy, the 300-odd negdel were, at their members' insistence, disbanded and turned into marketing companies. Herds were privatised and the two-dozen huge state farms dissolved. Prices were freed. The western development specialists who flooded in predicted that market signals would allocate resources more efficiently, allowing dynamic enterprise—including in pastoralism—to break free from moribund old structures.

It did not happen that way. Real income per head in Mongolia fell by half between 1990 and 1992, according to the World Bank, and by another third the next year. By 1998, a third of Mongolians were living below the poverty line, compared with none, at least officially, in socialist days. In part, the decline was down to the collapse of trade with the Soviet block: new trade with China filled only part of the hole. It was also due to the loss of Soviet aid, which supplied perhaps a third of GDP. Western donors made up much of the aid gap (Mongolians get among the highest number of aid dollars per head in the world), but to dismayingly small effect.

In the pastoral sector, the services that the negdel provided for herders under socialism—the regulation of access to pastures, the upkeep of wells for watering animals, the provision of winter hay, a collective truck for transport to fresh seasonal pastures, and much more—collapsed, and little replaced them. Herding became more atomised. People increasingly took up subsistence herding to escape joblessness in the towns. Traditional rights of use to certain pastures were eroded, as Robin Mearns of the World Bank puts it, by a spirit of free-for-all.

Without decent transport on Mongolia's roadless steppe, a ready market for livestock and processed goods was no longer assured, particularly for remote herders. The result was great hardship. The herders' response was to fall back on small, uneconomic networks of family or friends, to breed ever more animals with less regard to their quality (numbers rose to a record 34m in 1999), and to move closer to towns. This concentration has caused pastures near to the towns to be overgrazed, and more distant ones to be under-used. There is a desperate need, says Mr Mearns, to restore mobility.

Between the summer of 1999 and early 2002, an unprecedented series of meteorological disasters took place: great swathes of Mongolia were hit by drought, and by different types of zud, winter phenomena that prevent animals feeding either because of ice crusts or heavy snow. Some 7m animals died, wiping out many families' entire herds and so their livelihood. Under collectivisation, with fewer beasts, greater mobility and the state delivery of supplementary feed, such a disaster would not have happened.

The pastoral disappointments of the 1990s have led to a couple of alarming responses. The first is to dismiss pastoralism as a backward pursuit, an embarrassment to notions of modernisation rather than a proven response to a harsh environment. The governor of Dornod, the easternmost province, says that herders “get in the way” of his ambitious plans for resource extraction. These include not just mining, but also inviting Chinese agriculturalists to farm great swathes of steppe.

The second response, more sympathetic to herding but as disturbing in its potential consequences, is promoted by, among others, the Asian Development Bank. This argues that market reforms in pastoralism cannot work without the private ownership of land. Who can argue with that? Without ownership, herders have no incentive to protect land from degradation and to invest in land improvements. The theory of the tragedy of the commons is well-known: it is in the interests of any individual to add to his stock of animals on common land, even if that leads to further degradation.

Enter the free-market fundamentalists

Already, a 1995 land law, only recently being implemented, allows herders to apply for the rights to use certain winter shelters. Many interpret this as entailing the rights to winter pastures around those shelters too. Rich herders have rushed to stake their claims, leaving poorer ones at a loss. A new land law, passed in mid-2002, sensibly gives Mongolians the right to own urban plots of land. But many see such ownership eventually being applied to pastures, and are laying claim now to the best ones. “Traditional unwritten law is not working any more,” says Batbuyan, a specialist in pastoralism at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. “Younger herders don't really know the traditions. They want things written down.”

Alamy

Yet privatisation, say pastoral experts (though not most economists), would be a disaster, undermining centuries of institutional best practice. Inner Mongolia offers a cautionary tale. From the 1980s, pasture was, in effect, privatised through contracting-out. One justification was the threat of a tragedy of the commons. Fencing has gone up to delineate the private land. As a result, Inner Mongolia and Mongolia are distinguishable from the air: up to 40% of Inner Mongolia's steppe is reckoned to be degraded; less than 10% is in Mongolia.

Pastoral households, or even small groups of connected households, called khotail, form too small a unit to cope with the unpredictable weather and pasture conditions that characterise nomadic life. Proper mobility (sometimes the ability to move over 100 kilometres to a new pasture), and flexible access, are crucial to avoiding livestock losses and ensuring healthy herds. Private herds might one day gain the scale of former collective or feudal herds, but that is a long way off. Of some 275,000 households that own livestock, fewer than 1,000 have more than 1,000 animals. In the meantime, ways need to be found to make herding more co-operative.

One priority is to improve access. Outside Choibalsan, Dornod's capital, one herder, Ovgii, said he moved a year ago from the better pastures around Sumber, 300 kilometres to the east, because he can get more for his livestock: 40,000 tugrugs ($39) for a cow in Choibalsan, compared with 26,000 tugrugs in Sumber. Improved roads would lessen the discrepancy, and encourage more of the private co-operatives that are only now starting to take off, with groups of herders pooling resources for marketing and transport. Better roads would also improve distant herders' terms of trade, by lowering the price of flour, tea and Chinese consumer goods. Already, better information about market prices of produce such as cashmere, broadcast by radio, improves herders' bargaining power when traders come to buy wool.

Meanwhile, says the World Bank's Mr Mearns, herders need to share better the risks that collectives used to bear. Partly, this involves organising fodder provision, water supplies and pasture management. It also means spreading financial risk. One idea being developed with World Bank support is livestock insurance, with pay-outs calculated from data on a district's livestock mortality, weather and (using satellite imagery) vegetation growth. If growth failed, pay-outs to herders would be based on their livestock holdings.

Gankhuayg, a young former soum governor from Khentii province, argues for sweeping administrative changes, reshaping the artificial boundaries of the 300 soum set up under socialism, or even doing away with many of them; in effect, recreating hoshuu, the banners of old. That, advocates say, would better reflect the way herding is more intensive nearer the towns. It would also allow for more traditional roaming in remoter areas, including reciprocal access, for something approaching the large herds of former times. “The people who remain in those remote places,” says a Mongolian specialist in pastoralism, “will be Mongolia's toughest.”

from the print edition | Christmas Specials

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