Informations et ressources scientifiques
sur le développement des zones arides et semi-arides

Titre : Surviving pastoral decline : pastoral sedentarisation, natural resource management and livelihood diversification in Marsabit District, Northern Kenya

Auteur : Witsenburg K.M. and Roba A.W.

Université de soutenance : University of Amsterdam

Grade : Doctor aann de Universiteit van Amsterdam 2004

Présentation
It is presently widely acknowledged that pastoral mobility is a sustainable use of the African drylands.. Livestock keeping is an efficient way to use vegetation in a zone where no agricultural crop can grow sustainably, without massive investments. However, since 1970, numerous drawbacks in the pastoral economy, like droughts, war and declining terms of trade for pastoralists have pushed an increasing number of families out of pastoralism. This poses dilemmas for the future of pastoral communities. Even though pastoral mobility may be sustainable for the pastures, nomadic people today often own too few animals to subsist from. This means that an increasing number of pastoralists have to look for alternative resources to earn a living. Urban or agricultural settlements near water points or in sub-humid (mountainous or riverine) areas are therefore growing in many sub-Saharan regions. Especially impoverished pastoralists settled in these more humid zones to build up other livelihoods. . However,, such small, humid pockets in the drylands have been used in the past by pastoralists as fallback areas in times of drought. They also function as important nature reserves and water retention areas. That such areas are now increasingly occupied by people who cannot subsist from animals alone, signals a dialectical process within the pastoral production system : the poor are sloughed off by the system and settle in wetter zones. However,, this enlarges the problems faced by the nomadic people. Whether the present pastoral production system is sustainable without a structural change to overcome this contradiction is therefore doubtful. This study was inspired by a concern about the declining trends in livestock and the challenges it posed to pastoral people to overcome this threat to their survival. Migration to Marsabit Mountain, where rainfall is relatively high and agriculture is possible, increased population pressure and poses a challenge to the environmental sustainability in the settlements.. We investigated why people settled and what the effect had been on resources and the traditional institutions that govern them. We compared the socio-economic background and welfare of three types of households : nomadic households, households that had been helped in settlement schemes and those who settled spontaneously.

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