Pastoralism Beyond Ranching: A Farming System in Severe Stress in Semi-arid Tropics Especially in Africa

Pastoralism is the most traditional of ruminant livestock production systems in which extensive movement of the animals in search of pastures and water is its salient feature. Whereas the system is adapted to exploit the dry, arid climatic zone, it often overlaps into wetter, agricultural land, occasionally ending up into violent conflicts. Ranching is practically the intensive form of pastoralism but it has a weakness of being seen as antisocial and needing high initial capital. Whatever other truly improved system of exploiting the pastoral agro-ecosystem, it seems it seldom can indict sedentarized tendencies and rarely can it be less intensive than ranching. This paper argues that the mobility survival strategy of pastoralism does not solve the problem the system itself creates. The paper further argues that because it is a livelihood system pastoralism will continue to thrive but so long as it cannot contain the internal pressures within itself and in presence of various external pressures, the system is destined to disintegrate as well as is destined to self-destruction. With the urgency to satisfy ever increasing global food needs, extensive practices such as nomadic pastoralism will continue to diminish at least in the peripheries of crop cultivation.