Economic Spaces of Pastoral Production and Commodity Systems

Markets and Livelihoods

Richard Le Heron, Jörg Gertel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409425311
• eBook ISBN: 9781317146131
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Pastoralism as a land use system is under recognized in terms of its contribution to food provision, livelihoods as well as to human security. This book is the first attempt to explore the dynamics of economic spaces of pastoral production and commodity systems for explicit South and North positionings. It develops and applies a new approach in combining agri-food, market and commodity chain perspectives with livelihood approaches. This enables new understandings of re-aligning exchange relations between the global south and the global north. The case studies presented open up new empirical insights in largely under-researched areas, such as Afghanistan, Chad, Tibet and Siberia and very recent changes in industrialized economies with major pastoral sectors. The book reveals new evidence and theoretical insights about significant changes in established producer-consumer relations in agriculture and food.

PART I
Pastoralists in the Market

Chapter 1
Introduction: Pastoral Economies Between Resilience and Exposure

Jörg Gertel and Richard Le Heron

This book attempts to interrogate early twenty-first century pastoralism and pastoral economies by putting into tension ideas about markets and livelihoods. As such it is a project in the spirit of recent research and scholarship in economic geography, agri-food and development studies dedicated to producing knowledge on a planetary scale. The book asks three questions that draw on and point to new research imaginaries in a globalising world. The questions are:

• What does it mean to try to make a livelihood from pastoralism in different parts of the world?

• How are markets implicated in the livelihoods of pastoralists, wherever they are to be found?

• How far does or should, livelihood-informed thinking and action that emerges in particular geographic contexts necessarily mean engaging in market-making relations?

Our questions are designed to ground the book’s enquiry in the remarkably rich resource of field-centred ethnographic research on pastoralism and pastoral economies that is available, and to unsettle the categories of livelihood and markets that form very different points of entry into any research on socio-economic relations. They spring from a growing awareness and concern that across every sphere of economic activity market fundamentalism and triumphalism are sweeping away questions that challenge its market assertions, claims and promises. They are in fact unashamedly questions that prioritise and foreground human concerns of everyday surviving, living and hoping, questions that prompt reflection on the bodily placement of pastoralists as they strive to handle their exposure to multiple influences and seek to create conditions of some stability and resilience. In asking these questions we are forced to examine how situated knowledges about pastoral economies accumulated in different parts of the world might be framed into new and deeper understandings. In this way our open ended questions embrace wider intellectual concerns such as ‘where do markets or livelihood practices come from’ and ‘how are they performed into existence, by and for whom?’

The questions initially began to surface during our dialogue at the April 2006 conference on ‘Pastoralists and the World Market: Problems and Perspectives’ at the University of Leipzig, Germany. The conference formed part of the major German funded research programmes on ‘Difference and Integration – Interdependencies between Nomadic and Sedentary People’ (SFB 586) and ‘Critical Junctures of Globalisation’ (GRK 1261). Being able to bring together researchers whose pastoral economy interests spanned much of the globe afforded an unprecedented opportunity to probe issues relating to globalising processes through the lens of territorially distributed empirical and longitudinal studies. The great social and economic thinker, Karl Polanyi, who has influenced many contributing to the book, might have described the conference as a proto-project in comparative economy, given its focus on empirically informing discussion of pastoral economies and positioning them relative to their others. We should add, however, that while our questions may be ambitious, the book is more modest in its aspiration and what it achieves. Our step, in seeking to elucidate new styles of knowing pastoralism and pastoral economies is, we hope, to have used empirics and theorising creatively and differently.

When we began to outline our individual and collectively diverse research trajectories to each other at the conference we soon realised we were doing a global mapping of pastoralism and particular experiences of differing pastoral economies. The research trajectories were more than case studies put in a row. They rather reflected insights from very different situations all over the world. Indeed, the presenters were speaking from and about many contexts, that when considered through the eyes of the German and French academy, have been the focus of ongoing and heavily funded research programmes over many years. The Collaborative Research Centre ‘Difference and Integration’ at the Universities of Leipzig and Halle (SFB 586, 2001-2012) is focusing, for example, on interdependencies between nomadic and sedentary people, the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle is analysing integration and conflict in Asian and African societies, the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix-en-Provence has a long standing research interest in North African mobilities, and the Collaborative Research Centre Akazia in Bonn (SFB 389, 1996-2008) investigated arid climate, adaptation and cultural innovation in Africa. The experiences recounted all added up to a highly variegated landscape of human experience and knowledge relating to pastoralism and pastoral economies.

As editors, we reflected on the most strategic intervention that would allow the research programmes of the mainly European participants to be performative. By this we aimed to place the wealth of research into a new framing that elicited fresh and globally useful knowledge. Driven by the conference design, the provocation of putting markets and livelihoods into tension was very effective. The responsiveness to this framing on the part of participants was challenging. In their experience, the worlds of production and pastoral economies could not be reduced to one or the other of these categories. Moreover, the inseparability of markets and livelihoods struck a clear chord with the researchers present. The connections and relationships between markets and livelihoods dominated the discussion.

The keynote speakers at the conference, Barbara Harriss-White and Hans-Georg Bohle, directly challenged the hidden privileging of markets in the global commodity chain, global supply chain and global value chain and livelihood literatures as well as the market centred discourses of national and international policy communities. As successive presenters articulated the specifics of the pastoral economies they were studying we began to appreciate the remarkable revelatory experience we were sharing. The conference priority of assembling a group of researchers investigating pastoralism in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, regardless of academic traditions of declaring strong messages about correct ways to represent pastoralism, led to an equivalence of stature of pastoralism from any place with other places, and an equivalence of contribution amongst the presenters regardless of their background and longevity of field research. This was felt at the time. No recounted experience of pastoralism was any more or less relevant, pertinent or illustrative of pastoral economy experiences. No presentation had more or less merit because its narrative was tied to particular theoretical categories about or to which participants had more or less exposure or commitment. These conditions of engagement led to an openness of exchange around shared and up-to-date accounts with carefully framed critiques of the crucial categories of markets and livelihoods. Started by the conference and furthered by ongoing empirical and conceptual work in the collaborative research centres we established a discursive field around knowledge production on economic spaces of pastoral economies (see for example: www.nomadsed.de).

Situating Pastoralism and Pastoral Economies

The following five observations seek to establish a number of broad contours of pastoralism and to situate research on pastoral economies within the broader field of geographical knowledge production. First, pastoral activities are the reality of many people’s livelihood practices around the globe. Extensive pastoral production takes place on some 25 per cent of the world’s land area, it comprises herds of nearly a billion head of camel, cattle and smaller livestock and provides 10 per cent of global meat production. Livestock production is crucial for the livelihoods and well-being of up to 200 million households (Rass 2007). Until recently the largest share of benefits generated by pastoralism was obtained from grazers on marginal lands, where other economic activities provide lower returns or were not viable at all. But land use and market systems are changing at a rapid pace. Globalisation, growing international interdependencies, and integration into foreign exchange systems are fostering new pressures but are also creating new opportunities for pastoralist producers.

Second, there is little recognition of the existence of pastoral activities. The diverse characteristics of pastoralism and pastoral economies are commonly misrepresented, its importance understated and their diversity and enduring nature discounted. Statistical knowledge, especially counting, and more precisely the translation of social relation systems into numerical relation systems, is a major part of continually constituting the world of modern power that nomadic people inhabit. Pastoral and nomadic societies are probably among the most important groups that escape the counting practises of sedentary powers. Pastoral production provides multiple products, such as meat, hides, milk, hair, blood, and manure, while livestock also perform additional roles such as transport and draught power, food storage, and capital reserve, as cash buffer and a hedge against inflation. Yet, knowledge concerning pastoral production and marketing remains weak, however, they are part of the ‘diverse economies’ (Gibson-Graham 2008) – characterised, for example, by non-market transactions, unpaid labour, and non-capitalist enterprises. Official statistics barely capture economic values associated with pastoralism (Breuer 2005). Movement and mobility mean pastoralists and their herds (or in more sedentary arrangements, livestock flows amongst farms, en route to meat or other processing plants and from country to country) are hard to contain within national statistical systems. Many goods and services provided by pastoralist systems, particularly in Africa and Asia, are statistically unknown, due to their ‘informal’ activities (classified as such by sedentarised urban powers), the lack of systematic data collection and the failure to disaggregate national datasets into others. As a consequence, the economic and social contribution of nomadic people and pastoral societies remains structurally underestimated. In the same line of argument the framing of data deficits pops up in neoliberal contexts of ‘integration’, when international ‘development’ agencies complain, for example, about the lack of rigorous data on possible transmission of animal disease and viruses, and lament the constraints in guaranteeing reliable and sustained commodity supply for export markets.

Third, until now analyses of pastoral commodity and livestock marketing systems have been restricted to regional perspectives. Zaal (1999) focuses on two African countries (Kenya and Burkina Faso), Schlee’s (2004) edition on ethnicity and livestock markets concentrates on West Africa, while McPeak and Little (2006) investigate pastoral livestock marketing in eastern Africa. A complementary regional focus is provided by Kerven’s (2003) collection that reveals the effects of large-scale privatisation in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan (see Bruun 2006 for Mongolia). Recent insights for Latin America are provided by Westreicher et al. (2007), Grandia (2009), van Ausdal (2009), and Walker et al. (2009). So far, only Chang and Koster (1994) offer a wider geographical range of case studies, their approach, however, remains largely historical.

Fourth, beyond this background there are four significant dynamics that are constitutive of the broad contours of world markets and the particular articulations of pastoral economies: (a) Pastoral production for world export markets is regionally concentrated. The global sheep meat market is dominated by Australia and New Zealand, and so is the wool export market. Excluding intra-EU trade, 88 per cent of the world trade in sheep meat is sourced from them (see Fig. 16.2). In contrast, almost 50 per cent of the world beef exports originate from four countries in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay) (Brown 2009). Large national livestock production, however, does not necessarily correspond with high volumes of export. China, although a major producer of meat and wool, is a net importer. (b) Nomadic pastoral production in Africa and Asia – though increasingly commercialised – seldom meets international standards, particularly for meat; marketing is either protected (by tariffs) or restricted (by frontiers and regulations) to national markets, trans-border and proximate regional trade. However, millions of pastoral households depend on their livestock to make a living in rural areas. Yet, while meat from beef, sheep, goats and yak rarely reach affluent customers around the world, niche products for international export markets, particularly from Asia – such as cashmere from Mongolia, reindeer antlers from Siberia or caterpillar fungus from Tibet – constitute far reaching economic spaces. (c) The processes and patterns of organisations linking producers and consumers constantly anew can be conceptualised as constitutive of economic spaces made up of relations near and far. Sheep meat, for example, is supplied from Western Australia as live sheep to Arab Gulf countries and competes in Saudi Arabia with live sheep from Somalia or Sudan and with frozen meat from New Zealand. Driven by urbanisation, oil wealth, realigning retail structures, and concerns of animal welfare consumption patterns change with crucial economic impacts. The global halal market, for example, amounts to US$ 2.1 trillion and is growing at an annual rate of US$ 500 million (ACIL Tasman 2009). (d) Pastoral livelihoods, both in industrialised countries (i.e. Australia, New Zealand) and also in least developed countries (i.e. Somalia, Sudan) are often linked. They might even depend on the very same (external) decisions, political regimes and economic regulations that are often beyond their reach. The transport of expensive premium lamb meat cuts from New Zealand to European supermarkets takes advantage of New Zealand’s guaranteed sheep-meat quota into the EU of 227,854 tonnes. This in return limits market opportunities for proximate North African pastoralists.

Finally, from the point of view on market and livelihood encounters experienced by nomads, pastoralists and farmers, exchange relations are always embedded in societal structures. Markets and livelihoods are inextricably linked, and are continuously reproducing and constituting (new) economic spaces. As Massey (1999: 28) reminds us, space is, first of all, a product of interrelations, constituted through interactions. Space is also a sphere of multiplicity, in which distinct trajectories coexist. As interrelations are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, space is always in a process of becoming – it is never finished, never closed. ‘This relationality of space together with its openness means that space also always contains a degree of the unexpected, the unpredictable’ (Massey 1999: 37). Subsequently, our framing of economic spaces conceptualises them as being constituted through interactions, as spheres of multiplicity, as historically superimposed trajectories, as unfinished, and always in the process of being made. Moreover, economic spaces are inextricably constituted by economic knowledge (Mitchell 2008). But there is no simple divide between a virtual world of economic theory and a real world outside it. Every economic project hence involves – as Mitchell puts it – ‘multiple arrangements of the simulated and that to which it refers’ (Mitchell 2008: 1116). This feature has much bearing on how understandings of pastoralism and pastoral economies are shaped. Often simplistic assumptions of the state of things are contested by lived realities.

These five aspects are in a manner of speaking tests of lived realities, connections back to the presence of undervalued life. They register pastoralism and pastoral economies into framings that make broadly visible their hidden dynamism. But this increased visibility is hardly a sufficient investigative end. It is stepping off point and a basis for analysis. A preliminary look at exchange relations provides the beginnings of a re-orientation, in which it becomes possible to learn from the subject matter of experience about relations around which politics and ethics of survival may form.

Conceptual Approaches to Markets and Livelihoods

Informed by economic anthropology and its contextual knowledge of exchange relations the book is unreservedly a study of economic geographies, involving socia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I PASTORALISTS IN THE MARKET
• PART II FROM SUBSISTENCE TO MARKET PRODUCTION: POST-COLONIAL AFRICA
• PART III FROM STATE TO MARKET PRODUCTION: POST-SOCIALIST CONTEXTS
• PART IV FROM COMMERCIALISED PRODUCTION TO INTEGRATED MARKETS
• Index