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A Nation of Herders
From: Columbia University
| By:
Morris Rossabi |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
One of the largest countries in Asia is also one of the world's least populated. In Mongolia, one of the last pastoral economies in the world, as much as 35 percent  of the population is still engaged in nomadic pursuits. Although sheep are the most important, the traditional Mongolian herd animals also include goats, yaks, horses and camels.
In an interview with Fathom, Mongolia expert and Columbia University adjunct professor Morris Rossabi details the impact of present-day crises--from ecological disasters to unemployment--on Mongolia's herding economy. |
Morris Rossabi: Mongolia is about four times the size of France. It's an enormous country, and yet throughout history Mongolia has had a relatively small population. Right now, in 2000, Mongolia is more populated than ever before. But with a population of less than 2.5 million, Mongolia is one of the least densely populated countries in the world. In order to unify the Mongolian people at various times in its history, Mongolia required a great leader, an ecological disaster or a confederation of some sort. |
Fathom: How is Mongolia's economy unique? |
Rossabi: Mongolia's economy is unique to Asia, and possibly the world, because it still has a significant pastoral economy. About 35 percent of the Mongolian population earns its income from pastoral pursuits, mostly nomadic. |
In traditional times, the animals that the Mongols herded were often sent down to China to be consumed there either in the form of meat or in the form of hides and skins. All sorts of animal products were traded to the Chinese. |
Fathom: What are traditional Mongol animals? |
Rossabi: The five traditional animals in Mongolia are sheep, goats, yaks, horses and camels. The sheep is the most important of the animals, because sheep provide practically everything that the Mongol nomad needs--from food, to milk, to the felt that he uses in building yurts, the unique kind of tents that the Mongols have. Sheep dung is also used for fuel, so sheep are particularly important. There used to be many more sheep than any other animal. |
Second is the goat. The goat is also important for milk and meat purposes, but the goat is more devastating to the grasslands, and so in traditional times the number of goats was relatively limited. |
The third animal is the yak, or any bovine animal. They're much more difficult to handle, and there aren't as many of them. There are a certain number of yaks, but the Mongols don't necessarily depend upon them as much as they do on sheep and goats. |
 The fourth animal, the horse, was extremely important in mobility and warfare. Because the Mongols had such great cavalries, they had a tactical advantage over sedentary civilizations. |
Finally, the last animal is the camel. The camel is an important transport commodity, and it's also very important in trade. The camel is essential particularly in the southern part of Mongolia, in the Gobi desert, because it is ideally suited for desert travel. |
In the twentieth century, and particularly over the past 15 years, the number of camels has been reduced considerably. Their numbers have gone down drastically, about 50 percent or so, partly because of the substitution of jeeps and trucks for camels, and partly because the number of good camel grooms is very limited. |
Camels are capricious, and they are very fragile and difficult to breed. It requires very sophisticated knowledge to maintain a pregnancy in camels, so there has been a considerable decline in their numbers. |
Fathom: Is the camel population in Mongolia likely to disappear? |
Rossabi: It is possible that the camels will disappear, though I would say instead that they may continue to decline. That's been the pattern over the last 15 years, and it seems to be continuing. The latest statistics indicate a depreciation and decline in the number of camels. |
With the collapse of socialism, the government no longer provides trucks and  jeeps. The limited number of camels makes it extraordinarily difficult for the herders to bring their animals to market. Some Mongol herders now bring their animals closer to the market towns and cities where the animals will be bartered. |
But as more animals move closer to the cities and towns, they're degrading the grasslands there. It would literally pay to invest in trucks, jeeps, roads and other infrastructure in order to get the animals back to areas that would sustain them and to areas that would not be as devastated. |
Fathom: How else has the collapse of socialism affected the pastoral economy? |
Rossabi: Since the collapse of socialism there has been a higher rate of unemployment as factories and schools have been closed down. Those who became unemployed thought of herding as a safety net. They went back to herding without much experience in the pastoral economy, and they have failed. |
The large number of inexperienced herders contributed to Mongolia's pastoral crisis over the past few years. This crisis is deceptive, because statistics show that the number of animals in Mongolia has increased. The number of animals has increased from about 25 million to 32 million over the past decade, but the number of herding households has tripled in the past 10 years, contributing to the problems that exist in the pastoral economy. |
The large majority of these herders have not successfully bred their animals or cared for them in the proper way. Most have fewer than 100  animals. The usual figure for sustainability of a herd is about 100 to 125 animals; otherwise you're consuming the animals and not providing adequate reproduction. |
In addition, there is not very much of a market for the animals and meat that are the mainstays of the pastoral economy. There used to be a market with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but that market is closing down. And it is not a good sign that the number of animals has increased, because it means that older animals are consuming the resources of the herder and not contributing terribly much. |
Fathom: How has the market economy affected the decisions made by herders? |
Rossabi: In traditional times there was a ratio of the number of sheep to the number of goats. That ratio changed considerably with the development of the so-called market economy in the 1990s, because herders learned that there was a market for cashmere. So they increased the number of goats in their herds enormously, which was a horrendous mistake because it was devastating to the grasslands and led to degradation of some land, but it also made the herders very vulnerable to the vagaries of the price of cashmere. In fact, the price of cashmere in the mid-1990s went down dramatically and did not really increase till about 1999 and early 2000. |
This free-market decision should have been more planned out. The result of this increase in goats is that there's too much cashmere on the market, so the prices have not increased. |
Fathom: How nomadic is the nomadic economy? |
Rossabi: To have a really sustainable herding economy you need considerable movement. That's one area in which the new herders, who have come into herding over the past decade, have not succeeded too well. They don't understand that there needs to be a certain amount of mobility and a certain amount of movement of the animals so that you don't deplete the steppe lands. In times of natural disasters, when the steppe lands are afflicted by a disaster of one sort or another, the Mongols need to move quickly into an area that will sustain their animals. |
There is a special Mongolian term, otor, which refers to rapid movement, usually led by a few men, of a large number of animals to a rich area, sometimes tens or hundreds of miles away, to sustain them for the next winter. They feed them up so that they can survive a particularly bad winter. So, nomadism is critical for the survival of a pastoral economy. |
Fathom: How were nomadic patterns limited during the Soviet period? |
Rossabi: In their efforts to maintain control over the population, the Soviets and the Mongolian Communists tried to limit the migrations of the herders. Because the Soviets did not allow the herders to wander around and feed their animals in the proper way, the Soviets harmed the economy and allowed a certain degradation of the land. |
The Soviets and the Mongolian Communists were eager to control the population. The Mongols constantly moved around. Movement prevented them from controlling the population. It was hard to locate them and difficult to maintain the kind of authoritarian control possible if they were located in relatively small areas. |
Fathom: How are rural-urban economic structures interrelated? |
Rossabi: Mongolia's rural-urban structure is very curious. The capital city has about 30 percent of the total population, which worries geographers and specialists on environmental issues. |
The city inhabitants are basically consumers, and the factory economy barely exists. There used to be big meat-producing plants, a leather industry and a shoe industry, but most of those have died. The people who wind up in the cities are in the service-oriented informal sector, mostly catering to some of the wealthy Mongols and Westerners. It is a fragile setup. |
The other main cities seem to be much more stable. The cities Darhan and Erdenet are based on specific resources in those areas; Erdenet is a big copper center and Darhan has a number of different industries. |
In terms of rural-urban breakdown, about 35 percent are still in herding, and another 20 to 25 percent live in small provincial centers and towns and cater to the needs of the herders. These small provincial centers used to have small bread factories and shoe factories, among other things. Some of those factories have not survived, and the largest incidence of unemployment exists in those provincial centers. |
Fathom: What problems are faced by those who are really deciding to become herders? |
Rossabi: A considerable number of those who were laid off or unemployed as a result of the changes in the economy in the early 1990s felt they had no choice but to go back to the herding economy, not realizing that they had been living in communities or towns and had developed different kinds of skills. They simply assumed that the skills were transferable. |
Herding skills are very difficult to come by, and there's not a whole lot of education or books about herding to teach you the basics. That's one of the reasons the most famous herder in Mongolia, who wrote his autobiography in the 1990s, felt the need to write a manual for herders. |
He is working on the manual right now, and he hopes it will help inexperienced herders. The problem is that it is unclear whether there will be funding to publish this manual and make it widely available to herders. |
Fathom: Are these the final days of herding? |
Rossabi: It's hard to say what will happen in the Mongolian herding economy. While it is important not to dwell on the present crisis too much, the winter of 1999-2000 was much more devastating than anything that had occurred over the past 40 or 50 years. It led to the deaths of at least 2 million animals, if not more. |
There is some concern that this happened because facilities were not in place to deal with this crisis. The government acted very slowly; it didn't have enough resources, animal shelters or fodder. The government had not encouraged the building of animal shelters, as they had done during Mongolia's collective period, so there was little shelter available for animals during this horrendous winter. |
There also wasn't enough fodder to keep the animals going. There weren't enough veterinarians. The collectives had emphasized veterinarian services and had sent quite a number of veterinarians to be trained, but that has been reduced over the past 10 years. |
Mongolia is prone to such crises at least once a decade. Another crisis of this kind could be devastating for the Mongolian pastoral economy. In addition, the number of inexperienced herders who don't know much about herding and were not brought up herding could be a very serious impediment to the herding economy. |
The government has not made sufficient efforts to provide education and training for herders in the same way that the rural administration set up in the United States has done over the past 100 years or so. So it's unclear whether the pastoral economy will survive as a sustainable kind of economy. |
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