15 Ethiopian Case Study ABDUL

which dominates most of the economies in the region, relies heavily on the livestock subsector for its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP), estimated at 32 percent in the last decades for the region as a whole (Winrock International 1992). The region's growing population relies heavily on livestock products for their daily dietary requirement. The provision of draught power and manure also contributes a great deal toward improving the stability and sustainability of cultivation in agropastoral systems. Because discussions on the multifarious role of livestock in the region is already abundant in the literature, this topic is not be emphasized in this chapter. Livestock production in Sub-Saharan Africa is dominated by pastoralism and agropastoralism. These are traditional systems that evolved in response to the region's diverse agricultural environment arid, semi-arid, subhumid, and highland zones with varying temperatures, altitudes, soil types, and natural vegetation (Jahnke 1982). These diverse agroclimates—coupled with disease constraints, divergence in cultural preferences and economic incentives— influence the distribution of animals throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Pastoral-ism is practiced in areas not suitable for cultivation; and agropastoralism, in areas where the agroclimatic conditions favor crop production. Pastoralism in the region, in general, is characterized by the daily, seasonal, or yearly movement of animals —in response to the region's fluctuating weather conditions to reduce risks associated with the use of variable rangelands. An estimated 25 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa derive their livelihood directly from pastoralism, while the number of agropastoralists is estimated at 240 million (Swallow 1994). Pastoralism has survived through many centuries as a production system in Sub-Saharan Africa. In recent decades, however, it has been observed that pas-toralism is in continuous decline because of threats posed by human population growth, by increasing crop cultivation, and by other human activities that shift extensive livestock-production to areas of primary productivity that are increasingly marginal. Government policies—especially land-use policies—over the past decades have hardly been in favor of pastoralists. Land-tenure policies in most parts of Africa were designed to support sed-entarization; indeed privatization, which by implication was supportive of crop production, limits pastoralism to marginalized areas (Ault and Rutman 1979; Ethiopian Case Study 397 Kirk 1996). Pastoralism was to be " modernized " through the introduction of state ranches, fattening centers, and forced organization of pastoralists into strictly supervised pastoral associations. Most of these policies and interventions have, over the decades, only proved to be inappropriate, 1 as they underestimated …