The Sahel’s experience of adapting to changes in rainfall on a scale at least comparable to that of climate change scenarios, between the 1960s and the 1990s, suggests that lessons can be learnt that may have a wider utility for policy in the future. The Sahel is a major global agroecological region and its success in adaptation will influence the achievement of the global Millennium Developmen...

Social hierarchies comprise different levels of consciousness, each of which is mediated by the other. The social condition of low status, while ideologically ‘‘fixed,’’ exists only with reference to those above, so neither is independent from the other. Between ethnic groups, especially across the mode of production divide, such as hunters and herders, hunters are often on the periphery of her...

A recurring argument in the global debate is that climate deterioration is likely to make social conflicts over diminishing natural resources more common in the future. The exact mechanism behind such a development has so far not been successfully characterized in the literature. In this paper, we present a general model of a community populated by farmers and herders who can either divide up l...

Livestock makes an important contribution to the livelihood of Sahelian farmers and herders and is a source of self-insurance against income shocks. By allocating livestock efficiently over space, spatial market integration should foster a sustainable use of pasture resources. It is also expected to favor the sharing of risk across regions by smoothing idiosyncratic price variations. Using mont...

This paper concerns risk perceptions of Swedish Saami reindeer herders in conjunction with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Focus is also placed upon their experiences of damage and their efforts to deal with these problems. Data relating to these social aspects of the Chernobyl event come from interviews with members of Saami herding families. The initial governmental policy of establishing a s...

Abstract In the Arctic, indigenous reindeer herding peoples rely on a pastoralist food and knowledge system that supplies them with protein, vitamins, minerals. Reindeer pastoralism is product of interaction between animals’ physical needs, their behaviour, skills herders. The systems Sámi pastoralists depend about mountain slaughtering. When first stationary slaughterhouse opened in Guovdageai...

There is an important problem of food security in the world that majority population underdeveloped country facing severity crisis. The large number non availability grains, scarcity sufficient quantity and consequent to which people have face malnutrition. It supply per capita has also increased manifold since 1961 with excessive use nitrogen fertilizers modern irrigation facilities. main culp...

Recent work suggests that global variation in toolkit structure among hunter-gatherers is driven by risk of resource failure such that as risk of resource failure increases, toolkits become more diverse and complex. Here we report a study in which we investigated whether the toolkits of small-scale farmers and herders are influenced by risk of resource failure in the same way. In the study, we ...

When Odysseus left the devastated city of Troy after ten years of siege he could not foresee the perils he still had to face. The encounter with the cyclops, a giant with only one eye placed in the middle of its forehead, was doubtlessly one of the creepiest and most dangerous of his adventures. In the end, Odysseus could only escape with the help of a sheep. Whether Homers cyclops was inspired...

On the global scale, extensive pastoral production accounts for 10% of total meat production (or a billion head of camels, cattle and small animals on all continents)1 and supports some 200 million pastoral households. Yet, despite the considerable benefits conferred by pastoral production systems, they are often denigrated as being archaic. [R1] On the African continent, despite these subjecti...