The world is becoming increasingly unpredictable. The forces of weather, globalization, population, and disease create a dynamic environment that often challenges indigenous cultural, social, and economic systems. This dynamic environment creates risk in all aspects of everyday life. For the poor, with limited resources to buffer uncertainty, risk has become a dominant force. Severe weather events are more frequent and more intense. Their impact is compounded by growing populations living on marginal lands and using inappropriate cultivation techniques. The natural resource base, upon which the rural poor are so highly dependent, is degrading rapidly. Globalization has created unprecedented opportunities by fostering new financial and trade relationships, but it is also producing an unpredictable economic environment that adversely affects the poor.

The elimination of agricultural trade barriers by developing countries, without corresponding action by the OECD countries, has placed the agricultural sector of developing countries at a disadvantage. The role of disease is an increasingly important factor for both people and livestock. HIV/AIDS is changing the demography of poor countries, eating away at already insufficient human capacity and thereby weakening educational, scientific, and agricultural development. Animal disease is a major barrier to market access for developing countries. Rapid population growth in the developing world is also contributing to increased instability and unpredictability. A larger population puts more pressure on the natural resource base, dilutes national economic growth, and exacerbates conflict among different groups over access to key resources. For livestock producers, population growth often means the subdivision of land, which restricts their coping options.

Poor people, especially pastoralists who occupy marginal lands and often utilize inappropriate technology, are more exposed to risks than others because they are subject to highly variable weather and lack the personal and social resources to buffer unexpected perturbations in their lives. For most of the world's pastoralists, the major mechanism for dealing with unpredictability in the past was access to extensive grazing lands. The cultures and management systems of pastoralists reflected and depended on this coping strategy. As populations have increased, crop agriculture has encroached on marginal areas, particularly those with higher rainfall. This pattern has restricted pastoralists' access to traditional grazing lands, and their cultural and management systems have proven to be ill-adapted to cope with such changes. The loss of extensive grazing lands has forced pastoralists to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and concentrate their herds, which has challenged traditional cultural, social, and economic systems and degraded the natural resource base. Because pastoralists' traditional systems were self-contained and pastoralists were, to a great extent, independent of government authority, they now find themselves isolated, with limited access to information, services, and markets and with few indigenous coping options. Pastoralists are often reduced to competing within their region for critical resources, which leads to conflict and further instability.

Appropriate livestock development strategies depend on the ecology of production systems. New technologies and management strategies developed for more intensive systems are inappropriate for systems characterized by low rainfall and unpredictable weather events. Earlier livestock development efforts in sub-Saharan Africa attempted to apply models developed for systems in equilibrium, but recent research has shown that under conditions of unpredictable rainfall, development strategies need to focus on management of risk. Appropriate technological interventions and policy recommendations must also accommodate the unpredictable nature of the environment. Interventions must vary with the state of the system, and drought should be addressed as a continual risk rather than as an unexpected catastrophe. In systems dominated by abiotic factors, stocking rate-an equilibrium concept-is meaningless due to rapid plant resource changes. Development strategies that increase immigration and emigration of animals into and out of pastoral systems to accommodate drought and production cycles are of greater utility. Mechanisms for absorbing fluctuations in the availability of animals or for protecting grazing lands critical to opportunistic management will produce greater benefit than focusing on one dependent biological variable, such as livestock numbers. Policies that improve pastoralists' access to livestock markets and the efficiency of those markets are therefore very important.

The Global Livestock CRSP (GL-CRSP) projects focus on these arid and semi-arid environments, where human populations and natural resources are most vulnerable and, in most cases, where biodiversity is most valuable (particularly for tourism). In these areas, where pastoralists live with high levels of unpredictable variability, contingent responses to uncertain events have always characterized pastoral strategies. In recent decades, however, many pastoral and agro-pastoral societies, particularly those in East Africa, have been caught in a downward spiral of increasing poverty, chronic risk of livestock loss and famine, physical insecurity, and environmental degradation. The causes of such problems are multi-faceted and ultimately rooted in the pressure created when human populations grow on a static — or shrinking — base of natural resources. As poverty increases, pastoralists' options for buffering risks become more constrained and insecurity increases. Sedentary pastoralists are most at risk. In East Africa, billions of dollars have been spent in recent decades on famine relief for these populations.

To a great degree, the plight of pastoralists represents the condition of small livestock producers globally. Access to resources, be they information, markets, or technologies, are limited. Economic, social, and political systems are in dramatic transition, as witnessed in Central Asia. Markets are in turmoil, particularly at the local and national levels. The natural resource base (water and soil), as well as tenure systems and the accessibility of resources, are under attack by short-term strategies that often emphasize survival and extraction. Food insecurity and malnutrition constrain human capacity and national development.

The livestock sector review identified risk as a central theme affecting the lives of poor livestock holders in developing countries. GL-CRSP research indicates that a lack of coping options (alternative sources of income, information, connectivity to services and markets, weather prediction, mechanisms to manage natural resources, and resources to reduce malnutrition) is a primary cause of the poor development of this population. The GL-CRSP has focused on this concept.

The Livestock Information Network and Knowledge System for Enhanced Pastoral Livelihoods in East Africa (LINKS), GOBI Forage, and Improving Pastoral Risk Management on East African Rangelands (PARIMA) projects deal directly with information flow and coping strategies for diversifying income and increasing links to markets for pastoralists. They both work directly with pastoral populations and their natural resource base. The Multidisciplinary Research for Sustainable Management of Rural Watersheds: The River Njoro, Kenya (SUMAWA) project addresses one of East Africa's most important natural resource management issues: water. The project builds the science and the community capacity required to manage natural resources that are under attack by a growing population, increased livestock grazing and short-term extraction strategies that threaten a watershed and a major national park. National parks are a critical economic and social resource for the East African region. The Livestock Trade in Ethiopia and Kenya (LiTEK) project seeks to understand how terminal livestock markets function, in order to understand better how to connect interventions at the local level to national markets, which will ultimately lead to improvements in the ability of pastoralists to respond to drought.

For more information on these projects, please visit the GL-CRSP Projects Page