In an effort to adapt to chronic shortages of rain, pastoralist communities in east Africa who had experimented with growing crops are reverting to herding livestock, writes Pius Sawa on the pages of Alertnet. But there are finding that their traditional approach to pastoralism must adapt to an increasingly stressed environment – and many are coming up with innovative approaches to the changing conditions. A shifting climate, a growing population, the loss of grazing land to state and private tourism efforts and the introduction of agricultural investment projects are major threats to land security and resources for pastoralists.
With help from the Ujamaa Community Resource Team, a non-government organisation, the region’s Maasai pastoralist community has instead now developed a plan to manage its grazing resources better. Land is divided into separate clusters for agriculture, grazing, wildlife conservation and human settlement.
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