The policy document uses 800 words to explain this pillar. By comparison, the five specific objectives are dealt with in 136 words altogether.

COMMENTARY

1. Pastoralists’ demands? Just a few lines into the explanation of this Pillar, the document rephrases it quite significantly, saying that ‘one of the pillars of the Pastoral Development Policy is strengthening and commercializing the livestock resources through improvement of the natural resources management and sustainable utilization of the surface and underground water resources’. This seems quite different from improving the livelihoods of mobile pastoralists. Besides which, ‘strengthening and commercializing livestock resources’ is substantially the same as ‘increasing livestock production and marketing’, which has been the historical goal of pastoral development across sub-Saharan Africa.
   In the 1970s, analysts of pastoral development policies in the Sahel were already pointing out that ‘Most “development” programs are conceived from above, and emphasize sedentarization, controlled grazing, and a shift from subsistence dairying to commercial beef production. The programs are deficient in involving herdsmen in their planning and implementation, and fail to demonstrate how the herdsmen are to be the prime beneficiaries of the changes’.[1]
   In Ethiopia, increasing livestock production and productivity and promoting the commercialization of the livestock sector were already the goals of pastoral development interventions in the 1960s.[2] Agriculture-based industrialization – if not yet specifically livestock-based – was the goal of the 2005 Agricultural Development-Led Industrialization (ADLI) strategy and the first Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP I). The theory of change behind Pillar 1 is therefore neither centered on pastoral systems or a change from the past.
2. Supporting pastoralists’ livelihoods and ecology or supporting the livestock industry? The theory of change at work in this pillar is explained as follows: ‘Maximizing livestock production and productivity could result in improving the livelihood and income of pastoralists’; and this will and shall lead to livestock-based industrialization that takes animal products as primary input. This policy goal will be realized where …’. This wording is loaded with meaning. First, it is evident where the focus of this pillar really is: maximizing livestock production and the productivity of livestock-based industrialization. Improving pastoralists’ livelihoods, although presented upfront as a policy principle, is effectively regarded just as a possible outcome, something that could result from the main focus of industrializing the livestock sector.
3. The core policy goal unmentioned in the policy objectives. Livestock-based industrialization is described as a ‘policy goal’: ‘Maximizing livestock production and productivity … will and shall lead to livestock-based industrialization … This policy goal will be realized where …’. A goal is the same as an objective, and yet there is no reference to industrialization in any of the policy objectives.
4. Inverting the requirement for complementarity. The explanation of Pillar 1 claims that the realization of livestock-based industrialization will include ‘working processes which ensure that the mobile animal husbandry would be complementary rather than contradictory’. A requirement for complementarity with pastoral systems (rather than competition with them) is often found in recommendations for pastoral development projects, introducing options for livelihood diversification. Here, though, the direction of complementarity seems to have been reversed: rather than ensuring that the alternative options are complementary with pastoralism, it is about ensuring that mobile pastoral husbandry is complementary with the goal of livestock-based industrialization. This is an approach to pastoral development that is clearly not centered on pastoralism.
5. Fruit and vegetables, bee-keeping, and fishing? The rest of the description of Pillar 1 is an overview of the thirteen sectoral strategies, showing how these effectively follow from the pillars. Worthy of particular note are two remarks on page 28: ‘depending on market linkages, pastoralists shall be encouraged to be engaged in fruit and vegetable production through irrigation; in modern beekeeping; and fishery activities’; and ‘For mobile pastoralists, basic social services and infrastructure that is compatible with their mobility, shall be provided and expanded with the assistance of technology’. While the latter seems appropriate and welcome, the former is hard to explain outside an approach that distinguishes ‘pastoralists’ from ‘mobile pastoralists’ and assumes that the people in the first category are settled and therefore need to find alternative livelihood strategies, while those in the second category, as explained in Pillar 2, need to join the former.

[1] M.M. Horowitz, ‘Adaptive Strategies in the Sahel, before and after the Drought’, in J. Gallais (ed.), Stratégies pastorales et agricoles des Sahéliens durant la sécheresse 1969–1974 (Paris: CEGET, 1977), p.221.

[2] E.N. Gebremeskel, S. Desta and G.K. Kassa , Pastoral Development in Ethiopia: Trends and the Way Forward (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019).

Pillar 2: Conduct Voluntary Commune Programs to Improve the Income Sources and Living Standards of People Living in the Pastoral Areas (diversification and commercialization of pastoral livelihoods) (p.29) »