This activity focuses on people in settlements and crop farming.

It consists in establishing irrigation schemes in pastoral areas where there is relatively higher water availability:

• encouraging and supporting ‘people in the pastoral areas … to settle in development centers’;
• expanding ‘medium and large irrigation projects using pumps and gravity, etc. technology … to improve their [people in development centers] livelihood sustainably’;
• building ‘irrigation canals … in government owned mega project areas … to enable pastoralists [to] produce food crops and livestock fodder; and empower them to be out-growers producing crops for the mega projects’;
• preparing ‘legal and regulatory frameworks … to govern fair water resource sharing systems that ensure equal access and prevent conflict between lower and upper course riparian’.

COMMENTARY

1. Producing crops for industry. The description of this activity includes introducing medium and large irrigation projects for ‘producing crops that are necessary inputs for industries established in different places’. It is unclear whether ‘different places’ means outside the pastoral areas or simply not in the same place as the irrigation scheme.
2. From irrigation to sedentarization. This implementation activity links irrigation schemes to the program for the sedentarization of pastoralists addressed under Sectoral Strategy 1. One of the aims is to encourage people to settle in development centers built in areas where water resources are available.
3. ‘Empower’ pastoralists to become agricultural labor? ‘In government owned mega project areas, irrigation canals shall be built in order to enable pastoralists [to] produce food crops and livestock fodder; and empower them to be out-growers producing crops for the mega projects’ (p.41). ‘Government-owned-mega-projects’ in pastoral areas are built on state land, which is commonly managed rangeland converted to ‘State Domain’ by the Revised Constitution of 1955 and which has never been returned to its previous status as a pastoral resource.[1]
4. Dwelling on the mistakes of the past? The choice of the term ‘empower’ to describe the conversion from pastoralism to agricultural labor is telling. In a logic of development ‘on the basis of pastoral livelihood systems’ (the first policy objective), clearly pastoralists are not ‘empowered’ by abandoning their livelihood system and become agricultural laborers. The only logic by which the use of this term makes sense is one in which pastoralism is assumed to be inherently ‘weaker’ or ‘lower’ than crop farming. Only within this perspective it is possible to see the process of becoming an agricultural laborer as ‘empowerment’. But isn’t this precisely ‘the attitude that considers pastoralism as a backward livelihood system, without clearly understanding it’, which is denounced in the policy as one of the mistakes of the past, and which ‘have been observed as contributing factors to the underdevelopment of the pastoral areas’ (p.13)?

[1] Revised Constitution, 1955, art. 130: ‘All property not held and possessed in the name of any person natural or juridical, including all land in escheat, and all abandoned properties, whether real or personal, as well as all products of the sub-soil, all forests and all grazing lands, water courses, lakes and territorial waters are State Domain’.

d. Expand hydro power and alternative energy development (p.41) »