Pastoral Livestock Marketing in Eastern and Southern Africa: Research and Policy Challenges (review)

Longstanding problems regarding the livelihoods of East African pastoralists and how they interact with outside interests and actors have perplexed governments, policymakers, and development workers—not to mention pastoralists themselves—since at least the onset of the colonial era. How pastoralist peoples of the region interface with the rest of the world is important to regional food security, livelihood security, personal security, and even national security, including international concerns about the emergence and viability of particular political and ideological agendas. With poverty among pastoralists and the future viability of pastoralism in East Africa a primary concern in this regard, livestock marketing is seen as a way to decrease poverty, increase livelihood resiliency, and establish economic relationships. In this context, this volume makes a significant contribution.

The book is an outcome of a project sponsored by the Global Livestock Collaborative Research Support Project of the University of California– Davis, with partial funding by USAID. The chapters comprise a variety of approaches and issues, from econometrics to descriptive, and from marketing behavior at the household level to the difficulties of marketing across borders and problems with data collection.

One of the values of the book is that most of the chapters are the result of field research, often over significant time, and by researchers who have a great deal of experience working in eastern Africa and with pastoral groups. Readers familiar with pastoralist issues in east Africa will recognize many of the authors, as they are widely published and have engaged in a variety of applied projects.

The volume begins with a forward by Stephen Sandford, the former head of the Livestock Economics Division at the International Livestock Commission for Africa, who articulates the present situation regarding pastoralism and ways to escape from the present crisis. The four escapes noted, however, might be joined by an additional possibility: that pastoralism as a production system, or reduced to a partial system, morphs into other forms, as has occurred with some of the Fulani in Cameroon, and with the Somali in Kenya, as described by Mahmoud in chapter 8.

A couple of the chapters that engage in the econometric treatment of livestock marketing tend to be a bit reductionist and seem to assume quite a bit with regard to the "savior" notion of "the market" (chapter 2, Barrett, Bellemare and Osterloh; chapter 4, Adugna; chapter 5, Green et al.). In this regard, a number of assumptions seem to be left wanting elaboration. For example in chapter 2, Barrett, Bellemare, and Osterloh, could have elaborated more precisely how the stimulation of a livestock market will in turn stimulate pastoralists, well being. Additionally, it is unclear how increases in institutional and physical infrastructure will increase the attractiveness of nonpastoral investments by pastoralists, given that pastoralists' goals and objectives in reality are often not aligned with Western logical economic reasoning. In chapter 6, Radeny et al. note that pastoralist communities need to be more aware of "market responsiveness to animal attributes, seasonal price patterns and market types," with the assumption that livestock-keeping communities care about such attributes and their relationships to the market, given that they often sell only when and where they need cash. Thus, while the analytical rigor of the econometric chapters is appreciated, such rigor as applied to nomadic and transhumant pastoralism has been around for quite a while, with generally disappointing policy and development outcomes, in part because of the persistence of assumptions regarding pastoralists' intersection with markets. Perhaps one overall question coming out of the book, with data collection being as difficult as it is regarding east African pastoralists (chapter 10, Little), is how realistic the econometric attempts at producing realistic models, solutions, and recommendations are.

Several refreshing examinations of important but usually unanalyzed or assumed-to-be-irrelevant aspects of pastoralism are consequential to marketing. Among these is the issue of the stigma that many national governments attach to pastoralism, and...