Agricultural economies in dryland areas are widely viewed as being in crisis, suffering from
persistent food insecurity due to a lack of rainfall. Many governments look for solutions that
require to replace existing livelihoods, seeking to master nature by choosing interventions to
'stabilise'the environment. But history shows that this rarely succeeds in the long term, and
commonly leads to many other problems. Environmental variability is on a path to become
the most frequent condition in agriculture. Mastery needs to give way to accepting and living …