Saving Stripes

Category: Rangeland management | Date: Sep 14 2009 | By: savingstripes

Instead of patronizing the motel restaurant again, Tegegn suggested that we go into Yabello town for breakfast. We soon found ourselves at a restaurant that looked a lot like a kindergarten: we sat on miniature multi-colored plastic stools eating off miniature plastic tables in an outdoor area surrounded by colorful murals. Here, we discovered “ful” (a sort of bean stew served for breakfast) and “special ful” – ful served with a bit of fried egg and spiced cheese, along with a big fluffy roll. Full of ful, we headed to the CARE Borana office up the road.

We spent most of the rest of the morning talking to Aliyu, a rangeland expert who has been working with CARE and with the Borana for more than 15 years. From talking with Aliyu, we got the impression that the customary institutions and land management practices are more intact in Borana than in northern Kenya. For example, the elders’ leadership in making decisions about when to graze an area still seem to be respected. In Kenya, there seems to be more conflict and more fragmentation of the land into “group ranches” – probably because past (and current?) government policies deliberately undermined traditional management and leadership institutions.

Armed with lots of information and reading material, we agreed to meet Aliyu after lunch for a short field excursion. For lunch, we took Tegegn’s suggestion for another restaurant in town. At first we were a bit dubious. The place was not as nice looking as the kindergarten restaurant, and it smelled like kerosene. But the shiro was delicious – probably the best we had encountered so far. Tegegn ordered the shiro with chunks of garlic in it – a different twist. Good for preventing mosquitos in these lowland areas, he said. We also found that this place also served beyeinatu – a sort of variety platter of different lentil and vegetable dishes, arranged on a big round injera. It was also very tasty.

In the afternoon, Aliyu, took us to a government-owned ranch whose main mission is preserving the Boran cattle breed. Incidentally, this breed is prized by ranchers in Laikipia. The Boran cattle are handsome animals; the cows have sweet faces, while the bulls are impressive with their bulk and substantial fatty humps on their backs. We were interested to see that the purebred Borans on this ranch were all white – unlike the brown, gray, and mottled bunch outside. The ranch has a history of being lightly grazed and provided a nice contrast to the more heavily grazed conditions we saw outside the ranch.

Like most of the Borana region, however, much of the government ranch was heavily bushed – a big change from several decades ago. Why have areas that were once open grasslands turned into dense shrublands? There is no simple answer to this question. Most people in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia blame the government and other outsiders for banning fire. Traditionally, pastoralists in these areas deliberately set fires to keep back the bush, freshen the grass (the grass that resprouts after fire is highly nutritious) and to get rid of ticks and tsetse flies. Starting around the 70s, fire was banned or discouraged in these areas, preventing people from using this tool to keep small trees and shrubs from establishing.

But is fire the whole story? We think it’s one, but not the only, cause of woody encroachment. There are at least three other things that have also changed in the last few decades. For one thing, grazing pressure has increased, so there is less grass to compete with the trees. Another change is one we mentioned two posts ago: no more elephants (or rhino). Without these hugely destructive herbivores, trees also gain the upper hand. And what about climate change? There is some evidence that rising carbon dioxide levels favor trees over tropical grasses.

Regardless of the cause, though, the result stands: there are a lot of trees in most of these rangelands now, a lot more than people want, and undoing that change is a huge task (more on that tomorrow).