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During the Soviet era, an impressive system of cattle breeding and pasture use developed in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Combining effective methods of collective cattle breeding with Kazakh nomadic culture's thousand years of experience, this led to 35 million cattle and 20 million saiga antelope grazing freely on Kazakhstani soil in the 1980s. But the situation has changed dramatically since independence in 1991, with detrimental effects both for herders and for biodiversity.
Rangelands in this vast country occupy an area equivalent to one-third of the European Union, yet modern farmers suffer from a severe shortage of grazing land. They are allotted 100-200 hectares of land for farming, and have no right to use other land beyond that. Land near the villages is overused and becomes infertile, while remote pastures in rural districts go ungrazed, becoming overgrown and vulnerable to increasingly prevalent forest fires.
Local experts claim that there are 188.59 million hectares of natural pastures in our country, of which 26.4 million hectares are completely degraded. According to the World Resources Institute, the figure is twice as high: 26 percent of that land, or about 48 million hectares of pasture, is degraded. These figures are from 10 years ago, but the area of degraded land is unlikely to have decreased since then. This land has to support, as of 2020, 20.9 million sheep and goats, 8.2 million cattle, 3.5 million horses and about 250,000 camels, not to mention wildlife including 48 million birds.
The Collective System
These rural pasture areas formed the basis of collective agriculture in the Soviet period. The arable and irrigated lands of the villages produced grain, and cattle breeding developed on the pastures. Not far from the centre of the village, dozens of winter stables (called koshars in Kazakh) were built, each of which could accommodate up to 1,000 sheep (two flocks), depending on the number of animals. Since the fodder base and feed mills were located in the village, it was easy to transport feed to nearby winter stables.
Domestic cattle also overwintered here, and gave birth in the spring. Once the wintering area began to dehydrate, the cattle were moved to remote pastures. For about two months, the cattle grazed 30-70 kilometers from the village, near rivers and lakes, in hot and dry places where they had not set foot since the preceding season.
The grain harvest begins at the end of July. At the end of this harvest, cattle were driven into the arable fields to fatten them up with fallen grain. Soviet technology, unlike today's, left at least five percent of the grain on the ground, so the cattle were well fattened. By September, the herds were brought back from the distant pastures and taken to insemination stations. After insemination, the short-term herds returned to the thick grass of the winter pasture, which had been untouched all summer.
Under this system all of the village's pastures were fully covered, no one area of land was used for more than two or three months, and vegetation cover was quickly restored. Due to such intensive use of pasture lands, even villages with relatively little land raised 20-30 thousand sheep each.
After Kazakhstan gained its independence, radical changes took place in agriculture. The former collective farms were deemed inefficient and were completely dissolved, and their property reallocated to villagers. Throughout the country arable land, pasture, and agricultural machinery were redistributed. Agriculture in Kazakhstan was converted to a privately owned farming system. Wintering grounds were privatised by those who claimed to be livestock owners.
Degraded Pastures
Thirty years have passed since then. The distribution of arable and irrigated land as private holdings has yielded good results for some, as these lands entered the market and are now becoming valuable assets.
A great mistake was made however when the decision was taken to just allocate grazing land by area, without taking into account the characteristics of specific parcels. 'Experts' in the capital thought they had solved the problem of land distribution, but they had no knowledge of nomadism, pastoralism, or traditional livestock breeding practices. This mistake, enshrined when the country's Land Code was created, is now destroying the country's rural peace and threatening the ecosystem of the Kazakh steppe.
Today's problems arise from the fact that livestock farmers can only ever graze cattle near a privatised wintering ground. Sheep graze only 7-8 kilometres a day. So over the last 30 years, the 10-kilometer radius of land near those winter hills has become barren land where grass does not grow, because of the continuous grazing of cattle through both winter and summer.
The amount of grazing land allocated to private farms in the southern regions can be as low as 50 hectares, even though farmers say that keeping a herd of cattle on this low-fertility terrain without degradation requires 1,000 hectares. Without a rotational grazing system, the land will quickly degrade.
The remote lands which used to regularly be used as pasture but are now hardly ever grazed, are also in poor condition. Many plant species which rely on grazing animals to spread seed or disturb the ground can no longer reproduce. Grass species are reduced, and the land becomes overgrown with weeds. The absence of vigilant herders in these remote areas also increases the frequency of wildfires. So the small areas of land still used for cattle grazing, and the larger areas of unused land, both face a major ecological crisis.
There is also a lack of care for the land in the village which is allocated to growing fodder for livestock. In earlier times harvesting was monitored by agro-specialists. Village elders came to the land and gave permission: "The spikes are ripe, the grain is scattered, you can start". Now entrepreneurs, who mow hay on such land and and sell it to farmers, do not follow such rules. Since the money goes to whoever is the first to start the campaign, they start mowing as early as possible, without waiting for the plants to fully mature. This leads not only to lower yields but also to further reductions in biodiversity.
A Land Code Made in the City
The main reason for this catastrophic situation is that the part of Kazakhstan's current Land Code governing grazing lands was adopted without taking into account the traditional way of cattle breeding and the characteristics of grazing. The 2017 Law on Grazing Lands supposedly aims to increase the number of livestock in the country, yet rather than developing cattle breeding, it imposes a brake upon it.
Members of the Parliament express concerns, but seem unaware that the problems are in fact caused by the law they passed:
"Unfortunately, even after more than three years since this law came into force, the shortage of pastures and the resulting misunderstandings remain an acute problem ... despite the fact that the law aims to increase the number of livestock, increase the production of low-cost and environmentally friendly livestock products, [and] stop the degradation of agricultural land ... most importantly, the rational use of 187 million hectares of pastureland, which is the wealth of the country, is not fully implemented at the proper level."
The key issue is not 'incomplete implementation of the law'. Kazakhstan's land can accommodate 100 million head of sheep. The problem is the fundamental error of the 2017 Law, which divides the land into hundreds of thousands of individual small plots, without taking into account the characteristics of traditional livestock breeding. This is what makes it impossible for the state to manage and protect rangelands. It also makes it impossible to implement a unified national pasture policy which could effectively regulate the use of rangelands by private farms. At the moment, half of Kazakh land is worn out, and half is left empty.
The Way Forward
Analysis of these related problems clearly shows that rangelands should belong only to the state. The state should abolish the inoperative law, conduct pasture-land policy independently, and become the owner of the Kazakh steppe. Farmers should own only the land of their privatised winter farms, while the rest of the land should be transferred to the state.
In order to fully utilise the potential of pastures, the state should identify pasture and protected lands and control the timely transfer of livestock. In the age of GPS this is not a difficult task, and can be delegated to local level: all powers related to land should be assumed by the Akimat (regional administration). In order to preserve the vegetation cover, cattle should not graze on the same plot of land for more than three months. Farmers should follow land requirements established by the village government, constantly change pastures, and comply with environmental requirements. If the state moves to a professional level of land protection, there is an an excellent opportunity to prevent the coming ecological catastrophe in the Kazakh steppe, while also developing livestock breeding. Without this move, Kazakh land will become barren wasteland in 30 years, and there is no doubt that Kazakh people will one day be brought to the court of civilisation for failing to preserve such a huge space.
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Editor's note: for more detail on this story, see Kerven, C. et al. 'Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands: From Clans to Workers to Ranchers' Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.590401