On this year’s Human Rights’ Day, 10th December, representatives of herding communities from all over India rallied in Delhi to draw attention to their plight and discuss strategies for reviving their customary grazing rights. For hundreds of years these mobile livestock keepers have held together rural life by providing draught animals, milk, meat, wool, manure, and general ecosystem services.

But in the last several decades these diverse and colourful people that include the Raika and Gujjar of Rajasthan, the Maldhari of Gujarat, the Gaddi in Himachal, Bakkarwal in Kashmir, Van Gujjar in Uttaranchal, Changpa in Ladakh, Golla in Orissa, Kuruba in Karnataka, Toda and Konar in Tamil Nadu, and many more, have felt the squeeze of “development” and of generally unsympathetic government policies. The establishment of wildlife sanctuaries and national parks, joint-forest management schemes, allotment of common land for commercial plantation or bio-diesel cultivation, expansion of irrigation agriculture are all developments that have constricted their customary grazing areas.

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The following papers on livestock keepers’ rights were presented by Ellen Geerlings at the “VI Simposio Iberoamericano sobre la Conservación y Utilización de Recursos Zoogenéticos“, Chiapas, México, 7-10 Nov 2005.

Köhler-Rollefson, Ilse, Constance McCorkle, Jacob Wanyama and Evelyn Mathias. 2005. “Investigación en biotecnología animal y derechos de los criadores de ganado” (Animal biotechnology research and livestock-keepers’ rights). 64 kb

Mathias, Evelyn, Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, and Jacob Wanyama. 2005. Razas locales y derechos de los criadores de animales 165 kb.
 
English version, “Pastoralists, local breeds and the fight for Livestock Keepers’ Rights” presented at the PENHA 15th Anniversary Conference “Pastoralism in the Horn of Africa: Surviving against all odds”, 29 Sep 2005. 77 kb

Diversity in our livestock is essential to confront future threats to food supplies, but livestock breeds are becoming extinct at the rate of 5% per year.

Local livestock keepers and pastoralists hold the key to keeping this diversity alive – but only if their rights are recognized.

On World Food Day, 16 October 2006, the League for Pastoral Peoples organized a workshop where small-scale livestock keepers and pastoralists from Africa, Asia and Latin America demanded the safeguarding of Livestock Keepers’ Rights to the genes of their breeds.

Timetable and presentations

More information:

English 226 kb

Français 119 kb

Deutsch 241 kb