Economic comparisons of livestock production in communal grazing lands in Zimbabwe

During the last decade a 'new rangeland science' has emerged. One of the tenets of the new science is that pastoralists should not adhere to a single conservative stocking rate, but rather adopt an opportunistic strategy, where numbers will fluctuate widely in response to good and bad seasons. It is further argued that opportunistic strategies give higher economic returns compared to strategies based on conservative stocking rates. In the current paper we compare the economics of four cattle management scenarios. The analysis is based on a simulation model of the fluctuation over time of animal numbers, outputs and prices, using data from field surveys and the literature. Our results suggest that strategies based on conservative stocking rates would have higher net present values than strategies based on opportunistic stocking rates. Previous analyses have failed to account for losses due to drought and the costs of capital lied up in livestock, and the analyses have tended to compare commercial with communal production rather than considering different kinds of small holder production methods. To receive the full benefits of destocking, however, a decision to destock has to be made at the level of the community, as the benefits of improved outputs can only be achieved if the stocking rates of the communal grazing lands are reduced. Making collective decisions about managing numbers is a process with considerable transaction costs, and thus the likelihood of new institutions emerging are lessened. It is surprising that a tight tracking scenario (where numbers of cattle are managed by purchasing and selling so as to maintain numbers in equilibrium with the available feed resources) is being recommended in the most recent literature. Our results suggest that such a system would come with considerable economic losses. The costs of a current programme to reclaim small dams illustrate the environmental costs of the opportunistic scenario. A tight tracking policy is likely to further increase environmental degradation and its associated costs. We identify several serious flaws in the papers that elevate opportunistic pastoral systems as giving higher economic returns than other systems. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.