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International audiencePastoralism is a highly traditional production system for livestock and livestock products. Under the surface of a seeming stability a variety of pressures of the modern time all seem to accumulate to put the sustainability of the pastoralist production system to the test. Population growth and growing demand for meat, put pressure on the natural resources used by pastoralists because the grazing lands that are saved from encroachment or conversion into arable lands, may be overexploited. Changing climatic conditions, such as frequent droughts, put even more pressure on the system. With so many challenges coming together, it is important to analyze whether pastoralism in itself can be considered a sustainable production system that in principle can cope with these challenges and thus deserves support from policy, or whether the pastoralist production system has fundamental misfit with today’s challenges, in the sense that it is detrimental to the world’s scarce resources. The scientific literature on pastoralism provides an important entry point to such fact finding. This article therefore analyzes 125 recent research contributions to the literature on pastoralism on their inferences as to whether pastoralism is a sustainable production system for livestock-based products. The results show substantial consensus that pastoralism is seen as a sustainable production system for livestock and livestock products (78 of the 125 studies contain sustainability inferences, of which 58 infer that the pastoral system is sustainable, while only 2 come to a negative conclusion). A total of 18 studies point however at conditional factors. The main factors that can potentially explain differences in the conclusions on whether pastoralism is sustainable pertain among others to the domain of sustainability, including abiotic and biotic factors representing the planet dimension, mobility, adaptation, indigenous knowledge, institutions and population growth as people-related factors, and economic contribution as a profit-related factor. Other factors include the ecosystem and land use types, policy instruments, constant/flexible stocking, controlled/mobile grazing, and diversification policies, as well as academic discipline, research methods and geographic focus. A quantitative test shows that consideration of adaptation, institutions and mobility are most strongly related to the sustainability inference. Such studies suggest that pastoralists that can adapt to external conditions, that are supported by effective institutions and that can exercise mobility, are more likely to behave sustainably. We argue that marketing can help to meet these conditions. Because the role of marketing has received scant attention in the context of pastoralists and because it has often been narrowly interpreted as market integration, we further explain the potential role of marketing in sustainable pastoralism. The role of marketing comes down to a strategic competence that enables pastoralists to create value for target buyers w...

The continued interest in market access and market integration policies targeting small-scale agricultural producers has led researchers to further explore the theoretical underpinnings of these concepts. This study presents an in-depth qualitative investigation into the behavioral consequences of market integration for Ethiopian pastoralists. The findings show that pastoralists further strengthen their strategic connection to the market by the processes of market sensing and market responding, which enable them to offer livestock with the quality attributes demanded by buyers. Pastoralists engaging in these activities typically generate more revenue from the market, thereby improving their livelihoods. They are also more capable of adapting to changes in natural conditions and are more likely to change their lifestyles. These findings imply that policymakers should not only foster the market participation of small-scale agricultural producers, but also ensure that producers align their products with the wants and needs of customers by sensing and responding to their market.

In recent years, marketing education has broadened to poor people in developing and emerging countries. In this article, the authors use four empirical studies that apply well-established training design procedures to design a marketing training program for Ethiopian pastoralists. Because pastoralists operate in extremely remote, traditional, and sparsely populated regions of developing and emerging markets, the training complements trainings for the poor applied in urban areas of these countries. As such, the article provides implications for training program designers on how they can adapt the training program procedures to other contexts, thereby making marketing ideas accessible to a large and important new target group for marketing education.

Commercialization has been increasingly promoted for (agro) pastoral communities as an intervention to improve incomes and food access. Using households from rural Afar, this study examines the food security effects of the livestock commercial orientations of (agro) pastoralists by employing propensity score matching (PSM) procedures. The results show that, despite the fact that the market production of (agro) pastoralists is stressed by a broad range of factors, identified as cultural, infrastructural, and production risks, participation in livestock sales significantly decreased the severity of food insecurity in both the household food insecurity access score (HFIAS), and the reduced coping strategy index (rCSI) measures. However, the results failed to find consistently significant effects via the per capita consumption expenditure measure, in which case, the ‘subsistence’ and ‘commercially’ oriented groups are alike. Yet, given the factors depressing market production, properly addressed with policy measures, the income generated from livestock sales improved the welfare of (agro) pastoralists, at least by some (the HFIAS and rCSI) of the livelihood indicators. This highlights the importance of combining market infrastructure investments with culturally sensitive policy measures in order to sustain the traditional livestock husbandry of (agro) pastoralists. Therefore, in order to sustainably improve the food security situations in (agro) pastoral areas, the promotion of market production through the broadening of market access for both sales and purchases is important.