Experiences, pastoral strategies, development project hypotheses: The experience of masai Project

The start and finish of the “western range management" in Africa coincide in a singular manner with the experience in Tanzanian Masai land. The Fallon report, which was its preface, supported an intervention logic that was carried out mainly by the USAID and the UNDP during the 1960s and 1979s in Tunisia, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Northern Nigeria, Northern Ghana, Ethiopia, Somalia, North-Eastern Kenya, Kenya Masai land, and Botswana (J. Moris 1981). The end of the Masai project, on the other hand, coincides with a seminar promoted by the USAID in 1980, where, on the basis of evaluations of the different interventions in sub-Saharian Africa, it was recommended that "programmes and projects for the livestock sector must be re-oriented to make them more compatible with the social economical and environmental reality of the arid and semi-arid pastoral regions" (AID 1980). The necessity of giving priority to the breeders basic resources rather than insisting on commercial activities, was also emphasized. "This does not mean — it was observed (AID 1980) - denying the validity of national requirements, nor refusing pressures to increase the livestock contribution to the national wealth. But these contributions will not be assured in a definite way until the same producers do not have a secure subsistence base . By moving the emphasis on the "development for pastoralist", rather than on "pastoral development"  the "range management" particularly for the poor knowledge of the ecology of the pastures: "it is necessary to know much more, about the impact of intensive grazing on the different annual grass species, just as it is necessary to know much more of the impact of fires on the pasturelands, on the control of ticks and tze tze fly, on rotations and so on" (AID 1980).