PhD thesis Title Page Final _Richard Juma - Victoria University ...

etter conserve their resources. Sen (1981) argued that there is evidence of
discrimination against the pastoral communities, and a firm suggestion
that the Sahelian governments are closely tied to (and more responsive to
the needs of) the majority of sedentary communities. For instance, in
Sudan, the state gave priority to large public and private schemes based
on political influence at the expense of pastoralists and other small-scale
land users. The Sudanese government designed and implemented
programmes to settle nomads and thus exposed them to urban centres,
where they could be involved in the exchange market. By this policy,
nomads were forced to change their livestock keeping from sheer
subsistence to exchange mode of production (Babiker 2007). As a result,
nomads became more vulnerable to the dictates of the market
environment. In Tanzania, cultivation was extended to the pastoral areas.
For instance, in 1980s the Tanzanian Government, with assistance from
the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) sponsored a large
wheat cultivation project around mount Hanang, displacing Barabaig
herders from 10,000 hectares of their land. This led to the degradation of
common pastoral resources as Barabaig pastoralists could no longer
practice their complex system of land use that involves movement (Lane
1996).
A similar predicament to that of the Barabaig pastoralists befell the
pastoral Turkana, Maasai, and Samburu of Kenya in the post-
independence period. The Kenya government concentrated on the
development of higher potential agricultural areas to the detriment of
pastoral areas. This led to high population growth and land shortage in
high potential agricultural areas. This encouraged the migration of
cultivators onto marginal lands, depriving pastoralists of access to their
dry season areas, and making them more vulnerable to drought. Exclusion
of pastoralists from drought reserves (as a consequence of such areas
being set aside for wildlife and tourism and cultivation) has drastically
altered the pattern of pastoral land use. Losses of such dry season ranges
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