IYRP March: Maryam Niamir-Fuller on Economic Services of Global Rangelands

Tip Hudson: Welcome to the Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I’m your host, Tip Hudson, Range and livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com. Welcome back to the Art of Range. My guest today is Maryam Niamir-Fuller. Who is a special advisor to the Secretariat of the International Year of Rangelands and pastoralists Global Alliance. It’s a privilege to visit with you in person today. Welcome.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: Thank you. Thank you, Tip. Nice to be here.

Tip Hudson: How did you get into doing work in rangelands? We feel like this is important and it feels like there’s a lot of people that are involved, but it’s still a relatively small niche in the world. One of the themes that has come out in other talks and written material about this, is that the people of rangelands are often marginalized. We think of rangelands as being marginal lands, meaning that they are often seen as the places that aren’t good for anything else. But of course, what they are good for are quite important. The people that manage them or steward them are also quite important. This is still not a very large segment of the world’s population that knows something about rangelands and pastoralists. How did you become one of those persons?

Maryam Niamir Fuller: Well, I do like to think about the fact that my grandfather was a forester, but he lived in a dry land country, and so he had to deal a lot with dry land landscapes, many of it being rangeland, of course. I may have had some instincts coming from those genes. I don’t know. But I got specifically into rangelands after I had received my master’s degree in urban and regional planning, and I got hired on a USAID project to go to Sudan or what is now known as Southern Sudan. At that time, it was Abba Sudan. To work on an integrated rural development project among the Dinka pastoralists. That opened up a whole new world for me. After that experience, I decided to find out what Range management was all about. University of Arizona gave me that opportunity. Since then, I’ve been proud to call myself a range scientist.

Tip Hudson: I can’t resist asking, what is the lifestyle and the livestock of those peoples in Sudan?

Maryam Niamir Fuller: In the Dinka? My goodness. They are a fascinating community. They raise primarily cattle, but also sheep and goats. They live, they transhume meaning they seasonally move their animals as the waters of the Sudd of Sudan grow and retreat. In the rainy season, the Sudd is the biggest swamp in the world. It grows and the pastoralists then move to higher ground or to the north where it’s drier. Sudan in the North is very dry. Then as the waters retreat with the dry season, they move back down and they graze on the green growth that’s still there. They’re fascinating folks. They are agropastoralists, meaning that they have settlements where they will cultivate a little bit. Then the part of the family, usually the young men and young women will take the animals on to these seasonal movements.

Tip Hudson: Is that where the name Sudan came from is from the Sudd?

Maryam Niamir Fuller: Is from the Sudd absolutely.

Tip Hudson: I had not heard that before.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: The Sudd is a fascinating piece of landscape.

Tip Hudson: Yeah.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: Just as a caveat, I don’t know if this is at all relevant, but it’s fascinating because, of course, the powers to be in colonial time and Egypt in particular, decided that they needed to bring more water into the Nile. One of the tributaries, the White Nile goes through the Sudd. That’s where it gets its waters from. They tried to create a canal, the famous Jonglei Canal that would take this big bend of the river and just cut right through it to increase the flow into the Nile. Well, first of all, the project itself never materialized over the 20-30 years that they tried to create it just because it’s absolutely horrendous, cracking clay soil, difficult to navigate at even normal times. But also the environmental studies that they did showed that it would have completely cut off the migration route of the pastoralists of the livestock, you name it. This is a huge canal. Huge canal that we’re going to build. I’m very glad they did not build that canal.

Tip Hudson: One of the that Moritz and I talked about briefly was land security. That’s another example of that would have been a change that would have dramatically affected. Access to lands.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: That’s right. More conflict among pastoralists for the remaining lands.

Tip Hudson: One of the defining features of pastoralism is that this is not just a livelihood or a way of making so called money, but it is very much a lifestyle. In some ways, that probably hasn’t changed for many of those people for thousands and thousands of years. That feels foreign to many of us in the United States. But on the other hand, it wasn’t so long ago in a universe not so very far away that there were people that lived like that here, that rural residents of the United States. I grew up in northern Arkansas. Not four generations ago, people lived in what might be called subsistence living. What we meant by that is that they did the work necessary to provide for shelter and food and clothing. It was not primarily a cash society. Now we think of a livelihood as whatever it is that we do to generate enough money or currency to buy the things that we think are necessary for a comfortable living. But that term, I think, subsistence living almost has a negative connotation now as if somebody’s just living above the poverty line. But when I see people who are living a pastoralist lifestyle, in many ways, it appears that they are more free than we are because they’re not slaves to money, and they have what they need. Their goal in life, in many cases, is not necessarily to accumulate wealth. I’m curious to what extent?

Maryam Niamir Fuller: May I disagree with you with the last statement their goal in life is not to accumulate wealth. Actually, no, I think it is to accumulate wealth. Every society, every livelihood does that because they want to leave something behind for the next generation. It’s not necessarily money they’re accumulating. In the case of the Dinka, it’s livestock.

Tip Hudson: Right.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: Livestock is their wealth. That’s their bank account. They trade, in cows and sheep and tins of milk. But interestingly enough, what you’re saying about how being a subsistence economy has a negative connotation. It has been like that for decades or even centuries because the industrialization in the West gave us a new paradigm. It said, No, you got to produce more. You got to be more efficient. you got to accumulate more. That paradigm is still around. It’s good to be able to learn from those who never fell into that particular paradigm of saying, I’m just accumulating for my own self. Pastoralists are accumulating for their families, for their livelihoods for the future. I just wanted to also say, while I was working for United Nations Environment Program, we did start a well, it still is ongoing, very fantastic program to try to convince people that being satisfied with your life is a good goal. Just simple things, having, one mug is sufficient. I’m satisfied with this. I don’t need 10 of them. That’s how pastoralists do work. They have what they need. Whatever they may have more, it’s because they’re setting it aside for other things or for gifts or to negotiate for, broker something or to have reciprocal arrangements where they might give and take and so on and to be able to be helped when you’re in bad times, stress and so on. It’s that type of mentality and livelihood that we have lost in The West.

Tip Hudson: I very much like the idea of seeing livestock as wealth. In fact, I think that’s where the term livestock came from. That’s true. They’re animals. The term livestock mean this was wealth that was alive and that sustained itself.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: It was live.

Tip Hudson: At the risk of asking what may sound like dumb questions. In the United States, we mostly raise livestock for meat and also for fiber, but definitely meat for human consumption is the dominant use of the livestock in the United States. In other.

Maryam Niamir-Fuller: Dairy, you forgot dairy.

Tip Hudson: Pastorals cultures. Yes, for sure. Dairy goats, sheep have been raised more for meat recently because the wool was not seen as being valuable enough for that to be one of them, defining features of a sheep operation where people used to grow sheep for wool. But I’m curious. In other pastoralist cultures, say, for example, in Sudan, when they have lots of livestock, what is the what do they do with the livestock besides eat them themselves or drink the milk. Are they selling them as they are selling meat?

Maryam Niamir Fuller: Yes, for one thing, they do sell them, of course. There are livestock markets. Every pastoral system has those. Where else are you going to get your tea? Where else are you going to get your sugar? Where else will you get your wheat or whatever it is that you want to buy for your food? There is, of course, selling that’s happening. But, Just think about it yourself. If you have a bank account, you got a checking account and savings account. You keep the checking account for everyday things and then you’ve got the savings account that accumulates. Well, that’s exactly what it is with livestock for pastoralists. They will most most generally, it is the small stock, the sheep and the goats that are sold readily for everyday need, and it’s the cattle that are kept for long term savings. A lot of it is a defense against the variability in the environment, of course. Because when the hard times come, when the drought hits or the floods hit, and you lose your livestock, you cannot go below a certain level. I think there has been some great work done on calculating exactly what that level is for pastoralists. I’ve forgotten the numbers now, but if you go below that threshold, you cannot very easily spring back again. Maintaining that minimum level is an absolute must for any pastoral society. Hence, for a long time, outsiders never understood that. They said, my gosh, look at all those cows out there, and they’re overgrazing everything. Gosh, we’ve got to get them to come down to a reasonable stocking rate. That’s what I was taught. But they didn’t realize that that massive savings account is there because of the hard times that they know is going to be coming very regularly. The uncertainty, it’s a way of living with uncertainty as this meeting is also showing.

Tip Hudson: Sometimes the plain things are the main things. One of we are humans require protein to grow and to maintain our bodies. For most of human history, people have eaten meat. Meat has been a little bit in the spotlight at the global level today because of I think the irony to me is that this is the miracle of the Rubin animal, that they take foodstuffs that humans cannot do anything with, and the rumen microbes convert that into one of the most valuable foods on the planet. But in the process of doing that, those microbes release gases that we sometimes call greenhouse gases. But the places that grow the forages that the animals are eating also take up those greenhouse gases. Maybe I’m leading the question too much, but I’m curious, you’ve been involved in some of these global conversations around livestock raising peoples and the fact that most of what they produce is meat. What are your observations about this current for lack of a better term, global conversation around the relative value of meat.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: Well, I actually wanted to first talk about how this global discourse about meat has created such a has permeated almost every level of pastoral societies in every country.

Tip Hudson: Really?

It is fascinating to see that. It’s the angst, and a lot of it comes, of course, from, Internet these days, with the young ones saying, Hey, they’re telling us that meat is bad for you. Why is meat bad for you? That discussion is actually happening everywhere now. It’s not just something that the West is only talking about or Europe or whatever. Truly, this is now a global dialogue. It’s important to me that we set it in the right direction. Because as with everything, there’s always good and bad. As with everything, you will find something that’s going wrong and something that’s going really good. Now, in this particular case, we know, for example, that particularly red meat, beef meat and sheep and goats and so on and camel and horses and all the other meats that are eaten all over the world. Have not only a high concentration of proteins that you cannot get anywhere else, that we as humans as carnivores require, but they have a particular amino acid that you cannot get from any plant based products in anything at all. It’s like you’ve heard about cats needing taurine. Well, it’s similar for us. We as humans need this. We need this particular amino acid to function properly. That’s not as well advertised as it should be. We need to keep that in mind. However, when you look at the overall picture that we have of what we have today, there are statistics that say, by 2050, the global population will have increased so much and we will need so much meat, and therefore we need to have all these intensive systems in order to grow this meat. You can’t do it just on the rangeland. I can go on and on. The funny part about that is nobody’s really modeled it, nobody’s really sat down and brought in all the factors necessary to really have a proper picture of the scenario building into the future. I dearly hope somebody will do that in this year 2026. But in general, what we’re seeing is that if you take away a few ifs, if you were to say that there is zero food waste. Now, about roughly 30% of our food that we eat all across the board, not just meat, all across the board, is wasted. If you take that away.

Tip Hudson: Globally?

Maryam Niamir Fuller: Globally. I don’t think that figure has changed.

Tip Hudson: Interesting.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: That was a figure about a decade ago. I have looked at it recently, but it’s still the same. If you were to take that away, if that were to become zero, then you can imagine how much food supply you’re going to get 30% more food supply. If you were to everybody, those who are over eating and those who are undereating were to all have a satisfactory diet, healthy, satisfactory diet. If you were to do those, then there are actually is an indication that we could be producing enough meat and proteins from range based, nature based diet systems to [OVERLAPPING] .

Maryam Niamir Fuller: The picture is bigger than whether it’s just good for you or whether we have a little bit or not too much or whatever, it’s really looking at the whole site. Now, when you sit down and you compare the nature based systems with the shall we call them confined feed lot systems, when you start to compare those two, which again, we don’t have enough studies for that. We don’t have proper studies that compare these two systems. Whether it is from a nutrition angle or a climate change angle or biodiversity angle or any of these land use, livelihoods, social stuff, we really don’t have good studies. There are some, but they’re not global enough, you get it here and there. But when you do look at what studies that we do have, I think it’s very clear to see that what’s happening is this paradigm that’s been there from the past that says, Well, we’ve got to create efficiency. We’ve got to increase production. We’ve got to do all that to feed, a growing population. All of that is creating policies from governments all across the board that continue to support the feed lot systems and ignore the nature based systems. This is what I call the unbalanced subsidies. Yes, if you look at a country like United States, yes, there are some very good support going to the range and ranchers and so on and so forth. But when you compare that to what’s being given to the feed lots, it’s uncomparable the two. Similarly, in other parts of the world, when you look at how little taxes and tariffs are put on the importation of meat from Australia, New Zealand, or Argentina or wherever, to a country like Kenya, and how cheap it is compared to the meat from a Maasai herd. You see that there is some major imbalance that’s happening there. Those are the things that I think we do need to redress. First, it’s this false perception that meat is bad for you, and the second one is this false paradigm that says, Well, we’ve got to produce as much meat as we can, and therefore, we’re going to incentivize it in that way.

Tip Hudson: What are some policy changes that would support support, the course correction course? That seems to be needed. I realize that could be different in every single country.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: It could be very different in every single country, but I think in general, one of them is, first of all, this imbalance in the subsidies and the incentives and so on. The second one is that in many developing countries, not so much perhaps elsewhere, there’s just a clear lack of services. Services, infrastructure, you name it, whether it’s veterinary or health or education or whatever, which are the foundational parts of ensuring that that Dinka pastoralists, who is quite happily, raising his or her cows is able to benefit from everything else that’s going on around him. It’s able to not be left behind, is able to not be squashed behind because very often being left behind means completely disappearing. Services and infrastructure very clearly something that needs quite a lot of investment from government. I think that today’s Internet based society, we’re finding some amazing amazing infrastructure solutions that need to be advertised more. The third thing, of course, is this whole issue of land conversion. I’m so pleased that Society for Range Management meeting today, yesterday, today, has highlighted that as a key issue everywhere, everywhere. It’s something that needs to be looked at from a policy perspective, from a legal perspective, from all sorts of other perspectives. Market. Can you imagine? rangelands, everywhere in the world, I haven’t looked at the numbers here, are very cheap. The land itself. If you were to go buy that land, it is absolutely cheap compared to even a crop land next door. Why? I want to know why. What is the market not responding to? How can we change that?

Tip Hudson: I think in most cases, the market is responding to the perceived cash value of what could be grown and extracted from that land base.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: Yeah.

Tip Hudson: I do think that we are finding ways beginning to find ways to compensate what I call public goods generated on lands that are cared for by pastoralist peoples. we say that we value that, but we often recognize the value after it’s gone where we say, Well, that place was priceless, and now it’s a parking lot.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: It’s a parking.

Tip Hudson: Right or a subdivision or crop land, which is seen as it’s perceived as being valuable. But once it’s crop land, it’s no longer habitat for birds and Right.

Maryam Niamir Fuller: I just think that this is all captured in what we call payment for ecosystem services, but I really think that we need to expand those services well beyond just the ecosystem services and okay, their cultural services and so on are now added to it. But it’s the production services that are just as important. I think we need to really focus on that. There was a presentation this morning about I don’t know if I should go into this, but, um, about how public lands are important for society. Yes, they are. But the entire presentation never once said that these public lands are also important for the pastoralists. Those are the common lands that are really, really important to maintain. That would be the fourth thing that I would want to do or as part of the land conversion? Mhm Discussion would be to make sure that we continue to show the value of common lands to not just the ecosystems and biodiversity, climate change, but to the pastoralists themselves.

Tip Hudson: Very good. Maryam, thank you for your time and thank you for your work on this. Thank you for listening to the Art of Range podcast. Links to websites or documents mentioned in each episode are available at art of range.com. Be sure to subscribe to the show through Apple Podcast, Pod Bean, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcasting app so that each new episode will automatically show up in your podcast feed. Just search for Art of Range. If you are not a social media addict, don’t start now. If you are, please like or otherwise follow the Art of Range on Facebook, LinkedIn and X formally Twitter. We value listener feedback. If you have questions or comments for us to address in a future episode or just want to let me know you’re listening, send an email to show at Art of Range.com. For more direct communication from me, sign up for a regular email from the podcast on the homepage at artofrange.com. This podcast is produced by CAHNRS Communications in the College of Agricultural Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University. The project is supported by the University of Arizona and funded by sponsors. If you’re interested in being a sponsor, send an email to show at Art of Range.com. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed by guests of this podcast are their own and does not imply Washington State University’s endorsement.