Grassland herders, grazing systems, ecological change, and livelihood issues.
I. Who Truly Cares About the Snow Leopard? Pema Tseden’s posthumous film *Snow Leopard*, winner of Best Film at the Tokyo International Film Festival, tells a remarkably straightforward tale: on the high, snow-swept plateau, a herding family loses nine sheep after a snow leopard attacks their livestock pen. This incident…
Anyone who has visited the grasslands of Inner Mongolia will be familiar with steaming pots of salted milk tea and traditional Mongolian dairy foods. Last summer, during my fieldwork in Sangendalai Town, Zhenglan Banner, Xilingol League, Inner Mongolia, local herding households would invariably treat me to these delicacies. Initially, I…
In late June, while travelling by car to Jiangbutasi village in eastern Altay, Xinjiang, we kept coming across Kazakh herders on horseback driving their livestock to summer pastures. Vehicles frequently had to pull over to let the herds pass. This is now the migration season for herders. Herders in the…
Since 6 April, Damao Banner in Baotou City, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has been hit by almost daily sandstorms. The worst hit was on the 10th, when a storm persisted for nearly five hours, obscuring the sun with blowing sand and leaving the interior of houses in gloom. “We had…
Twenty hours later, my feet finally touched down, sinking into the deep snow of Lapland, northern Sweden. It was seven in the morning, and the skies above Jokkmokk had yet to fully brighten, yet the glare reflecting off the surrounding white expanse was already sufficient to make out the silhouettes…
Foodthink Says In Inner Mongolia, where the vast majority of pastoral families have settled into fixed grazing patterns, the grasslands are criss-crossed by wire fences. Consequently, there has been a rise in cases of stomach perforation from ingested wire among cattle and sheep. Meanwhile, in the Banners of Ordos, where…
Foodthink Says Temperatures have risen noticeably recently, and many fellow farmers across the north are about to end their winter off-season and begin spring ploughing. Yet for herders on the steppes, the winter and early spring lambing and calving season is the busiest time of the year. It is also…
