Standing Wealth. Pastoralist Livestock Production and Local Livelihood in Sudan

Krätli S., Dirani O.H. El, Young H. 2013. Standing Wealth. Pastoralist Livestock Production and Local Livelihood in Sudan, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Feinstein International Centre, Tufts University, Nairobi

May 2013, Khartoum - This study takes a fresh look at what makes livestock production - the backbone of Sudanese agriculture - operate successfully.

Animal production in the predominantly pastoral arid and semi-arid regions represents the most important part of agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Sudan, yet the programmes for modernizing agriculture invest comparatively little in pastoral systems. 

As pastoral systems use the environment in a fundamentally different way than globalized intensive agriculture – working with environmental variability rather than against it – genuine modernization can only happen by taking this difference into account. Rather than importing off-the-shelf ‘modernity’ that ignores local systems of production, efforts to modernize a largely pastoral livestock sector should engage with this reality, mobilizing scientific research and technological development, in a dialogue 

with primary producers, in order to generate innovative solutions specific to the logic of production in pastoral systems.