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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Rangelands cover 69% of the word's agricultural land (FAO Stats 2009) and around 40%
of all global land surface. They occupy 32% of the land surface in Portugal (ICNF 2013)
and 42% in Morocco. Most of these rangelands are managed by nomads and
transhumant pastoralists in Morocco, and by semi‐ sedentary in the North of Portugal.
Pastoral systems have undergone profound changes. Among the trends and
perturbations faced by pastoralists across the world, we can enumerate demography
changes and breakdown of the traditional local institutions and systems for managing
natural resources. Recently, since ecological integrity of pastoral systems that
sustained natural resources for a long time depended on the mobility of people and
herds, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) considered transhumant
feeding systems for livestock as one of the most sustainable. As consequence,
productivity of rangelands became highly variable and hardly sustain livestock
requirements, especially, in mountain regions where the winter cold is an additional
limiting factor for vegetal production. Therefore, livestock producers developed
specific strategies to cope with the changes. The aim of this study is to document the
changes livestock farming systems are going through and compare the strategies
developed by livestock owners in mountainous regions in Morocco and Portugal. Our
results show that in the Middle Atlas, farmers opt for diversification of agricultural
activities with an intensification of livestock systems. The cost of production for
livestock is increasing as consequences of rangeland degradation due to overstocking.
In Portugal, pastoralism based on daily grazing routes, has constantly decreased over
the years. As a result, rangelands are often under‐grazed and wildfires have and are
continuously increasing.
Description
Keywords
Range resources
Pedagogical Context
Citation
El Aich, Ahmed; Castro, Marina (2016). Management of range resources in mountain areas of Middle Atlas ‐ Morocco and in North Portugal. In I International Conference on Research for Sustainable Development in Mountain Regions: book of abstracts. ISBN 978-972-745-214-9
Publisher
Centro de Investigação de Montanha (CIMO)