ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some aspects of the history of the Somali nomadic pastoral economy and of the relationship in such a society between famine and desertification and shows broad outlines for a new type of development policy. A pastoral ecosystem has three main components: people, animals, and land. In the traditional Somali nomadic pastoral ecosystem, human and animal populations were kept in a fluctuating and approximate relationship to each other and to the land by a variety of mechanisms. The Somali government is a socialist government, committed to transforming a dependent colonial economy into a modern self-reliant socialist one. The chapter suggests that the crisis in Somali pastoralism has resulted in part from the breakdown of such traditional institutions as were available to regulate the relationship between people, animals, and the land, and by the manifest inadequacy of such institutions, particularly in a rapidly modernizing nation.
