ABSTRACT
The Rahanweyn of southcentral Somalia have much to teach who seek to understand agropastoralism. The Rahanweyn are agropastoralists who exercise considerable effort and caution in maintaining both crop and pastoral production in order to realize their subsistence needs. Agropastoralism is a social formation common in many parts of the world, but more in evidence than in Subsaharan Africa. In many examinations of agropastoral societies researchers have justified their selective treatment of pastoralism by citing the limited integration of herding and cultivation, that it often takes place only at the level of exchange. Unlike some cases of agropastoralism, among the rural Rahanweyn neither cultivation nor livestock production is oriented toward commercialization. Higher productivity for households that are presently able to produce with some measure of security would be in a position to invest in more cultivation if it provided a return to justify such an investment.
