ABSTRACT
This chapter analysis the process of commercialization of cattle keeping in one of the remote parts of Botswana, namely Ngamiland, against the background of the conditions and policy at the national level. Botswana's post-independence livestock policy has as its main objectives as increase and improvement of production, a preservation of pastures and a strengthening of the institutional framework. The Tribal Grazing Land Policy (TGLP) aroused much interest, as the policy tried to combine extensive private and communal land use with due attention for access by all segments of the population, aiming at both output and environmental improvements. Land use policy conducive to livestock commercialization in Ngamiland chiefly boiled down to the implementation of TGLP ranches as a direct follow-up of a general zoning exercise in 1975. The inequalities in cattle ownership which existed in colonial time were reinforced by environmental conditions and by government policy.
