[At the best of times, this is a fragile climate, with little rainfall and huge variations in temperature, which is why this vast territory supports a population of only 3 million people, making it the world’s most sparsely populated country.]
By Simon Denyer
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Nyamdorjiin Tumursanaa,
38, a herder, rides his motorbike across the grasslands
with his younger daughter.
(Giulia Marchi/For The Washington Post)
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ALTANBULAG,
Mongolia — It was another harsh winter on the central
Mongolian steppe, with temperatures dropping to nearly 50 below zero Fahrenheit
and thick snow covering the rolling grasslands. More than a million cattle,
sheep and goats, already weakened by a dry summer, died, while nomads’ precious
horses froze to death on their feet.
“It was very hard, and the snow was deep,”
said 38-year-old herder Nyamdorj Tumursanaa, drinking milky tea in the nomads’
traditional circular tentlike home known as a ger. “Even if the animals dug
through the snow, there was no grass underneath. We had to buy grass for them,
but still many of our animals died.”
Here on the central Asian steppe, the ancient
home of Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde, the nomads are brought up tough. Yet
their ancient lifestyle is under threat as never before. Global climate change
combined with local environment mismanagement, government neglect and the lure
of the modern world has created a toxic cocktail.
Every year, thousands more herders abandon
their way of life and head for Mongolia’s crowded capital, Ulaanbaatar, which
already holds half the nation’s population.
The nomadic culture is the essence of what it
is to be a Mongolian, but this is a country in dramatic and sudden transition:
from a Soviet-style one-party state and command economy to a chaotic democracy
and free market economy, and from an entirely nomadic culture to a modern,
urban lifestyle.
Climate change is a major culprit, and
Mongolia, landlocked and far from the moderating effects of the ocean, is
suffering more than most parts of the world.
At the best of times, this is a fragile
climate, with little rainfall and huge variations in temperature, which is why
this vast territory supports a population of only 3 million people, making it
the world’s most sparsely populated country.
Now, government figures show average
temperatures have risen by about 2.2 degrees Celsius (4.0 degrees Fahrenheit)
since systematic records began in 1940 — well above the global average rise of
about 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.53 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1880.
Summers, when most of the rainfall occurs,
have become drier, and “extreme climate events” have become more frequent, says
Purevjav Gomboluudev, head of climate research at Mongolia’s Information and
Research Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment.
The most dangerous event of all is a dry
summer followed by severe winter, a phenomenon known as “dzud.” Drought leaves
livestock weak and reserves of grass low, making cold weather more dangerous:
extreme cases in 1999-2001 and 2009-2010 wiped out a combined 20 million
animals.
On the grasslands outside the small town of
Altanbulag, 47-year-old Banzragch Batbold and his wife, Altantuya, remember how
streams used to run off every mountain in their youth, how horses would dive
into a local pond to cool off in the summer. “Now all that water is gone,” she
said.
Hundreds of rivers, lakes and springs have
dried up across the country, the environment ministry says. And as the water
retreats, the desert advances. Roughly three-quarters of Mongolia’s land is
degraded or suffering desertification, with about a quarter seriously affected,
said Damdin Dagvadorj, managing director of the Climate Change and Development
Academy.
But Mongolia’s mismanaged twin transitions
are also to blame.
In the Soviet era, Mongolia, a satellite
state, kept nomadism under tight control. Animals were kept under collective
ownership, but their numbers were limited, while the state supplied veterinary
services, winter fodder and a guaranteed market.
In 1990, as the Soviet Union disintegrated,
Mongolia threw off its one-party state and became a democracy. Three years
later, it began privatizing the herds.
What followed was a huge expansion in animal
numbers as individual herders valued their worth by how much livestock they
held.
State support simultaneously vanished almost
overnight.
Today, 66 million livestock roam the
Mongolian steppe, nearly three times the 23 million cap maintained in the
communist era. Overgrazing is a major cause of pastureland degradation,
especially by the voracious and sharp-hooved goats whose numbers have exploded
to supply the valuable trade in cashmere. Rampant, uncontrolled mining also
uses huge amounts of groundwater, pushing the water table ever lower.
At the same time, the government has failed
to extend education, health care and veterinary care to remote herding
communities, says Ulambayar Tungalag of the Saruul Khuduu Environmental
Research Center. “There is no incentive to stay in rural areas,” she said.
Nor is herding as financially viable as it
was. Middlemen traversing the grasslands pay herders knockdown prices for wool
and other products while supplying consumer goods at sharp markups. Herders
often go into debt to pay for their children’s schooling.
And inequality is rising: Eighty percent of
the livestock is controlled by the richest 20 percent of owners, among them
elite city dwellers who pay others to look after their herds. More than 220,000
Mongolian families depend on herding, but more than half have fewer than 200
animals, government figures show, well below the 250-to-300 threshold
considered economically sustainable.
Herders may have solar panels, smartphones
and televisions, but life isn’t getting any easier. Families are separated for
much of the year as children head for boarding schools in the nearest towns,
sometimes with mothers tagging along.
In the winter, Altantuya stays, getting up at
first light to dig frozen cowpats out of the snow to build a fire, with Batbold
heading out to protect the animals from wolves, wind and snow.
“In the winter, people get lonely,” he
admitted. “You can’t go anywhere. You have TV now, but your children are in
school. The women go crazy, and the men drink vodka.”
The couple’s children are being educated in
Ulaanbaatar. Neither child has expressed any desire to follow in their parents’
footsteps. “No one wants to be a nomad,”
Batbold said. “When I’m old, and If I am not able to ride, there will be
no one left to look after the steppe.”
Quentin Moreau, country director for AVSF (Agronomists
and Veterinarians Without Borders), a French nonprofit supporting smallholder
farming, says no investment is being made to make herders’ lives easier.
Projects to promote quality over quantity — for example, by rewarding herders
with higher prices for better-quality cashmere — are still too small-scale to
make a difference, and government plans to promote intensive farming make no
sense on the water-starved grasslands, he says.
Moreau fears an acceleration of the rural
exodus — to the point where the system of villages and towns serving herders is
no longer sustainable. What few social services that are available could
disappear entirely.
Yet the lure of the capital often proves to
be a mirage.
A century ago, the town that is now
Ulaanbaatar was little more than a trading post and a monastery. Today, it is a
sprawling mess of 1.4 million people, half living in Soviet-style apartments,
half in the sprawling, unplanned “ger districts” where people have pitched
their homes on the hills surrounding the city.
Mongolians are a people deeply connected to
nature, who call their country the Land of the Eternal Blue Sky. But their
capital has become the land of choking smog, as ger dwellers burn coal to ward
off the cold.
In winter, the capital has some of the worst
air pollution in the world. Cases of respiratory infections have nearly tripled
in a decade, pneumonia is a leading cause of death for infants, and children
living in the center of the city have 40 percent lower lung function than those
in rural areas, UNICEF says.
Residents of ger districts lack access to
running water, while jobs for rural migrants are few and poorly paid — a
watchman, a cook, a driver perhaps. Many people lack the skills to succeed
here.
During festivals and important events,
politicians like to don national costume — the herders’ calf-length tunic, or
deel — but are doing nothing to protect the source of that culture, Tungalag
said. Meanwhile, in urban society, herders are often stigmatized, their
lifestyles looked down upon.
“Nobody understands that actually Mongolian
identity — being a nomadic person, being close to nature — is being lost,”
Tungalag said.
