Jordan's Badia: local knowledge has little relevance to livestock development in Jordan's arid regions  ,   It is argued that "local knowledge" has only a limited role to play in the future of the sheep industry in the arid lands of eastern Jordan.

The term "local knowledge" can of course be interpreted to include knowledge held by people in smaller or larger geographical areas, and knowledge held by only the people who live in the resource base under consideration or by all those who participate in decision making procedures which affect resource use in that resource base. Also, local knowledge can imply indigenous understanding of resource use, acquired over a long period of time, or simply the knowledge that is held by the people of a given area at any one point in time - especially the present time because that is the period which is important for future decision making. The term "local knowledge" is typically under scrutiny in the context of change and development and is perhaps seen in contrast to the external knowledge held by development agencies, whether national or international. The implication typically is that local knowledge is under-represented in decision making forums that lead to change, with unfortunate results including the lack of interest or participation of the local people most directly affected by the proposed change.

  For this paper, the term "local knowledge" refers to the long-standing knowledge, held by the Bedouin who inhabit the Hammad Basin, about the management of their Awassi sheep. In particular it refers to that knowledge which is held by the Bedouin who live in the Jordanian part of the Hammad basin, the Jordanian pan-handle which sticks out north-east separating Syria from Saudi Arabia, and bordering also with Iraq. Rearing sheep in this region has been practised for as long as sheep have been domesticated, and the animals have been kept alongside camels and other domesticated livestock, including goats.

Of course, Jordan hardly qualifies (referring to the title of the seminar) as a "tropical" country. However, perhaps we are justified in squeezing it into this seminar by the fact that TAA has kindly funded two graduate agriculturalists to join the project, saying at the time that Jordan is acceptably dry tropical because, where our project is based, it is very hot and dry in summer - presenting a development challenge similar to and as severe as that experienced in places which genuinely lie within the dry tropics.

  In the Jordanian part of the Hammed Basin, agricultural research and development, in the form of external inputs to the traditional systems of sheep management, have been important factors affecting the local livestock industry since, let us generalise, the Second World War; and I will return to these later.

  However, it is also true to say other external inputs to the system, not related to agricultural research and development, have had at least as great an impact on sheep husbandry as agricultural R&D. In general, these sources of change have been prominent since the settlement following the First World War. They include the very creation of the country, Jordan. In the 1920s the international borders, referred to above, between Jordan, Syria, Saudi and Iraq, were fixed, creating barriers across the Hammad and across traditional pastoralist transhumance routes. At first, perhaps, the Bedouin tended to ignore these borders but as time has passed, and the social and economic systems and performance of the four countries have diverged, the Bedouin have sought to turn the existence of the borders to their own advantage resulting in cumulative modifications to their attitudes to and their practice of sheep husbandry. They have looked for inputs where the government has been most generous, and for markets where the sale value of lambs has been highest. Also, when the borders were created, the government of Jordan needed the people within the new Jordanian borders to consider themselves as Jordanian, and the borders had to be protected. Thus payments were made to tribal leaders, and employment was found for tribal members in the growing security forces with the result that the pastoralists were less dependent on and less concerned about the long-term future of their herds and the rangelands. Today the borders separate countries at financial and economic extremes: Iraq whose economy has collapsed, Saudi with great oil wealth, and Syria in between. Jordan's north-east Badia is a buffer zone - or rather a transport route - between these extremes. As far a sheep keeping is concerned, many people today find it more rewarding to participate in the trading of sheep, not to mention also a range of smuggled goods, always in the general direction of the high-priced markets of Saudi, rather than to rear sheep. In other government moves, strong encouragement was given to Bedouin families to settle in what has become the important regional town of Mafraq and in a string of villages and hamlets between Mafraq and Safawi. This encouragement to settle eventually coincided with the growing interests of the Bedouin families themselves in health and education, in electricity and running water, and in access to other salaried government jobs which has reduced sheep numbers and their significance in the Bedouin livelihood.

  Other changes of external origin, originally unrelated to livestock, and certainly unrelated to agricultural R&D, have also had a profound impact on the livestock industry of the Badia. These include: the oil pipeline and its pumping stations H4 and H5 which gave rise to the townships of Ruwayshid and Safawi; the main road linking the Red Sea and Amman with Baghdad giving a stimulus to trade and service provision; the introduction of vehicles which replaced camels and the way of life associated with camels; the introduction of health and education systems and electricity and running water, which encouraged Bedouin to settle; new opportunities for dependable salaried labour outside the livestock sector; and the removal from the Badia of very large volumes of water to supply the ever growing demands of Greater Amman, etc.

  And the government has also made a number of interventions which have directly affected the livestock industry. These include the introduction of veterinary health services (though because they are not of high quality in the Badia their impact so far has not been great) and the introduction in the early 1970s of a very high subsidy on imported concentrate feeds. The government also declared that all uncultivated land belonged to the State, and that people were free to use such state land for grazing their stock. This greatly reduced the practical possibility for the tribes to manage the resources on which the sheep depended (grazing and water), particularly as large trucks and water tankers were purchased by wealthy tribal members to move their sheep, and the feed and water for the sheep, great distances across the Badia to wherever rainfall had generated a flush of grazing. The inevitable response has been a great increase in the numbers of sheep and the great reduction in the numbers of palatable rangeland plants

  In recent twists to this story of government intervention into the sheep industry, the concentrate feed subsidy was removed in mid-1996, in response to the World Bank, and structural adjustment programmes and GATT agreements. And since then, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Jordan Co-operative Organisation have been caught up in the new government and international philosophy of privatisation, which is leading, in Jordan, to a complete restructuring of the systems for the provision of services connected with livestock, health, nutrition and genetic improvement.

   Given the above rapid and ever changing series of external inputs to the livestock industry of the Badia, both direct and indirect, dependence by the Bedouin on local knowledge has been replaced by the need to respond to a wide range of external stimuli and so there is little scope for depending on "local knowledge", as above defined, for either research or development. Moreover, the remaining local knowledge that the Bedouin could apply has been rendered obsolete by another set of changes related to the livestock industries of other countries. For example, the gross margin of Israeli Awassi sheep is far higher than of Awassis in Jordan. And with modern sheep production and transport systems, it is also likely that Awassis reared in Australia will arrive in the Saudi and Gulf markets cheaper than those from Jordan, under present Bedouin management practices. Therefore it seems very likely that if sheep production in the Badia is to survive, other than as an expression of a traditional lifestyle financed by other sources of family income, productivity will have to rise sharply. Such increases in productivity will be almost entirely dependent on "external" knowledge, and the surviving pastoralists will be those who adapt to it most rapidly and most thoroughly. And the survivors will be using health, nutrition and breeding systems with which they have no traditional familiarity. Health will be dependent on combating major debilitating diseases which have recently been identified. Improved genes will be imported via Israeli Awassis. Nutrition will rely on foodstuffs (including processed tomato and olive waste and chicken litter, as well as alfalfa and Soya) which the Bedouin have not previously used. Indeed, concerning foodstuffs, increased ingestion of plant fibre is even necessary to stop the sheep eating remnants of degraded black plastic used for irrigation because this clogs and incapacitates the rumen - and there is no local knowledge to help the pastoralists combat this problem. Improved health, nutrition and breeding will be essential in order to give the animals the potential of those being reared in Israel and Australia and elsewhere - and which, under international agreement, will be ever more free to enter the local markets than they are today.

   But all of the above is not to suggest that the Bedouin sheep owners should not be involved in decision making about future change. Even if their inherited knowledge is no longer of great relevance to them, their interests and attitudes and capacities must all be taken into due consideration, and there will need to be a real meeting of minds between the officials deeply involved in the new structural changes to the industry and the Bedouin themselves if the latter are to have any chance of adapting current livestock husbandry practices to meet the new market demands and to make most effective use of the new provision of livestock services. .