Nomads and Development

A Kham Aid Foundation report by Pamela Logan, Oct 25, 2004

Contents:
 * Background info and figures on nomad populations in Ganzi Prefecture
 * Challenges facing education
 * Challenges facing health care
 * Recent improvements in transportation
 * Settlement of nomads into permanent housing
 * Problems affecting the environment
 * Challenges facing economic development
 * What Kham Aid is doing to help

As most readers will already know, traditionally, Tibetans traditionally rely agriculture and herding for sustenance. This report will talk about pure herdsmen, people who live where crops won't grow.  Often, these pastoral Tibetans have no permanent dwelling, but live in tents year-round. 

Tibetan herdsmen are often referred to as "nomads," although this term can be misleading, because they do not wander freely or at random, but rotate between 2 or 3 fixed campsites according to the season of the year. In summer, they go to high pastures.  In early October, they move to valleys at lower elevation where they spend the winter.

Note that not every herdsman you see in Tibet is "pure."  In many parts of Kham, herding is mixed with farming, as agricultural valleys and grazing lands are within a day or two's walk from each other.  This is quite a good way to organize one's family economy. The family can supply itself with grain, butter, and meat, and has little need to trade with outsiders.  Children and old people stay in the house, where they can attend school and use health care facilities, while the stronger members live in tents out on the grassland. Such part-time herdsmen are not the subject of this report, for they differ in many significant ways from those who have no farms at all.

Herdsmen on the move, with their animals.

Pure herdsmen have their own, somewhat different, culture.  For one thing, they have their own dialect of Tibetan, and it's more or less the same across the Tibetan plateau.  They are, like virtually all Tibetans, devoutly Buddhist, but their attitudes toward education, health care, and other aspects of life in modern China differ somewhat from their farm-dwelling brethren. They are even more religious than sedentary Tibetans, which makes them deeply conservative and leery of change.

In Ganzi, 18% of the population are nomads, and about 54% of the total land area is useable pasture. Pure herdsmen are found primarily in Litang, Pelyul, Derge, Serthar, and Sershul counties. Until recently, most of these people lived in tents on the grasslands, twelve months a year.  This kind of life, while seeming romantic to some, brings many hardships.  This report will outline some of the challenges facing Kham Aid and others who wish to bring a better life to Tibetan herdsmen in Kham.

Education

It is very difficult to get nomad children to school.  Physically, the schools are usually far distant from the encampments of most of its students.  In Pelyul, I met a family whose two primary-school-age children walked 20 km to school each way.  The two boys stayed in the school dormitory during the week and came home only on weekends.  There was a bus, but the family could not afford the 20 yuan ($2.50) one-way fare.  Imagine sending a first-grade child 20 km from home - most children that young cannot even dress themselves properly!  Parents are understandably reluctant, and delay as long as they can. This makes nomad children older than their farm- or town-dwelling classmates.

In Pelyul, nomad children would certainly leave school were it not for the threat of a fine that the Pelyul County government imposes on parents of drop-outs.  I have never encountered such fines elsewhere, but apparently the Pelyul officials think it necessary to ensure attendance. It most probably is.

Nomad children at the Ponru School, which is privately funded. A government school at Qiwu Township, Sershul County.

This problem of distance is a hard one to solve. If one builds more schools in nomad areas,  then one finds that the enrollment at each school may be twenty or fewer children.  Such a small school is inefficient and expensive; moreover, it cannot easily meet the different educational needs of its mixed-age student body.  Also important: it's difficult to attract good teachers to these lonely and rugged outposts.

The Ponru School, where Kham Aid operated its Better Schools program this year, is typical in some respects and exceptional in others.  It is not a government school, though the county does provide one of the two teachers.  The other teacher is a local monk who teaches Tibetan language. The government-funded teacher, a young woman named Dawa, teaches everything else.  She lives at the school and, with the cook, takes care of the children 24 hours a day.

Since Ponru School opened two years ago, about one-third of the 32 children have dropped out.  Their parents simply wanted them back home to help take care of the herds. Even the children who graduate from grade 6 at Ponru School will have difficulty continuing their education.  Some will simply be too old.  Others may not be able to meet the expense of attending the boarding middle school in the county seat. (see our Scholarship program for more information on helping middle-school students).

Ponru is exceptional because it achieves remarkably high test scores considering that it is located in such a remote area. One knowledgeable Tibetan reported, "This [Ponru] school is academically excellent.  Private schools like this one out perform government schools.  The difference is big." 

Ten kilometers from Ponru, not far from a major highway, is a government school at the Yiniu Township seat.  This school is larger and has much better facilities, but its students reportedly under-perform academically.  If there was no Ponru School, local parents would be unlikely to send their children to Yiniu; the children would simply not go to school at all.

Dawa, the teacher to whom most of the credit for Ponru's excellence is due, does not possess advanced certification, so she is paid only 300 yuan ($36) a month.  She would like to leave the school and the teaching profession altogether, and become a nun.  However, the parents have pleaded with her and extracted a promise to stay until the current batch of students graduates from grade 6.  If she did not aspire to be a nun, she would certainly want to leave sooner because of the low pay, and because an educated woman like her is unlikely to find a suitable husband among the local nomads. When Dawa leaves, it will be difficult to replace her.

Health Care

Nomads suffer from many health problems, and some of them result from their low education level and extremely rigorous environment.  In Kham, grasslands at 4000 meters or higher elevation enjoy only two or three frost-free months each year.  In winter, it is bitter cold.  The climate, and the inconvenience of fetching and heating water, mean that hygiene is sorely neglected.  Washing is rarely done, and when it is, only the hands and face are washed.  Toilet paper may not be available at all.  There are no designated toilets, so people simply relieve themselves on the pasture.

A midwife in Litang county, with Wu Bangfu, director of Kham Aid Foundation's midwife training program.

Some aspects of hygiene could easily be improved were it not for lack of knowledge.  "People think that brushing your teeth is for good looks, to have pretty teeth, " said Kilung Rinpoche, founder of the Ponru School. "They think it's a vanity.  They don't realize it's for health." Not surprisingly, it's common to see adults with severely decayed and missing teeth. He asked the Better Schools team to give the Ponru children lessons on teeth-brushing, which we did.

Other, more serious, health problems are common.  Malnutrition has been observed in Tibetan populations, especially nomads, and must be at least partly caused by the almost complete lack of vegetables in the herdsman's diet.  Even meat is in short supply, because herdsmen are extremely reluctant to slaughter their precious yaks.  They subsist largely on butter, tea, and tsampa, which is purchased in town.

These problems have profound effects, especially on women and children.  The Bridge Fund did a survey of nomads and found that virtually every family had lost a baby in childbirth at one time or another.  [Kham Aid is working to rectify this: as I write these words, ten Sershul women are completing our program in midwife training].

Non-pregnant women also do not receive basic health care.  Tupten Nyima, head of the Sershul Family Planning Agency, said, "Ten out of ten women in our county have some form of gynecological disease."   His agency cannot easily provide contraceptive services - wanted or unwanted - to nomad women, because they are simply too hard to reach.  

Moreover, many nomad women reject any interference in nature's ways.  "Some families have five or six children," said Dawa the teacher. "When I suggest they should do something about this, they ask me, 'what kind of a Tibetan girl are you?'"

Even when they go to seek medical help, Tibetan nomads sometimes do so at the wrong times, and for the wrong reasons.  ?A Tibetan mother will ride for two days to take her six-year-old-daughter to our clinic because the girl?s got a sore throat," says Lee Weingrad, head of the Surmang Foundation, which operates a clinic in Qinghai.   "But when the woman is pregnant, she won?t even think of seeing a doctor.?

From the foregoing anecdotes, it's apparent that basic health knowledge is lacking among herdsmen.  Yet for reasons mentioned above, education is not easy to supply.

Transportation

This is one area in which significant progress has been made in nomad areas.  China's push to expand and improve its highways has meant that nearly all national roadways in Kham have been paved in the last five years.  Dirt roads are being slowly expanded and improved. 
 

The town of Dzogchen, in the middle of a nomad area, is accessible via a bridge and a road that was being improved in the fall of 2004.

Many herdsmen have bought motorcycles, which are cheap to operate, convenient to use off-road, and fit well the herdsman's notion of what is manly.  In Sershul, one report estimated the number of motorcycles in the county at 3,000-5,000, for a population of some 60,000 people.  Motorcycles, usually decked out with Tibetan-style saddle blankets and other decorations, have become completely ubiquitous in Kham and are often seen parked outside herdsmen's tents.

Housing

A few years ago, the Chinese government embarked on a massive campaign to encourage nomads to move into permanent houses.  In Kham, this is visible in the form of giant housing projects being constructed on winter pastures.  Rows of cookie-cutter Tibetan houses are springing up in Litang, Trango, Sershul, and other places.  In Sershul, I saw construction projects in full swing, with dozens of houses going up. 

In Derge, they are taking a cautious approach, building houses for a few families to see how the program works.  In Pelyul county, I was told that every herdsman now has a home of his own.  No money is charged to the herdsmen for these houses.  They are simply given free. And for the most part, nomads accept them.

The Environment

Daniel Miller, a noted authority on Tibetan nomads, writes that "Many of the large lakes on the Tibetan Plateau are much smaller than they were thousands of years ago. Old beach lines, in some cases 40 metres above the present shore lines, indicate the degree to which lakes have dried up. This general desiccation that is taking place is also affecting vegetation..."

In other words, the grassland ecology is changing, and probably for the worse, from the herdsman's perspective.  There does not seem to be any solid research on the impact of large animal herds on this already-changing environment.  Nevertheless, there is a perception among Chinese government leaders that Tibetan herdsmen are unduly stressing the rangeland on which they live.  Another government-sponsored campaign is encouraging herdsmen to fence in their pastures, to control the movement of yaks and sheep, and allow the grass to recover.

Pasture in Serthar County - still unfenced in 2004.

Fences formalize informal arrangements that have been observed by nomads for decades or even centuries.  Some observers complain that these measures are bad for the nomads, and undermine their way of life as well as harming the ecological balance.  I don't know enough about grassland ecology to offer an informed opinion, but I will offer a few possibly relevant anecdotes.

One attitude held by herdsmen is striking: most don't believe there is any such thing as too many animals.  No matter how many yaks a herdsman has, he is still reluctant to slaughter any, and will do so only under significant pressure.  One family in Pelyul said that, of their hundred-odd yaks, they slaughter only one or two a year - and that's to feed nine people.  (that works out to about 3 kilos of meat per month per person).  They are equally reluctant to sell.

As a result of these attitudes, at Ponru, children of "rich" nomads, with three hundred or more yaks, were no better dressed that children of poor nomads.  Even in October, prime slaughtering season, meat at Ponru was no cheaper than meat in Kangding, which is a good-sized city located miles away from any pastures.  Driving through Sershul county, one sees endless green vistas, and all are covered with yaks. 

The reason why nomads like large herds is simple: the extra animals are an insurance policy against disaster.  In 1996-7 there was a blizzard in Sershul, which covered the grass for weeks and killed thousands of yaks.  Herds were decimated.  Families that before felt secure were pushed into great uncertainty and even starvation.  Large herds mitigate the damage of such unforeseeable events.

By now, eight years later, the herds have been regenerated.  However, a new problem has emerged: "black beach," a phenomenon in which grass disappears, leaving only bare dirt.  The cause might be overgrazing, and pikas: small rodents that burrow underground and eat the grass from the roots up.  Daniel Miller cites another possibility: natural ecological evolution.  He writes: "The rangeland environment can no longer support Kobresia plant communities and the rangeland is going through changes to a plant community dominated more by drought tolerant grasses and forbs." 

In an effort to better allocate increasingly limited pasture, the government has been handing out free fencing material to nomads.  In Sershul, concrete posts and wire are distributed on a village basis, and the villages are responsible for finding (or hiring) the labor to put them up.  Generally speaking, it is the winter pastures that are fenced, leaving the summer pastures open.  The long-term results of this program - good or bad - will take some time to be known.

The Economy

Because Tibetan herdsmen consider yaks to be more useful than cash, they have little incentive to sell animals, and they consequently are cash-poor.   The average per capita annual income for herdsmen in Ganzi is 822 yuan (about US$100). In Litang, the monthly butter output of one family's eight yaks brings in about 60 yuan per month, after some butter was taken out to feed the three family members.  (One foreign expert told me that the yak is, relatively speaking, a rather poor milk-producer.  An American dairy cow has more than 20 times the milk output of a female yak).

In May herdsmen in some areas go to dig for caterpillar fungus, and in August-September they collect mushrooms. It's these activities, not animal husbandry, that bring in the bulk of a nomad family's cash earnings.
 

Upward mobility on the grasslands:.monks in their quarters in Dege.

Some simple arithmetic will show that even families with large herds of more than 300 animals are not earning very much money.  (and it's interesting that the extra money they do have is often spent on a new motorcycle).  They can get along as nomads in tents with yaks on the grasslands, but there is no surplus to buy a house, invest in a new business enterprise, or send a child to college - all of which might afford some upward economic mobility. Most crucially, there is little extra money to pay hospital bills in the event of a health crisis.  (Yaks can be sold, but in winter and springtime they are thin and do not bring in much money).  All of this means that herdsmen are mired in poverty from which they are unable to easily emerge.

A second factor that inhibits nomads from developing economically is lack of ambition to do so.  Anthropologist Melvyn Goldstein has written how herdsmen are proud of their lifestyle, which demands little of a man except for sitting back and watching his animals eat and multiply. 

In Pelyul, I asked the two brothers what they wanted to be when they grow up.  They hesitated for a long time before they finally said, "monks."  In the beginning, Dawa's pupils also professed no ambition beyond the monastery, but after two years of schooling they started to look further outside their own grassland world, and to dream of being teachers, doctors, and drivers.

If the above-mentioned hurdles were not enough, Tibetan's Buddhist faith provides the final challenge.  Tibetans will readily herd yaks, but they are less happy about sheep because a sheep offers less meat per soul sacrificed - and the Buddhist faith enjoins us to respect and cherish equally all lives, whether great or small.  For religious reasons described in another Kham Aid report, they are even more reluctant to raise pigs or chickens.

The Chinese government has tried various experiments to bring herdsmen further into the cash economy.  One experiment that seems to have failed very badly is an attempt in one county to force nomads to sell a part of their herds each year.  Township officials took away yaks from each family, reportedly as much as 17% of the herd, sold the yaks, and reimbursed the family for the sale.  However, this effort went badly awry when the cash realized from the sale proved much too tempting for avaricious local officials.  Much too little was returned to the nomads. It seemed to them that this "program" was just a tax, and a monstrously high one at that.

I've heard of taxes on nomads being exorbitant in other regions, with the culprits being corrupt local officials.  (This sort of thing is hardly unique to Tibetan areas, but is a perennial problem everywhere in rural China, and recently has been the subject of much public discussion.)  Some Tibetan leaders who hold posts within the government reported the nomads' situation to authorities in Beijing.  As a result, a decree was issued that, starting in 2004, no taxes of any sort will be collected from Tibetan herdsmen.  This is certainly a good thing; yet it's unlikely that this measure by itself will enable many herdsmen to substantially improve their standard of living.

Summary

It is tempting to say that nomads are happy the way they are, so they should be left alone.  Yet there are two compelling reasons for interfering.  First, the enormous herds that are now in Kham are probably not sustainable over the long-term.  Second, on pure humanitarian grounds, it is unacceptable that Tibetan herdsmen suffer from so much preventable disease.

With so many deep-seated problems and an extremely conservative population, It is difficult for me and other NGO leaders to offer programs that will help Tibetan nomads better their circumstances.   Education is key, for educated herdsmen are far more ready to step outside the lifestyle of their parents and push the envelope of their Buddhist beliefs. Yet education is not easy to provide, nor is it always accepted.

What Kham Aid is doing to help

1. Our scholarship program helps children from remote areas attend junior middle school.
2. Our midwife training program is training, or has trained, midwives from four of the five counties where nomads live in large numbers.
3. Our Better Schools program improved the classroom and dormitories of the Ponru School, in Sershul.
4. Our Small Grants for Schools program has given beds, desks, and other items to primary schools serving nomad children.
5. Our Medical Aid program has provided crucial medicines to charity clinics serving nomad populations.