MOHAMMED is a modern Bedouin from the Badia, the 鈥渙utback鈥� of Jordan. He exchanged his camels years ago for a truck and a big motorised water tanker. For much of the year, he lives a sedentary life in his village in the Tafila district, southeast of the Dead Sea, and keeps his sheep close by, nourished on subsidised feed. In spring, he phones round his friends to discover where the rains have fallen and the grass is lush, loads his flock into trucks, fills his water tanker and heads for distant pastures.
This take-it-or-leave-it nomadism may seem innocent enough, but it is at the centre of a row between ecologists and developers, the result of which could determine the future of both the Bedouin and the Badia. Those who want to develop the area argue that people like Mohammed are destroying the fragile, arid grasslands of Jordan, and are harbingers of doom for the desertification of the Badia grasslands, which make up two thirds of the country. The ecologists, however, see the practice as a modern, more efficient version of the old ways. They say the Badia is alive and well in the hands of the Bedouin, and that it is the development plans that could destroy it.
A generation ago, the Bedouin and their camels roamed the deserts of the Middle East. Mohammed鈥檚 forefathers, members of the Ariza tribe, travelled between the Jordan and Euphrates rivers, living a largely self-contained existence. Today, they are stuck behind the national boundaries of Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In the northern Badia, less than 1 per cent of households own camels, once a sign of nobility among the Bedouin. But 99 per cent own sheep 鈥� the original inhabitants of the region 鈥� which they rear for the cash that their meat, wool and milk will earn.
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The Bedouin are settling down to a less noble, but more profitable, existence. Mamdouh Srour, a Bedouin and sociologist, says that most have a family home in a village. Their children go to school and take jobs in business or government. Only a minority of households now depend on livestock for their main income, and many hire others to look after their flocks for much of the year.
Even so, says Srour, people are still nomadic. In a study for Britain鈥檚 Royal Geographical Society (RGS), which has established a Badia research project with the Jordanian government, Srour has found that a quarter of families in the Badia still migrate long distances to find grazing pastures for part of the year.
This year, an unusually wet one in the northern Badia, several families came up from the south of Jordan 鈥� a trip of about 400 kilometres 鈥� to exploit the good grazing. The contrast between the old and new was often bizarre as the herds of sheep, trucks and tents dotted the grasslands of the Badia. Tents were patched with old fertiliser bags, trucks bumped across the Badia delivering barrels of water, and shepherds followed their flocks on donkeys before driving into Safawi, a truckstop on the road to Iraq, to hear the latest gossip, or heading to Saudi Arabia to buy a cheap Toyota.
Without limits
Under the pressures of modern living, the complex tribal systems governing access to the pastures have collapsed. In a draft report to the UN鈥檚 International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Roger Blench, a British consultant, says that 鈥渋n practice almost any rangeland is available to those who can exploit it鈥�. Mohammed will go to any area of Jordan, says Blench, 鈥渁nd does not consider it necessary to ask permission or even to enquire into traditional grazing rights in the region where he plants his sheep鈥�.
Though Mohammed can no longer pass unhindered into Syria, Iraq or Saudi Arabia, his flock could. Many Bedouin, says Blench, operate 鈥渞esale rings鈥�. They sell their animals across the border for a season to a fellow member of the Ariza tribe, and then buy them back later. Such rings 鈥渕ay involve more than one country and animals may move in large circles crossing from Syria to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq鈥�.
The Badia is the back yard of Jordan, the region east of the Jordan valley. Although it is very arid, with rainfall of less than 200 millimetres a year, most of the land is covered by grass. Almost the entire Badia, up to the borders, is used as pasture land for sheep and goats after rains. The main exception is the black 鈥渂asalt desert鈥� of parts of northern Badia, near the border with Syria, where huge stones lie on top of often fertile soils, making it almost impossible to cross, even for the hardiest of goats.
Market gardeners
A generation ago, oil prospectors bulldozed networks of roads through the stones, before abandoning their efforts to turn Jordan into a new Middle East oil state. The oil prospecting failed, but the encroachment of the modern world has continued. 鈥淭he decade since 1985 has seen a major expansion of pioneer farming in northern Jordan,鈥� says Blench, 鈥渁nd new settlements, roads and other infrastructure exist that are not shown on any maps.鈥� Along the main road from Amman towards Iraq, much of the land is converted to crops. In the villages, production of vegetables, often irrigated and under plastic, has soared. The Badia has become a market garden for Amman, and for export.
The government would like more permanent settlements. The RGS Badia project has included identification of sites for new towns and villages among its early tasks. Sharifa Zein Alsharaf bint Nasser, a Jordanian princess and PR director for the project, says: 鈥淭his is virgin land. We have the opportunity to achieve something great here 鈥� environmentally acceptable development. I鈥檇 like to see more livestock, more farming, more industry and a better quality of life out there.鈥�
But the reality is that the land is far from virgin. It is already heavily used by the Bedouin. Encouraged by subsidised feed, the herds of sheep are among the largest in the world, says Blench, averaging more than 400 per household. One farmer at Zatari on the edge of the Badia is said to have 30 000 animals. A livestock census in 1991 found 2.5 million sheep in the Badia.
Many, particularly those who want to develop the Badia, argue that these sheep are turning the grassland to desert. Yet evidence to back this up is hard to find. Blench says: 鈥淚 have searched the literature, and there appears to be no long-term monitoring of the state of the Badia.鈥� According to Roderick Dutton, head of the RGS Badia project, 鈥減eople assume the area is overgrazed because if you fence parts of it off from animals, the vegetation grows higher鈥�. But this is not the point, the critical question is whether the current land use is sustainable, whether the pasture is becoming exhausted and vulnerable to desertification. 鈥淣obody knows,鈥� says Blench. The evidence for permanent decline is scant: this year, for example, heavy rains brought a massive growth of vegetation.
There is no scientific consensus about what controls the amount of vegetation growing on an arid rangeland such as the Badia. When Blench鈥檚 survey team asked the Bedouin what they considered to be the main factor, two-thirds said it was rainfall. Blench in his draft report calls this 鈥渁 convenient fantasy鈥� which 鈥渁bsolves them from responsibility鈥� for degraded pastures.
But is it? Other consultants to IFAD and the RGS agree with the farmers. One said: 鈥淭here is a split between those who think the Badia is resilient and tolerant, and those who think it is just getting hammered by grazing, and is being permanently destroyed. My own view is that it is quite resilient. It may look highly desertified after a dry spell, but after good rains, like this year, it shows remarkable recovery of vegetation.鈥�
Ian Scoones of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex agrees. He is co-editor of Range Ecology at Disequilibrium, which reflects the new thinking on the world鈥檚 great unfenced grasslands. Far from being fragile ecosystems, he says, they are mostly highly flexible and dynamic. Without rain they may appear to be arid desert, but after the first shower they swiftly become green again, confounding claims that they have been 鈥渄esertified鈥�. Grazing rarely does permanent damage, he says, and rainfall is usually the limiting factor for the growth of vegetation. The evidence for this includes the fast recovery of vegetation on the margins of the Sahara after the droughts of the 1980s. 鈥淟and degradation from overgrazing is not the major issue it was once assumed to be,鈥� he says.
This new model of grassland ecology has important implications for the economic development of places such as the Badia. If Scoones is right, to make the most of such an unstable environment, cattle herders and shepherds need to be as flexible as the ecosystem they inhabit, able to react quickly to changing circumstances, altering the sizes of their herds and migrating to areas where the vegetation is best that year. So Mohammed may have been right all along.
Most ecologists are far more concerned about the likely impact of the spread of the plough into the Badia than about the impact of grazing. Ploughing 鈥渄estroys the surface, causing crusting of the clay soils, increased flash floods and erosion鈥�, according to Clive Agnew of University College London. John Gowing at the University of Newcastle, who is also part of the RGS Badia programme, agrees with him. 鈥淎 lot of the rangeland has been lost to the plough already.鈥�
Irrigation worry
More damaging even than ploughing the Badia, says Agnew, would be the development of large formal irrigation systems. Water is the most scarce resource in the Badia. According to John Waddington of the University of Newcastle, half the water extracted from the area each year is used for irrigation. Many local wells have already dried up. 鈥淲ithin a few years,鈥� adds Blench, 鈥渕uch of the water from wells will be unsuitable for agriculture鈥� because the freshwater reserves will be gone, replaced by deeper layers of salty water.
The push to 鈥渄evelop鈥� the Badia is growing. Since the Earth Summit in 1992 agreed on the need for a Desertification Convention to tackle the problems of arid lands, the governments of poor, dry nations such as Jordan have been pressing for international aid money. But what should that money be spent on? One view is that this could mean protecting the Badia from desertification by encouraging the shepherds to quit the pastures and feed their animals full time from feedlots. Blench鈥檚 study broadly takes this line by concluding that they should be persuaded to keep fewer sheep by compensating them for relinquishing their pastures, much as the European Union now subsidises nonproduction through set-aside.
Another option is to turn as much as possible of the Badia over to irrigated agriculture, or other forms of intensive agriculture 鈥� a policy that, according to Blench, is still pursued by Jordanian agricultural officials. A third idea is to preserve large parts of the grasslands for ecotourists and conservation. The RGS Badia project has already established a 4000-hectare nature reserve. And this summer Britain鈥檚 Darwin Initiative for biodiversity gave the project 拢162 000 to protect biodiversity, with a view to developing ecotourism. There are also many remote and entirely unexploited archaeological remains with great tourist potential in the Badia, such as the 5000-year-old Jawa fort which has beneath it one of the oldest dams in the world.
Whatever the route to development, most of the agencies with aid money to offer start from the premise that the existing free-for-all use of the land by the Bedouin must end. They see a settled form of land tenure as essential for investment and development. Blench鈥檚 report says that only individuals with a long-term interest in the land will help conserve it. The RGS鈥檚 Dutton agrees that 鈥渨e will concentrate our development work on areas where there is some form of de facto ownership鈥�.
But if the new thinking on the ecology of grasslands is right, then the most sustainable way of making a living on the Badia probably remains the 鈥渙pportunistic鈥� use of the land already undertaken by the Bedouin, unencumbered by modern rules of individual land ownership. That leaves Mohammed, his feed-lots and his phone calls, as the unlikely ecological hero of the Badia. If Scoones is right, Jordan鈥檚 nomadic shepherds may just turn out to be the wise men.