Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/92264

The most urgent issue facing Inner Mongoliaʼs livestock farming industry is how to balance solving environmental problems with maintaining herd Management. For this analysis, it is necessary to analyze the development process of livestock feeding in Inner Mongolia, especially changes in herd Management and their main factors. Previous research on changes in herd Management has focused on institutional factors. This is because, with the individual allocation of livestock in 1981 and the individual allocation of land in 1997, pastoralistsʼ herh management has shifted to an individualized system in which each livestock is managed on its own grassland. Hence, it was argued that among the three major elements of pastoralism, livestock, land, and labor, the reform of the ownership system for two of them, livestock and land, regulated changes in livestock rearing patterns. However, the perspective of the third element, the labor force, that is, the population, family, and the labor unit that combines them, is missing. In this paper, we observed the progress of population growth and family differentiation over a long period of time, and used statistics and case analysis to show that the scale of livestock rearing per family is a determining factor in changes in livestock rearing patterns. In other words, we showed that the two ownership reforms of livestock and land did not themselves immediately change the way livestock were kept. In addition, it uses examples to show that current herd management is conscious of the balance between grassland area and the number of livestock, and to clarify the problem with the conventional understanding that the cause of grassland desertification is overgrazing by pastoralists.