Biocultural community protocols for livestock keepers
quarries, combating logging and poaching, and eliminating Lantana, a toxic, invasive
plant species. With respect to livestock, they undertook to continue the customary manuring of the forest as well as rotational grazing, to keep their traditional Bargur cattle
breed and conserve their ethnoveterinary knowledge.
Visibility
Biocultural community protocols change the outside perception of breeds by putting the
people and communities that have nursed them centre-stage. In essence, they transform
“genetic resources” that seemingly exist in a social void – and belong to nobody particular
– into the heritage or property of specific communities and flag them as the products of
traditional knowledge of these communities. They firmly establish pastoralists and other
traditional livestock keepers as indigenous and local communities embodying traditional
lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity that are
entitled to certain rights under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Protocols provide
insight into the problems and constraints facing the breed and identify the people who are
in the best position to tackle them. Biocultural community protocols make visible the ways
of life, practices and situation of livestock keepers and thereby provide an entry-point for
the in-situ and community-based conservation of breeds.
Pashtoon nomads on long-distance migration in Pakistan (photo by Abdul Raziq Kakar)
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