The Grass Nobody Owns
Mongolia handed its collectivised livestock to herding households between 1991 and 1993 and left the pasture in state ownership, where the constitution still keeps it. The national herd has climbed from about twenty-six million animals to more than seventy, and every few years a winter kills them by the million — ten million in 2010 alone, close to a fifth of everything alive.
Drive west out of Ulaanbaatar and within an hour the fences stop. From there to the Gobi and back there is no boundary of any kind on the ground — no wire, no hedge, no marker except the ovoo cairns on the passes and the occasional stone winter shelter. Sheep, goats, horses, cattle and camels are on the grass in every direction, in numbers that take a day or two to stop registering as remarkable. Nothing about it looks contested.
The national herd was about twenty-six million animals in 1990. It passed seventy million in 2019. Mongolia covers roughly 1.56 million square kilometres and has about 3.5 million people in it, so there is a great deal of room. The difficulty is that the room is not evenly useful, that the useful parts are used by everybody, and that the arithmetic of who pays for the damage has been broken since the year the collectives were wound up.
The half that was privatised
Herding was collectivised through the 1950s into negdels — district cooperatives that owned the animals, moved them, paid the herders a wage, ran the veterinary service and, above all, administered the pasture. A negdel decided which valley was rested this year. It trucked animals to reserve grazing when a winter went wrong, and it cut and stored hay against the possibility. When the People's Republic ended, the negdels were liquidated and their livestock distributed to member households by voucher between 1991 and 1993. Inside three years essentially every animal in the country was in private hands.
The grass was not. Article 6 of the 1992 constitution holds land, water, forest and subsoil in state ownership, and while the Land Law of 2002 lets citizens own or possess plots for housing and cropping, it excludes pastureland, which stays in common use. So a herder owns the animals, their offspring and their fibre, and owns nothing whatsoever of what they eat. Every additional animal is entirely his. The cost of that additional animal is spread across everyone else grazing the same valley. This is the oldest problem in resource economics, and Mongolia produced an unusually clean version of it by accident, in three years, by privatising one side of the ledger and leaving the other side where it was.
Why the herd became goats
The growth was not evenly distributed between species. In 1990 goats were roughly one animal in five; by the end of the 2010s they were closer to two in five. The reason is cashmere. Mongolia is the second-largest producer of raw cashmere in the world after China, and a goat combs out something in the order of three hundred grams of it a year — a small quantity worth more per kilogram than anything else a herding household produces, which sells for cash at the roadside to a buyer who arrives with a lorry, and which needs no refrigeration, no market stall and no road. Meat and milk need all three. Goats also graze closer to the ground than sheep and will pull shallow-rooted plants out rather than clip them, which is the part that does not appear in the price.
Nobody chose goats out of sentiment. A goat is the only animal on the steppe that turns grass into cash without a road, a cold chain, or anyone you have to trust.
Dzud
A dzud is the winter that kills livestock, and it usually needs a dry summer in front of it: animals go into the cold already thin, and then deep snow or an ice crust puts the grass out of reach and they starve standing on top of it. Three consecutive dzud winters between 1999 and 2002 killed something like eleven million animals. The winter of 2009–10 killed about ten million in a single season, close to a fifth of the national herd. The winter of 2023–24 had killed more than seven million by the following summer. None of this is new and none of it is freakish — what is new is the size of the herd standing on ground a dry summer has already stripped, and the absence of anyone whose job it is to move them off it.
What has been tried
The most interesting response is an insurance product. Since a pilot in 2006, Mongolia has run index-based livestock insurance: a herder is paid not on his own losses but on the recorded adult mortality rate for his species in his soum, the district. If the district crosses a threshold, everyone insured in it is paid, whether or not their own animals died. It sounds crude, and it is exactly that crudeness that disposes of the two problems that would otherwise make the product impossible — nobody has to send an assessor across roadless country to count carcasses, and nobody has any incentive to let animals die in order to claim. Take-up has grown slowly and still covers a minority of households. The larger fix, a pastureland law giving herder groups a defensible right to a defined area and an obligation to rest it, has been drafted and reintroduced to the State Great Khural repeatedly since the 2000s and has not passed. It founders on the same objection every time: any allocation of common grazing tells somebody where they may no longer go, in a country whose self-image is that nobody may be told that.
What a visitor is actually looking at
The result is not desert, or not yet. Government and academic assessments have for years placed the majority of Mongolian rangeland in some degree of degradation, with a smaller share judged to have crossed into change that will not reverse on its own. From a vehicle window that looks like shorter grass, more bare ground between the tufts, and the palatable species giving way to the ones nothing wants to eat — which is to say, it looks like grass. The clearer signal is back in Ulaanbaatar. After a bad winter, households that have lost their animals sell what is left and move to the ger districts on the hills above the capital: fenced plots with a tent or a shack on them, no piped water, no district heating, and a stove burning coal from October to April. The city banned raw coal inside its boundary in May 2019 and substituted a processed briquette, the particulate readings did fall, and the queues and the carbon monoxide poisonings of that first winter were the news for months. Both halves belong to the same story. Pasture that cannot be rested pushes people off it, they arrive somewhere that was not built to hold them, and the bill is settled in a currency with nothing to do with grass.