October decides February

By Dr. M. Mehdi Eker  

Anıl Yıldırım(Pexels)

Türkiye’s national strategy against desertification runs to 128 pages. It is a serious document, and I quote it with respect. The word veterinarian does not appear in it once. Neither does vaccination. I was the minister responsible for agriculture, food and livestock — for the soil, the crops and the animals. That omission matters because it points to a wider blind spot in the way we think about rangelands, livestock and resilience. We count animals. We measure hectares. We record rainfall. But too often, we notice the condition of livestock only when the crisis has already arrived. When I became Türkiye’s agriculture minister in 2005, the decline of our rangelands was not a mystery. The national assessment records that 87.6 percent of our rangelands are in the medium or poor class and require rehabilitation. Rangelands make up less than a fifth of Türkiye’s territory, yet more than half of all soil lost to erosion comes from them. The assessment identifies the causes in the language of management: Early, excessive and unplanned grazing and, above all, the absence of effective rangeland management. Management was my department. I ran that ministry for a decade, and for the last four years the word livestock was in its name. At the time, I read the diagnosis as ministers often do: As a problem of numbers on the pasture. Too many animals, too early in the season, in too few places. What I have learned since is that the headcount was the easiest thing to measure and close to the least useful thing to change.

A veterinarian standing in front of a ewe in October can know a great deal about February. Fat over the loin, condition along the spine, the state of her teeth: None of these will reveal how deep the snow will be or whether ice will seal the ground. They reveal something more immediate — how much winter that animal can survive. A dry summer arrives as thin animals in autumn. Thin animals in autumn arrive as carcasses in late winter, at a threshold of cold that animals in better condition can survive. This is not a metaphor. It is the mechanism. In Mongolia, the word is dzud. Mortality accumulates over months through the combined effect of poor animal condition and severe cold. In the winter of 2023–2024, Sukhbaatar province alone saw 52.8 percent of its herding households lose more than half of their animals. For a herding household, that is not simply a bad year. The animals are the capital, the pension and the school fees. Faced with losses on that scale, the instinct of policymakers and experts is often to reach for the herd count. I would once have done the same. But a nationwide Mongolian analysis published last year, covering four decades of rangeland data, found that while herd size has a modest effect from one year to the next, that effect disappears at the scale of decades. Temperature dominates, and weather effects are an order of magnitude larger. The policy conclusion drawn by the researchers themselves is equally important: Measures that limit herd sizes may affect people without preventing degradation. I did not have that correction when I needed it. It came from a country whose experience deserves to be read as carefully as it is discussed. I, too, was sometimes quicker to advise than to listen. There is another part of this record for which I must take responsibility. Our subsidies raised production without reaching the smallholders who needed them most. In the Konya basin, where the ground is now subsiding and hundreds of sinkholes have been documented, the acceleration of groundwater loss falls within my decade in office. Well licensing was governed under another ministry’s water law. But the cropping patterns, irrigation practices and support design that made sugar beet and maize the rational choice for a farmer working above a falling aquifer belonged to agriculture, and therefore formed part of my responsibility. We paid for output, and we were slow to price water.

The scale of what is at stake makes these omissions harder to defend. According to the desertification convention, rangelands cover more than half of the Earth’s land surface, support the direct livelihoods of around 500 million people and provide one-sixth of the world’s nutrition needs. The convention also describes them as among the planet’s most overlooked and increasingly degraded ecosystems. More than half the land. Around 500 million livelihoods. One-sixth of the world’s nutrition. And still, important parts of the system remain largely invisible. Last month, five United Nations agencies, including the World Health Organization, published 250 pages examining why nutritious food is priced beyond the reach of 2.7 billion people. Across those pages, the word veterinary appears once, on page ninety-eight. There, in a discussion of why animal-source foods are the most expensive food group in Africa, the report recommends reducing feed costs, scaling up veterinary services, including accessible vaccination programmes to mitigate disease, and investing in production intensification for smallholders. That sentence is correct. It is also nearly alone. Our own 128-page strategy did worse. I do not make that comparison to score a point against colleagues whose work I respect and whose figures I use. I make it because this is a blind spot I, too, helped to build. Vaccination is not welfare. Fodder logistics is not charity. They are part of the difference between a herding household that survives a hard winter with its capital intact and one that reaches the following spring with nothing left to sell but its labour. Nor do we lack institutional models for acting earlier. Türkiye’s agricultural drought machinery dates from 2007: A coordination board, an early-warning committee, a risk committee, a data unit and crisis centres in every province chaired by the governor. The first plan covered 2008–2012. That plan has long been superseded; Türkiye is now working through its fourth, running to 2027. The document did not last. The committees did. That distinction matters. Resilience depends not only on having plans but on institutions that can see vulnerability early and act before losses become irreversible.

This month, the parties to the desertification convention meet in Ulaanbaatar. Mongolia asked the United Nations to make 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, and the world agreed. According to the convention, nearly 77 percent of Mongolia’s land is already degraded. Türkiye’s Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change has sent a caravan overland to mark the year, travelling through Azerbaijan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and China. I write as a Turk about a Mongolian conference, conscious that, on the question of living with grass, I am not the senior party here. But the lesson reaches far beyond one country or one winter. Resilience begins when institutions are able to see vulnerability early, act before losses become irreversible, and place the people who depend on land and livestock at the centre of the response. Every country with a herding population should be able to answer two questions before the first snow each year: What condition is the national flock in? And who already holds the money to act on the answer? A drought plan that cannot answer both in October is not a plan. It is a report waiting for February.

Dr. M. Mehdi Eker served as Türkiye’s agriculture and rural affairs minister and later as the food, agriculture and livestock minister for a full decade, from 2005 to 2015. A veterinarian by training, he holds a doctorate in livestock management economics and previously served as the vice president of the Lalahan Livestock Central Research Institute. He chaired the G20 Agriculture Ministers’ Meeting in Istanbul in 2015. He is a candidate for director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.