ナミビア北部における食肉産業の展開とオヴァンボ農牧民の牧畜活動の変容--キャトルポストの設置に注目して (特集 地域研究の前線)

Abstract

The meat industrial sector in Namibia has changed rapidly since becoming linked to the global economy after the country's independence from South Africa. Before independence, the meat industry was managed by colonists who ran commercial farms in the central and southern parts of the country, and who ignored livestock farming by "Black people" living in the north under apartheid regime. After independence, however, the nation has promoted livestock farming by people living in northern Namibia to involve them in the national meat market. On the other hand, the livestock farming of Ovambo has also changed in the past two decades, and some households have set "cattle posts, " areas of grazing land surrounded by a fence. The purpose of this research is to clarify the relation between the changes in livestock farming among Ovambo agro-pastoralists and the expanding of meat industry of Namibia, with special reference to the setting of cattle posts. Most cattle post owners have high-paying jobs, and their cattle management system is different from the old one. It is considered that they invested the money earned through their jobs into livestock farming, and that they introduced a new system into their livestock farming. However, households that own cattle posts and those that do not showed the same tendency for the number of livestock purchases to be higher than the number of sales. The number of gifts of livestock was also high. This implies that their livestock farming is not directly connected with the meat industry. It is not a perfectly commercialized economy but rather a subsistence economy, the aim of which is to increase the number of livestock and the yield of crops by using the manure of livestock.