More than 90% of Iran’s surface is arid or semi-arid land and pastoral communities have always played an important role in food production by developing creative and sustainable systems for the use of scarce natural resources. Although migrating pastoralists number only about 2% of the entire population (1.3 million pastoralists) according to government figures, they satisfy about one quarter of the country’s livestock needs.
The pressures of drought, debt and pro-sedentarisation policies are driving pastoralists to abandon their livelihoods systems and settle permanently in villages and cities. However, there is lack of jobs for settled pastoralists. Furthermore experiences with industrial livestock production - the main alternative to pastoral livestock production - have not been promising.
This case study seeks to understand how local pastoral communities could play in the management of drought in Iran. It begins with an examination of the range of organisations that are involved in drought management in Iran. The next section focuses on the experience of the drought of 1999-2001 in the words of Qashqai pastoralists from the south of Iran. Their testimonies make a strong case for increasing the involvement of local communities in managing natural disasters that affect them.
The tragic earthquake that struck the Iranian city of Bam in December 2003 has made a big impact on this report. The response to the earthquake served to spark a debate in the Iranian media, and interest among the public, on the strengths and weaknesses of Iran’s disaster management plan and strategy. The first and most tragic observation was that so-called “natural disasters” do not necessarily need to result in disasters - they can be avoided and their impact mitigated. The two earthquakes that hit California and Iran just days apart in December 2003 both measured at about 6.5 on the Richter Scale, but whereas only 3 people were killed in the California earthquake, roughly 43,000 dead according to official numbers have been registered in Iran.
The government has been heavily criticised in the weeks following the earthquake for its lack of preparation and poor coordination for such a disaster, even though it is widely known that Iran is one of the most earthquake prone areas on earth. And while Iranians have been very eager to donate money and goods to the earthquake survivors, many have organised their own deliveries for fear that their donations would not end up in the hands of the victims.
Following the earthquake, Ms. Jamileh Kadivar, MP for Tehran made the link between the Bam disaster and the state of governance in the country. “When the institutions that run this country are constantly arguing with each other and constantly faced with challenges and crises and one institution is trying to eliminate the other, we cannot create a society which benefits from order and security.” She went on to say, “If our politicians were really motivated to develop the country for all its people then our development projects would not lie half-finished for years on end, our villages wouldn’t be empty of their populations, traffic and pollution would not have reached crisis point in our cities and our tourism sector would not be as inactive as it is today”.
This public and critical look at the government’s record is a very positive step and should be welcomed by the government as it is necessary for developing alternatives and for building the political will to implement them. However, one striking feature of all the criticism - whether voiced in parliament, in newspapers, or in academic journals - has been the lack of systematic and in-depth analysis of “what went wrong”. As is the norm in Iran, a huge public outcry follows a major and tragic national disaster and loud calls are made for improvements to the system. But there are very few specific recommendations based on analysis of laws, policies, budget and on-the-ground experiences. The tragedy is never forgotten, but the call for improvements fades from our consciousness.
This case study attempts to present a more in-depth look at the system for managing natural disasters in Iran and particularly the new National Comprehensive Plan for Relief and Rescue. There are both positive and negative aspects of the comprehensive plan, but perhaps the most important recommendation would be to design a national plan that put the citizens of the country at its centre. The current plan is supposed to be implemented by a maze of overlapping committees and working groups with no clear picture of how a local community could negotiate its way through such a system to play a more active role. Legal obstacles to registering non-governmental and community-based organisations present another major difficulty in envisioning a national plan that could involve local communities since legal registration is a prerequisite for any social group to become active. Lastly, the development of a national plan with local community involvement would require local communities to be organised into coalitions or unions at the national level. Since this is currently not the case, the recommendation is to start building up experiences from the most local levels, with the ultimate goal of arriving at a full national plan of cooperation.
