How Your Cashmere Sweater Is Decimating Mongolia's Grasslands
"We've been wintering in this valley for 30 years," she says, looking away from her cows toward the hills in the distance. "Back then, the grass came up to my chest. It grew so tall that we had use a sickle and horse-drawn equipment to cut through it. But the grass of my time is gone — there's no longer enough to feed the animals."
The explanation goes beyond the animals' capacity to breed. This is about money.
The culprits stand innocently grazing nearby: cashmere goats. Their sharp hooves cut through the soil surface, and their eating habits — voraciously ripping up plants by their roots — make it impossible for grass to thrive.
But thriving isn't a problem for the goats. If there's no grass, livestock in Mongolia eat feed, a mix of grains that herders must buy in the city.
"Goats reproduce faster than all my other animals, even faster than my sheep!" Bish says with a frown. "Not too long ago, I used to have 20 of them. Now I've got 150. I don't want that many. They're just taking over."
Thirty years ago, when the grass grew tall, cashmere goats made up 19 percent of all livestock in Mongolia. Since then, their numbers have skyrocketed to make up 60 percent today.
China – Mongolia's biggest trading partner and southern neighbor – has strict controls on importing meat and milk from Mongolian sheep and cows, but not on cashmere. It is the biggest consumer of cashmere from Mongolia.
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Today, Mongolian rangeland is at a crossroads," says Bulgamaa Densambuu, a researcher for the Swiss-funded Green-Gold project. Her organization focuses on preventing overgrazing of Mongolia's grasslands, which Densambuu calls "rangeland."
Densambuu recently completed a survey that found 65 percent of Mongolia's grasslands have been degraded due to overgrazing of cashmere goats and to climate change. The climate change has led to a 4-degree Fahrenheit rise in average temperature in Mongolia, outpacing the rest of the world by three degrees.
But Densambuu hasn't lost hope. "Ninety percent of this total degraded rangelands can be recovered naturally within 10 years if we can change existing management," she says from her office in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. "But if we can't change the existing management today, it will be too late after five to 10 years."