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Overview: This Off Site Session will take place on the Plateau du Larzac, which is an highly symbolic place for different reasons such as community decisions over land management and property, community resistance facing executive power…etc. Lunch will be arranged by local partners and you will discover local farms and grasslands. During the 90-minutes of bus transportation, local experts will present the landscape and the land use change from the Mediterranean coast to the Larzac Plateau.

As any sector of agriculture, the livestock farming systems are impacted by the different components of the global change along the last decades. The change has always made part of the factors which lead the breeders strategies, especially the mobility and savings. However, may be it has never been so important and diversified in such a short time. Moreover, the combination of different factors of changes increases the complexity of the processes and therefore the responses in terms of practices and policies.

In arid areas, the rainfall reduction, the global warning and high frequency of hazards force breeders to adapt the management practices of the pastures. The strong urban development and new lifestyle require different resources as for example land, water and food, impacting the countryside and the breeding areas. New technologies of information and communication, especially mobile phone and transport, help the breeders to have a better knowledge about the price of the products and the dynamic of the market. During the last decade, the globalization of the economy gets high the animal product prices, as it never happened. The social demand, mainly young people and women, requires significant transformations in terms of living conditions and relationships between the generations and the traditional governance. The new social and environmental awareness at different level result in new rules and practices in natural resource management and sustainable development.

The breeders have to face important changes in the same time, have to take decisions, frequently in a short time and may be leading to irreversible modifications of their livestock farming systems, their living conditions, with risks for their sustainability. In this global change context and according to the differences between the biomes and regions of livestock activities, what are the main differences and common issues in adaptive strategies and resilience process at farm and local level, especially in management of the pasture, the feed and the herd, land-use, labor organization, long-term farming trajectories and public policies.

The Pastoralism Off-Site Session will start before the lunch. Farmers and local representatives of the Société Civile des Terres du Larzac (SCTL) will present their own assessment of the resilience at collective scale based on their 30-years experience. After the lunch, members of another pastoralism association, from the neighbouring region of the Cevennes will also present their experience in term of adaptation to global change and resilience at collective scale.

Some information about SCTL:

•  Some Information about Larzac_SCTL_Eng
•  QuelquesInfosLarzacSCTL

Some information about Cévènnes:

• Présentation_Pacte_Resilience2014 (106 Ko)

• Intercommunal_pastoral_pact_in_CévennesEng (163 Ko)

After these two introductive presentations, and based on contrasted study cases in different biomes, the Pastoralism Off-Site Session will focus on the three following themes:

• What does global change mean at the local level?
• What are the main adaptive strategies at local level?
• What about the resilience of the livestock farming systems at local level, especially in harsh conditions?

We are suggesting to all the selected speakers to integrate in their presentations the relevant issues regarding these three themes in their respective study cases.

The Pastoralism Off-Site Session will be developed in 3 parallel sub-sessions: 1. Resilience strategies, 2. Policies and human dimension in the resilience, 3. Resilience as a tool to better understand the local trends. Each sub-session will have 90 minutes for four presentations and will be managed by two coordinators of LIFLOD network (Livestock Farming Systems & Local Development, www.liflod.org) who will be responsible to summarize the presentations and the discussions in relation to the three themes.

Organizers: LIFLOD (www.liflod.org)

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