Pastoralists are often victims of food security crises. Although pastoralists maximize resilience in very hostile environments, they suffer food insecurity when their coping mechanisms are disrupted. Inappropriate interventions in pastoralist areas can also drive malnutrition, as in poorly planned market access strategies.

Land tenure is a central theme of pastoralist problems across the world. The main challenges include the poor understanding of customary laws and of the advantages of communal tenure, but also investments that displace pastoralists from their grazing lands or that disrupt their resource sharing strategies with other collectives.

Pastoralist economies have often been undervalued because of lack of access to product markets, and because many services provided by pastoralists do not have conventional market values. An improvement in the way pastoralist products are valued and marketed offers great opportunities for poverty reduction. Women are usually the manufacturers of most pastoralist products (converted foods, handicrafts) and know well which products can be marketed. A larger income derived from their products could translate into increased empowerment of women in pastoralist societies.

Key fora in which pastoralists are currently engaged include:

• The Terra Madre network,
• The Committee on World Food Security (CFS), including the revision on the Biofuels,
• Responsible Agriculture Investment (RAI) by FAO,
• Global Strategic Framework for Food Security and Nutrition (GSF) by FAO,
• FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) in the context of national food security.