Trading Mongolia's Sovereign Meat: the Social Transformations and Everyday Geopolitics of the 'Livestock Revolution'
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Social Anthropology
Abstract
Context
While its mining-driven GDP growth figures in 2011-2014 were among the highest in the world, Mongolia is now experiencing the full effects of the so-called 'resource curse'. Corruption and mistrust are rife, its international financial reputation is in tatters, and the domestic economy flounders from crisis to crisis. One sector, however, still appears promising to policymakers: the livestock that now graze Mongolia's vast pasturelands in record numbers. As a former socialist bloc state, Mongolia once exported significant amounts of meat to fellow socialist countries; however, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, exports dwindled. Today, the Mongolian government and international donor organizations are promoting meat export as a key industry for development in order to halt the rural exodus, and reduce stocking rates, thereby combatting grassland degradation, while generating new employment opportunities for the newly marginalised peri-urban population.
Aims and Objectives
The proposed project, grounded in social anthropology, but also drawing inspiration from discussions in adjacent disciplines such as human geography, will be carried out by experienced researchers with intimate knowledge of the region and its languages. The project will study how herd animals are transformed into commodities, how these commodities are made to circulate both within Mongolia and across its borders, and the political effects of these processes. We aim to examine how a range of actors navigate the post-socialist revival of an export-oriented meat industry, study the efforts to establish a legal framework and standardise meat production, and thus uncover the effects of the livestock revolution from the margins of the world economy.
Case studies will highlight the frictions between domestic production and international ambitions and include institutions such as meat-processing plants in Ulaanbaatar and provincial centres with Chinese export licenses, key sites where actors grapple with new standards and the geopolitical implications of the meat trade. We will also study informal spaces of meat production and exchange, including small-scale seasonal abattoirs, and markets in Ulaanbaatar's outskirts. In addition, our project will consider the making of laws relating to international trade through the study of archives and debates in contemporary media, as well as through ethnography of Mongolian law-makers.
Centred in Ulaanbaatar, the spokes of the project will also move out to examine attempts to transform rural livestock production to conform with international standardisation regimes, and the activities of trader-agents who move livestock from pastures to processing plants and provide the infrastructural backbone of the meat industry.
Potential Benefits
Meat production and meat consumption have been explored by scholars from a variety of disciplines, but our project makes a distinctive contribution in approaching meat as a vector of everyday geopolitics. Our research will investigate how the making of meat into an export commodity and its subsequent circulation is transforming livelihoods in the context of extensive rural-urban migration, while at the same time producing anxieties as this emotionally and symbolically-charged national resource is traded across borders.
This research will be of interest to the general public, especially those concerned with questions of food systems and sustainability, the future of Inner Asian mobile pastoralism, and the geopolitical tensions that are accompanying China's rise. Our project will also be of direct benefit to researchers from a range of disciplines (e.g. anthropology, human geography, sociology, politics, economics, international relations, urban and development studies, environmental science, and food studies), and will interest the growing number of stakeholders with a focus on the region, in particular policymakers in the UK and abroad, development banks, and NGOs.
While its mining-driven GDP growth figures in 2011-2014 were among the highest in the world, Mongolia is now experiencing the full effects of the so-called 'resource curse'. Corruption and mistrust are rife, its international financial reputation is in tatters, and the domestic economy flounders from crisis to crisis. One sector, however, still appears promising to policymakers: the livestock that now graze Mongolia's vast pasturelands in record numbers. As a former socialist bloc state, Mongolia once exported significant amounts of meat to fellow socialist countries; however, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, exports dwindled. Today, the Mongolian government and international donor organizations are promoting meat export as a key industry for development in order to halt the rural exodus, and reduce stocking rates, thereby combatting grassland degradation, while generating new employment opportunities for the newly marginalised peri-urban population.
Aims and Objectives
The proposed project, grounded in social anthropology, but also drawing inspiration from discussions in adjacent disciplines such as human geography, will be carried out by experienced researchers with intimate knowledge of the region and its languages. The project will study how herd animals are transformed into commodities, how these commodities are made to circulate both within Mongolia and across its borders, and the political effects of these processes. We aim to examine how a range of actors navigate the post-socialist revival of an export-oriented meat industry, study the efforts to establish a legal framework and standardise meat production, and thus uncover the effects of the livestock revolution from the margins of the world economy.
Case studies will highlight the frictions between domestic production and international ambitions and include institutions such as meat-processing plants in Ulaanbaatar and provincial centres with Chinese export licenses, key sites where actors grapple with new standards and the geopolitical implications of the meat trade. We will also study informal spaces of meat production and exchange, including small-scale seasonal abattoirs, and markets in Ulaanbaatar's outskirts. In addition, our project will consider the making of laws relating to international trade through the study of archives and debates in contemporary media, as well as through ethnography of Mongolian law-makers.
Centred in Ulaanbaatar, the spokes of the project will also move out to examine attempts to transform rural livestock production to conform with international standardisation regimes, and the activities of trader-agents who move livestock from pastures to processing plants and provide the infrastructural backbone of the meat industry.
Potential Benefits
Meat production and meat consumption have been explored by scholars from a variety of disciplines, but our project makes a distinctive contribution in approaching meat as a vector of everyday geopolitics. Our research will investigate how the making of meat into an export commodity and its subsequent circulation is transforming livelihoods in the context of extensive rural-urban migration, while at the same time producing anxieties as this emotionally and symbolically-charged national resource is traded across borders.
This research will be of interest to the general public, especially those concerned with questions of food systems and sustainability, the future of Inner Asian mobile pastoralism, and the geopolitical tensions that are accompanying China's rise. Our project will also be of direct benefit to researchers from a range of disciplines (e.g. anthropology, human geography, sociology, politics, economics, international relations, urban and development studies, environmental science, and food studies), and will interest the growing number of stakeholders with a focus on the region, in particular policymakers in the UK and abroad, development banks, and NGOs.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Uradyn Bulag (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
White T
(2023)
Sparks from the friction of terrain: Transport animals, borderlands, and the territorial imagination in China
in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
White Thomas
(2024)
China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier