全球羊绒需求激增却引发蒙古草原荒漠化,牧民与生态间的艰难平衡
On the stony fringes of the Gobi, where winter temperatures can plunge past minus forty degrees, herder Batbayar Nergui surveys a pasture that has grown eerily quiet. A decade ago, flocks of sheep and cattle provided a modest income alongside the prized cashmere goats that generations of his family have combed each spring. Now, with a global appetite for cheap, soft winter garments surging across European catwalks and North American shopping aisles, goats outnumber all other livestock on his land by a factor of six. The coarse, wiry grasses that once anchored the topsoil are vanishing under a relentless assault of hooves and hungry mouths, and Batbayar knows the dust storms that choke his ger each April are only the most visible symptom of a far larger malady. Across Mongolia’s vast rangelands, the same calculus is being repeated by tens of thousands of herding households, driven not by greed but by the iron logic of a luxury commodity market that has quietly transformed the steppe into an extraction frontier.
Cashmere yields in the country have more than doubled since the early 2000s, propelled by post-Soviet livestock privatization and now by Chinese and European processing mills that absorb approximately 40 percent of the global raw fibre supply. The goat population officially exceeds 27 million, though some livestock census officials privately concede the real number may be considerably higher, as herders often underreport to avoid grazing fees. While the animal’s undercoat is the biological marvel that insulates it against extremes, its foraging method—plucking grasses out by the root with sharp, narrow teeth—is devastating on a landscape that receives less than 300 millimetres of rainfall annually. Scientists from the German-Mongolian Institute for Resources and Technology have documented a 30 percent decline in vegetation cover across southern aimags since 2010, a trend that correlates tightly not with drought cycles but with the expansion of specialised cashmere herds. Once-dependable wells are running dry, and sandy patches that were manageable are coalescing into barren corridors stretching for kilometres.
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