Under a Broken Sky

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ive kilometers away, another herder's inheritance is rapidly diminishing. Sanbilag's family once oversaw 1,000 animals with the help of two other families, but the herd has thinned to 300. Sanbilag's son, Bor, just returned from a stint as a lieutenant in Mongolia's army, a once proud outfit that has flagged since losing Soviet support. Traveling throughout the country, Bor found himself longing for home, his family and the animals. Now 27, he wants to stay in the countryside, but the future looks bleak. "If he could find work in the city," Sanbilag admits, "he'd be better off."

Sanbilag says he heard the weather got so bad "because a layer of the sky broke." But in truth, this crisis stems almost as much from geopolitics as from the dzud. After the Soviet collapse, scores of state-run factories were closed and their workers set adrift. Nothing filled the employment vacuum, so many Mongolians returned to the nation's traditional vocation. The ranks of herders doubled, says Barry Hitchcock of the Asian Development Bank, and the number of livestock rocketed from 23 million in 1989 to 35 million in 1999. "It's one of the few places in the world where something like that could have happened," says Hitchcock, "because there are no fences and no ownership of land."

The predictable outcome was overgrazing, water shortages and disease. Some people had forgotten or never knew how to raise animals, and their herds were the first to fall. Others lost their way as Soviet backing disappeared. Under communist rule, the nomads raised state-owned livestock and Moscow looked after them in return. "Until 1990, they were government employees," says Jeanne Bartholomew, who consults for the World Bank in Ulaanbaatar. There was fresh hay available when needed, and a truck came around regularly to carry hides, meat and milk to market. Veterinary services—which have now largely disappeared—were widely available. Jampur, for one, says all this support had a negative effect on younger herders: "The Soviets made them lazy." Bartholomew contends that it's difficult "to change the mind-set from 'I'm a receiver' to 'I have to do this myself.'"

One man grappling for an answer is Prime Minister Nambaryn Enkhbayar, whose own grandparents were nomads. "This whole lifestyle of living as nomads, this whole culture has to change," he says, sitting in a huge, finely appointed conference room in Ulaanbaatar's Government House, the seat of Mongolia's political establishment. Enkhbayar, a man of letters who has translated English and Russian texts into Mongolian, wants to see eight or nine provincial centers expand into cities of 100,000 or more people. These would be connected by new roads and fiber-optic cables. Mongolia, he argues, needs educated urban entrepreneurs and land owners, not nomadic herders.

Convinced that the wanderers should have fixed addresses, Enkhbayar has drawn up an impending program of land reform. It stipulates that residents of the capital will receive 25-meter-by-30-meter plots, while those who settle elsewhere—in the provincial centers, for example—will receive five to seven times that. The country he envisions hums with competition, new markets, trade, communication and diplomatic links with the outside world, countering Mongolia's geographic isolation and its second-class status in the eyes of its neighbors, China and Russia.

The idea is to wean the country from its dependence on a few sectors with limited export potential (such as animal husbandry) and low returns (such as copper). One day, Enkhbayar dreams, this land of goats and yaks could be a haven for software production. The status quo, he argues, leads only to dependence—on foreign powers, imports and the weather. "We cannot afford to limit our vision," he says, "or the very notion of the independence of the country will come under question." As he sees it, the transformation may take three decades, even if all goes well.

Of course, Mongolia can't pay for it. But Enkhbayar hopes the country's democracy, laws and newly privatized banking sector will brighten Mongolia's sheen in the eyes of international investors. There's a formerly state-owned cashmere factory that's looking for a buyer, and groups that help fund construction of a cross-country highway may receive mineral rights in return for their desperately needed capital.