Amethyst wrote:^^ American-Suufi oughta add another dash and add Pessimist to the name. Sheesh.
James D',
Ive got an Uncle who is a xoolo dhaqato. He lives about 30 to 40 km away from nearest big city. With the many of the recent droughts, and the harsher dry seasons (I wanna say due to global warming or whatever) most of his cattle have died off. He still owns tons, for which the majority source of his food and other items necessities are obtained. We provide for him as well, but for the life of us cant see why he he wont just pull the plug on the whole thing and simply move into the city like the rest of the relatives for greater economic opportunities and better conditions. How would something like this work for him? Would he need to ride into the city all the time to sell the items, he'd made from his camels and then return home to the deserted areas? He would obviously get money for it, buy what he needed at that moment, barter or whatever they do down there. I'm sure if we were thinking about this economic recovery plan from an individual stand point, it'd work for him. To get it to work on a wider scale Someone like him would prolly need more people to do it with him, have us send more money from here to invest in, maybe even to buy more cattle with. Who would buy the items? Aside from the city folk? People in other regions? People in other countries? I agree with many previous postings that better infrastructure such as roads and bridges are badly needed. Who is to build them tho? The newly elected government? How....through taxes? Foreign Aid? There has never been a lack of a resource problem in Somalia.....Its always been a lack of a distribution and useful purposes to them.

This is actually precisely the problem that the woman who invented Camel Cheese faced. Distribution, distribution, distribution.
http://www.tiviski.com/index0-uk.html
In Mauritania, the company Tiviski established a pasteurization and distribution system, and the herders sold the milk to them, and Tiviski handled the whole distribution, processing, packaging, sales etc side of things. It works as something of a cooperative and they have thousands of herders that they get their milk from.
Basically speaking, if a company based in Galkacyo for instance had all the infrastructure to deal with the the milk pasteurization, UHT treating, cheese making, packaging and distribution side of things, and had a few trucks, then the trucks could go out to the country, collect the milk and pay the herder, bring back the milk to the processing center and then ship out the final product to the other major cities and the domestic market.
With UHT camel milk, it'll last for months, even years, and can be shipped out internationally, as does camel cheese.