This was a response to the request from Hanna Gooren and a group of other students at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, to provide my view and opinion regarding an “ethical issue” they had been asked to research and to prepare a joint paper.  The research question was: “Should pastoral nomads in Turkana District be supported or has their livelihood become too hopeless?”

Over the fifteen years prior to the 1984 publication of this article, East African pastoralists faced food shortages and famine. From the perspective of the mid-1980s, this article analyzes the challenges to solving this problem. Modernization had disrupted already inadequate traditional food systems and continued to threaten pastoralists. "Pastoral development" had been proposed as a means of achieving long-term food security by increasing pastoralists' involvement in national food and economic systems. If pastoral development was to become reality, however, daunting obstacles had to be overcome. Halderman warns that if solutions were not found and implemented there could be heavy costs to the region's pastoralists and governments. Contemporary students of pastoralism can evaluate whether progress was made or not.