UN International Year of Rangelands 2026: More Wolf Hunting or Finally Better Rangeland Policy?

The UN has declared 2026 the «International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists» explained.

The focus is on grazing landscapes as habitat for biodiversity, grassland-based livestock farming, and the social reality of herders worldwide. In Switzerland, the farmers' association and recreational hunting lobby are already attempting to use this occasion to repackage old demands for more wolf culls in modern garb.

What the UN really wants

According to the FAO, grazing lands cover approximately half of the Earth's land surface. They secure livelihoods, food, climate resilience, and diverse ecosystem services. The UN year often centers on marginalized communities that must survive on scarce and climatically sensitive land. The goal is to promote political frameworks that ensure access to land, fair value creation, and ecological sustainability. Internationally, the year is used to draw attention to the vulnerability of herding societies, the threat to rangelands from climate crisis and land seizure, and the importance of traditional use systems.

Swiss grazing narratives: shield laws for problem politics

In Switzerland, the farmers' association and agricultural organizations predictably board the UN train, albeit with a highly selective reading. Campaigns such as 'Grazing land feeds us' present pastures and alpine farming as a quasi-natural success model that guarantees food security, biodiversity and climate protection. All the more apparent is the silence regarding how current subsidized grazing practices systematically produce conflicts with predators and in many regions rest on a thin ecological foundation.

In parallel, agricultural representatives in parliament are demanding further facilitation of wolf regulation: motions aim to simplify culls, defensive shooting by armed herders is being reviewed, and hunting bans come under fire as alleged security risks. The wolf becomes a projection surface for structural problems that have never been seriously addressed politically: underdeveloped herd management, missing livestock guardian dogs, poor working conditions on alpine pastures, dependence on direct payments.

Grazing, herders, and wolves: what the UN means and what Switzerland ignores

The UN year of grazing lands and herders is not an invitation to selectively demonize predators, but a call for adapted, socially fair, and ecologically sustainable grazing systems. This includes: access to land and resources not blocked by one-sided interests. Appropriate livestock numbers instead of overutilization of sensitive alpine meadows. And fair working conditions for herders, who must not serve as a 'cheap security apparatus' for politically motivated wolf hostility.

In Swiss discourse, by contrast, labor rights, social standards, and ecological carrying capacities are remarkably rarely discussed, and it is almost always about culling quotas, threatened livestock losses, and supposedly 'uncontrollable' wolf populations. The wolf is to assume the role of scapegoat so that a grazing policy that exacerbates climate crisis, biodiversity loss and animal welfare problems can remain untouched.

When the wolf is the symptom, not the cause

Examples such as Valais show where this logic leads: instead of seriously reforming grazing practices and herd protection, wolves are culled by the dozen and entire packs are eradicated, politically sold as sober 'management'. The official tally lists culls like performance metrics, while young animals become collateral damage in a strategy that cements conflicts rather than resolving them.

This contradicts the spirit of the UN year: whoever truly wants to secure grazing lands as an ecological and social foundation must design grazing systems so they can coexist with predators, rather than using them as a pretext for ever-new exceptions in recreational hunting and conservation law. It is about resilient landscapes with diverse functions, not about maximally predator-free forage areas for ever-more intensive meat and milk production.

UN year as opportunity or PR façade?

Scientific networks and NGOs worldwide emphasize the need to direct investment toward sustainable grazing practices, enable herder mobility, and make governance structures more inclusive. In Switzerland, there is a risk that this global agenda will be reduced to a national image campaign: beautiful pictures of grazing lands, alpine herdsmen, and cheese, flanked by demands for further wolf culls.

Wildlife conservation organizations and critical voices are especially called upon to confront the official grazing narrative with its dark sides: subsidy logic, animal transport, overgrazing, recreational hunting privileges and the systematic externalization of risks onto wildlife.

What honest grazing policy should accomplish

A grazing policy that truly does justice to the UN year would not secure withdrawal first, but would: introduce herd protection as standard, technically, financially, and labor-rights secured. Bind stock sizes and production targets to ecological carrying capacity and climate goals. Link direct subsidies to concrete biodiversity performance and animal welfare, not to blanket presence on the alp. And disentangle recreational hunting policy from lobbying interests so that conflicts with predators do not reflexively result in culling programs.

The International Year of Grazing Lands and Herders is a chance to conduct this debate openly, or to bury it in the shadow of new wolf hunting initiatives. Those who seriously invoke the UN can no longer hide behind the myth of the 'evil wolf' while the actual structural problems of grazing practices remain untouched.