CHITRAL: The participants of a conference here on Sunday said that grazing of goats in the forest of Jughoor village caused environmental threat to the area.

However, the owners of the goats said that they had no alternative means of earning livelihood. They said that they had no agricultural lands which compelled them to adopt goat keeping as a profession.

The stakeholders’ conference was organised by Community Appraisal and Monitoring Programme (CAMP) to resolve the issue of goat grazing in the forest. Goat grazing has been a bone a contention among the villagers for the last 20 years that also resulted in armed clashes among them in the recent past.

During the conference, the goat keepers admitted that grazing in the pasture caused floods every summer in the village besides polluting the water of the stream and denuding the forest. They said that alternative source of livelihood should be provided to them so that they could give up the profession of goat keeping and live in peace with their other villagers.

The arbitrators including Maulana Sher Aziz, Haji Maghfirat Shah, Hazrat Ali Shah and Hussain Ahmed lauded CAMP for bringing the two hostile groups on a single platform.

They said that the issue had been taking horrendous dimensions for the last two decades as the two sides were at constant hostility with each other while forests were also depleting fast.

They said that conflict resolution at grassroots level was unavoidable for lasting peace in the area as different communities and ethnic groups lived there.

Three local organisations -- Koh Integrated Development Programme (KIDP), Chitral Integrated Development Programme (KIDP) and Legal Aid Forum (LAF) -- were co-sponsors of the event.

The Peshawar-based manager of CAMP said that his organisation had taken the project of conflict resolution sensing its gravity. He said that they wanted to address the root causes of the conflicts among local people.

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2014