One outbreak, a whole aimag pays the price
Under current veterinary practice, detecting a highly contagious animal disease anywhere in an aimag or soum triggers a full quarantine regime across the entire administrative unit — halting all livestock and meat marketing and all animal movement, regardless of how far a given herder is from the actual outbreak. Responsible herders in genuinely healthy zones suffer severe economic damage for an outbreak they had no part in.
The root cause is a resourcing gap, not a policy failure: government veterinary agencies lack the manpower and technical capacity to monitor livestock movement at fine grain across Mongolia's vast grazing areas, so blanket administrative quarantine becomes the only tool available.
This is the same structural problem PUAs and Lamb Fattening address from other angles: a fine-grained, herder-level unit of accountability succeeds where a blunt, area-wide instrument fails. A Disease-Free Zone turns biosecurity into something herders have a direct economic stake in enforcing themselves.
Certified at the herder-group level, not the soum
A bottom-up disease-free, healthy, and stable zone ("Free Zone") certified at the level of a herder group's own contracted pastureland — the same PUA boundary established under Component 1 — rather than at the scale of an entire soum or aimag.
- Certifies a herder group's PUA-contracted pastureland as free of specific highly contagious diseases
- Gives herders a direct incentive to police their own boundary — losing the certification costs them market access
- Complements, rather than replaces, national-scale disease-free zones — small, herder-level zones are the base layer that makes the whole system credible
