Mongolia“s nomadic herdsmen are at the mercy of the hostile weather or crammed in Ulaanbaatar, where they struggle to make a living, says a Reuters report. The country’s underground wealth provides little solace for the millions of refugees who huddle from the cold in the capital’s makeshift shanty towns, stuffing rudimentary stoves with coal and wood or anything else that burns, and casting the city in a sulphurous fog.

Ulaanbaatar“s refugee problem began after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when herders facing new Russian export restrictions began to flee the harsh pastures and erect gers on the hills that encircled the capital. Now the collective farms have disappeared, herds are more dispersed and the Soviet-era supply chains have broken down, forcing herders in far-flung regions to rely on middlemen to sell their meat. When the bad weather comes, those middlemen don”t arrive.

Not everybody has found a permanent home in the city. Thousands of orphans and vagrants descend through manholes into the capital”s crumbling Soviet-era hot-water system each winter to seek refuge from the bitter cold. They are often pelted with stones by city regulators trying to push them out of the underground labyrinth.

The Prime Minister has admitted that the Government does not yet have the means to deal with the winter refugees, or with the thousands arriving at the ger districts to find work. “They can stay, but to get registration and social benefits, they need help from the authorities and that needs to be based on our capacity,” he said.

As Mongolia tries to forge ahead with efforts to convert its vast underground wealth into tangible gains, aid workers suggest many nomads are the victims of the laissez-faire economics that dominate the country”s solidly business-oriented parliament. In the 1990s, herders were encouraged to apply for cheap loans to expand their herds, but few had the wherewithal or experience to sustain those herds through the brutal winters, leaving the country”s banks with a mountain of bad debt. In addition, the marginal land could not sustain the expanding livestock.

This was especially the case when soaring cashmere prices encouraged nomads to breed more goats, which have long been the scourge of sustainable agriculture in poverty-stricken farmland throughout Africa and Central Asia as goats eat through crops and leave grassland barren.

Ms. Rana Flowers, UNICEF”s representative in Mongolia, said the Government might need to consider more proactive measures. “They have allowed herds to increase in an uncontrolled way, and unless they are prepared to deal with it, they will face a dzud every year,” she said.

Experts say herds have increased by half in the last two decades, and Mongolia“s barely fertile land can no longer feed them. With fodder supplies already hit by a summer drought, large numbers of animals are now starving.