Neither government legislation nor traditional law has much control over commonages. The resulting vacuum has allowed influential people with substantial non-farming incomes to acquire and privatise large areas of commonage, and to over-exploit grazing in commonages shared with permanent residents who depend largely on stock farming for their livelihoods. Large areas of communal land thus suffer from the 'tragedy of the commons' where the rich get richer, the poor become poorer, and environmental degradation intensifies.