Poverty & Environmental Degradation in the South
Wed Apr 30, 2008 at 08:36:23 AM PDT
Another diary penned by Ms AAF, who's toiling away on her psychology master. I did a little edit, not much.
The causes of environmental degradation in the South are manifold, and poverty is a symptom of a global economical and social system which drives this environmental degradation, both in North and South, in pursuit of short-term financial gain and greed, without consideration for future generations and sustainable development.
Citing poverty as the single cause for environmental degradation would be simplistic and plain false as both phenomena must be seen in their local, national and international context.
The extreme affluence of the North (or formerly 'First world') with their associated hunger for resources , drives environmental degradation in the South (formerly Third World) as much as the extreme poverty found there. Both conditions (extreme wealth and poverty) are unsustainable, but to achieve change the balance of economic, social and political powers would have to undergo radical change.
An example of poverty, caused by overpopulation, resulting in environmental degradation is the ever increasing desertification of arable land. Desertification, or the last step of environmental degradation of land resources occurs when no more vegetation can be supported by the soil due to wind an water erosion. Increasing demands for food lead to over-farming of lands, fallow periods shorten, and the land gradually loses its nutrients, plant cover and productivity, starting a downward spiral. More demands are then made on the land, until it yields no more – having been overgrazed and compacted by cattle hooves and over-farmed. This leads to increased run-off in rainy periods, and wind erosion as the soil is no longer held together by plant roots. The land resource has been pushed beyond its carrying capacity due to too many individuals in that area.
Overpopulation certainly is a major factor which affects poverty in the South. It is considered, on the one hand, a cause of poverty in Malthusian population theory and a powerful incentive for technological innovation and improvement as in the Boserupian Model on the other.
In the Malthusian population model, developed in the 19th century, population control is mainly achieved by two means, either positive or preventive checks. Positive checks are those imposed by the carrying capacity of an area, or the limit at which available resources like food, shelter and water become scarce, and effectively result in death by famine, disease or other preventable misfortune. Malthus advocated the use of preventive checks, which involves population number restrictions by way of use of contraceptive methods, in order to avoid getting too close to the carrying capacity, which fluctuates in technologically underdeveloped areas to a much larger degree, due to a greater dependency on local climate fluctuations, and other localized phenomena (droughts, insect plagues, floods).
According to Malthus, by restricting population size, resource poverty is also restricted, and traditional farming methods can be maintained, thereby limiting environmental degradation.
This view, however, fails to take into account the enormous economical value many poor families place on their offspring. Indeed, much of the labor-intensive farm-work - for which there is no machinery available - is carried out by children, thereby enabling their mothers to carry out more gainful work. In the Boserupian model, versus Malthus, it is precisely a high population density which drives the human mind to develop more technologically advanced farming methods, culminating to date in genetically modified crops, with the potential to combat world hunger. The kind of technology required to deal with the South's multiple environmental and social problems, however, is largely developed in the North, and sold profitably to Southern countries, and not widely available to poor farmers. Thus, to cater for ever increasing numbers, the finite common resources in the South are exploited beyond their maximum sustainability, and quickly become degraded. Meanwhile, the vicious circle of overpopulation and their associated positive checks of needless deaths by famine and disease continues.
Environmental degradation and poverty in the South also have their roots in deeply entrenched gender inequality. Women, in most societies, outnumber men by a small margin, yet, due to traditions and religious beliefs, they are oppressed, often mere chattels of their husbands, with little or no access to education and basic human rights or say over their fertility. Yet most of the work, from farming to animal husbandry, housework and child rearing, is done by their hands. With today's AIDS crisis, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, many women are either widowed or too ill to carry out heavy work, and arable land reverts to its natural vegetation, thereby increasing pressure on the remaining farmed lands. To combat poverty and localized environmental degradation the education of the poorest - and especially the poorest women, is a humanitarian exigency. Empowering women to control their fertility and change from the positive-check-strategy to preventive-check-strategy would benefit the environment as well as the social fabric of Southern countries which often ignore the enormously positive contribution women have to give to society.
Environmental degradation however isn't just caused by getting too close to the carrying capacity of a area – which causes poverty - or by social and gender issues. The economic perspective is probably an even bigger culprit, causing both poverty and environmental degradation. At first glance, poverty, caused by overpopulation, drives the environmental degradation in the South. Increasing deforestation to gain grazing land and fuel wood, worsening water pollution due to increased fertilizer use and the leaching of weakly bound tropical soil minerals - leading to eutrophication of water bodies; and increased air pollution due to increased burning of forests and general machinery use. All of these on the surface, are directly attributable to poverty which forces humans to increasingly exploit and degrade the natural resources around them, and abandon traditional more non-invasive farming and forestry methods.
In Honduras, where the population almost doubled between 1970 and 1989 and 70% of rural children suffer from malnutrition, this environmental degradation quickly followed. But the poverty and environmental problems are driven by land distribution issues and a misguided World Bank loan strategy, and not by the increasing population. Honduras availed of large World Bank loans for the development of pasture land to produce mainly cattle for export to the North. Up to half of all arable land there is now being used for cattle farming, benefiting the minority of extremely wealthy landowners, which by this virtue also are able to influence local government policy in their favor. The vast majority of landless or land-poor, low-income families do not benefit from this. They are paid minimal wages and their small farms barely produce enough for their own consumption. In attempting to eke out a living from their small plots of land, the poor do cause small-scale localized environmental problems, but this is minimal compared to the large-scale, internationally sponsored environmental damage caused by wealthy landowners who deforest the rain forest in order to make way for cattle pastures – cattle, which then is imported cheaply by the North to supply our fast-food industry. This happens not only in Honduras, but all over the South, and usually the North's economic might drives this mechanism, where small numbers of local people benefit to the detriment of the poor masses, with the North unaccountable for their ecological footprint – the real cost of a cheap burger, or cheap clothing is never paid by the end consumer in the North. Moreover, the developed nations of the North prevent the Southern producers of consumer goods to compete in the world market equally. This is firmly tilted in favor of the protected and - in the case of agriculture - state - sponsored markets in the North, due to tariffs and trade barriers, with the EU's CAP, or common agricultural policy and the WTO but two of the main market distorters.
These policies and organizations prevent Northern producers from having to compete with Southern producers on a level playing field, depressing prices in the South, and keeping them artificially high in the North, thereby preventing people in the South from escaping the poverty trap. Not trading itself is to blame, but the distortion caused by protected Northern markets and unsustainable consumption levels in the North.
Northern demand for consumer goods such as coffee remains high, yet the economic might of Northern buyers depresses the price a local, Southern grower can realize for their product. Many have been given government loans, which in turn are financed by the world bank, and the combination of low prices and loan repayments cause many to live near poverty levels.
Indeed overall the level of Southern debt to Northern financial institutions is so great, that this alone perpetuates poverty in Southern nations. Large percentages of Southern nations' GDP is swallowed up by debt repayments, preventing important infrastructural investments like school programs for all children or public health programs to combat AIDS, or the building of road and communication lines, which are sorely needed to remedy poverty and its associated environmental degradation.
Many of the loans given by the World Bank to Southern nations, which now cripple their developing economies, were used to finance activities which caused environmental degradation in the first place, like mineral extraction, prospecting or deforestation for paper pulp. The uneven distribution of natural resources means that most of the requirements of developed, Northern nations cannot be met by their own territories. This demand for goods and resources is increasingly met by Southern nations, with terrible consequences for their local environments and people. Deforestation for example, has displaced many indigenous forest-dwelling peoples, especially in the Amazon Basin and equatorial Asia, peoples who lived in comparable harmony with their environment, and didn't suffer overpopulation. When the Northern financed prospectors moved in, cleared the forests, and moved people unaccustomed to local exigences in, the balance was quickly upset, and environmental degradation caused the poverty with all its social problems prevalent there now. In Africa, to an even greater extent, all of this is compounded by the historical damage done by colonialism. Democracy has never developed and present day political unrest adds another dimension to the impoverishment and displacement of people, and its associated environmental degradation whilst being extremely resource-rich. Resources which benefit mainly the North, and a small layer of local individuals, whilst detrimental environmental effects have to be borne by the poor masses.
Poverty causes environmental degradation, but so does the over-consumption of resources of wealthy Northern nation, by proxy. Poor nations in the South have no other choice, as many face existential threats. We in the North however, know better.
Given a level playing field, our planet could support the billions of humans that now inhabit it. It is the prevalent power system which prevents this, and general indifference in the North, which tolerates the positive population checks in the South as inevitable. If children died like flies from totally preventable illnesses such as diarrhea in the North, that situation would not be tolerated, yet this occurs every few seconds in the South, and our governments only pay lip-service in the form of pathetically low foreign investment aid. The writing-off of Third World debt is a step in the right direction to help rectify some of the damage the North has done to the South, historically (colonialism) and in present times.
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