POVERTY, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
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POVERTY,
ENVIRONMENT
AND DEVELOPMENT - extracted text
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POVERTY,
ENVIRONMENT
AND DEVELOPMENT
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POVERTY,
ENVIRONMENT
IND DEVELOPMENT
Proposals for action
Paper prepared for the secretariat of the 1992
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
Written for the Swedish International Development Authority
by Johan Holmberg, IIED, London, in May 1991
O/^o2_
Cover: Coffeeharvest
painted by Francisco D. Van-Dunem. Angola
Layout: Press Art
ISBN: 91 586 7133 1
Printed by Ljunglofs Offset
Stockholm, July 1991
The paper is manufactured using methods
that are kind on the environment
2
Table of Contents
Foreword
4
Abstract
5
1. Background and purpose of the paper 6
2 Poverty and impoverished environments 8
3- The deprivation trap and development 10
4. Environmental trends and the poor 13
5. Natural resource dependence and foreign trade 16
6. Poverty and population growth 19
7. Poverty and environment: the debate 21
8. Poverty and environment: an appraisal of the causality 23
9- The policy agenda..________________________________________ 27
9.1 Some basic assumptions 27
9.2 The macro-economic framework 28
9 3 Empowerment and the role of governments 30
9.4 Primary environmental care. 31
9 5 Supportive services and institutions 33
10. Some specific areas for action 37
Notes 41
Annex: Illustrations and case studies 45
Chart 1: Poverty/environment: the process of cumulative causation_ 46
Chart 2: Growth and environmental degradation 47
Case study 1: Women and land management in Malawi
Case study 2: Soil erosion in the Ethiopian highlands
Case study 3: Ruining the commons-, coastal overfishing in Kerala___
Case study 4: Health problems in rich and poor areas within cities__
Case study 5: Low input soil restoration in Honduras
Case study 6: Agroforestry in Burkina Faso
Case study 7: Household garbage collection in Recife
Case study 8: The national soil conservation programme in Kenya__
48
49
51
52
53
54
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57
3
Foreword
Poverty and development are often so closely linked that they are commonly
referred to as two sides of the same coin
Over the last decade it has become obvious that there are also close links
between poverty and environment. The Brundtland Commission stated in
1987: "Poverty is a major cause and effect of global environmental problems”.
To combat poverty it is thus necessary to address environmental issues
efficiently. The interrelationships between the two are complex however,
and have not been studied sufficiently. The World Bank, in its First Annual
Environment Report 1990. states: "The links between environmental
degradation and poverty' are as yet poorly understood”.
The Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA) in 1990 initialed
in-house work to improve our understanding of the poverty-environment
links as a basis for formulating strategies for our future cooperation
programmes. The UNCED Secretariat learnt about our work and asked
Sweden to produce a paper on the subject. To this end SIDA engaged Mr
Johan Holmberg of 1IED, London. Mr Holmberg is an assistant director
general at SIDA on leave. The paper, which is based on the findings of our
in-house study, was finalized in May 1991 and has been submitted to the
UNCED Secretariat.
As a contribution to international discussions we have decided to make
the paper available to a wider audience.
Carl Thani
Director General
Swedish International Development Authority
4
Abstract
This paper arises out of an in-house study carried out by SIDA analysing
conclusions from SIDA’s own work with poverty and environment. The point
of departure of the paper is the dictum of the Brundtland Report that poverty
is a major cause and effect of global environmental problems.
There is some evidence that there is a connection between poor countries
and resource poor and fragile environments. Within countries the poor often
tend to be found in environmentally sensitive low-potential areas. The poor
typically lack access to land and to the social services and amenities that
potentially could improve their livelihoods. Internal distortions in developing
countries, land distribution being one of them, are probably the greatest
immediate impediments to poverty alleviation.
Generally, degradation of the environment in poor countries is characterized
by a reduction in the productivity of natural resources, principally because
of overuse. While there is a shortage of data to accurately measure
environmental trends, all indications are that they are accelerating in a
negative direction, and that this is hurting the poor the most. In many
countries degradation of the environment is fuelled by dependence on
natural resources for growth and exports.
Population growth is closely associated with poverty and leading to
increasing environmental stress in poor countries. In the literature on poverty
and environment may authors underline the role of poverty as an underlying
cause of environmental degradation, while other authors prefer to stress the
role of 'misdirected public policies’. Closer examination of the poverty/
environment linkage yields the conclusion that the causality is more difficult
to define than it appears to be at first sight. In many situations poverty may
be an underlying cause, while in others poverty is only a proximate cause
with policies and other factors seen as underlying causes.
Policies to address poverty and environment should be conducive to
approaches here summarized under the rubric of primary environmental
care. Sound macro-economic management and improved environmental
management on a national level are two prerequisites for sustainable success
of projects in this area. The role of NGOs in implementing projects relevant
to poverty and environment is emphasized. More attention needs to be given
to degraded urban environments, an area much neglected by governments
and aid donors.
5
1. Background and Purposeof the Paper
As we proceed through the 1990s, two problems continue to be pervasive in
world development. One is consistent poverty and destitution affecting about
one-third of the population in developing countries despite impressive gains
made by many of these countries during the past decades. The other is
increasing natural resource destruction in the same countries which, in
combination with global environmental threats like climate change, have led
to growing international recognition of the need to address degradation of
the environment as a major impediment to development.
Poverty, environment and development will therefore feature high on the
agenda for the deliberations at the 1992 United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development (UNCED). The subject was debated at the
second meeting in March 1991 of the UNCED Preparatory Committee. The
intention of the UNCED secretariat is to submit to the third meeting of the
Committee in August 1991 a set of programmatic proposals designed to
address poverty, environment and development.
To that end the UNCED secretariat has commissioned papers on this
subject from eight different UN agencies In addition, the Swedish International
Development Authority (SIDA) was requested to submit a paper based on
an earlier version prepared in December 1990 for the secretariat. That paper
in turn was based on an in-house study carried out by SIDA in 1990/91 and
only available in Swedish. To assist the preparation of the present paper SIDA
organized in April 1991 a seminar with participation of international experts,
representatives of some aid agencies and SIDA staff.
Poverty and environmental degradation are often seen as interrelated, at
the same time the cause and the effect of each other. The 'conventional
wisdom’ on poverty and environment is that of the Brundtland Commission
which in its 1987 report stated that
’’Poverty is a major cause and effect ofglobal environmental problems.
It is thereforefutile to attempt to deal with environmental problems
without a broader perspective that encompasses the factors underlying
world poverty and international equality"'
6
However, the relationship may not be quite that straightforward. Authors
on the subject have tended to use a set of suppositions as their point of
departure for reasoning that often is poorly substantiated by empirical
findings, although there is a growing body of intuitive and field-related
experience which has yet to command serious attention. The causal effects
between poverty and environment are often more complex than believed at
first sight. Further, there is the potential for conflict in policies and
programmes between the goals of poverty alleviation and environmental
protection.
The academic debate on the poverty/environment linkage is inconclusive.
The World Bank has stated that "the links between environmental degradation
and poverty are as yet poorly understood" and that "improved understanding
of the links between poverty and environment remains a priority”2.
Some of the most serious environmental problems today facing the planet
originate in the rich countries, and there is clearly a relationship between high
levels of consumption caused by wealth and environmental degradation. It
is also argued by some that profligate northern consumption in combination
with the unequal North-South political and economic power relations are
underlying causes of poverty and environmental degradation in developing
countries. Further, there are evidently many poor in the rich countries.
All of these aspects are relevant and important. However, they are not
dealt with in this paper. North-South relations and their linkage to environment
and development will be exhaustively covered elsewhere in the UNCED
preparatory process. This paper therefore limits itself to a discussion of
poverty, environment and development in developing countries.
The paper starts with a brief overview of poverty and impoverished
environments. Poverty is analyzed in the context of the broader concept of
deprivation, and a review is made of environmental trends in developing
countries and how they affect the poor. A summary is made of the natural
resource dependence and foreign trade implications on the environment in
developing countries and of the relationship between population growth and
poverty. The debate in the literature on the poverty/environment linkage is
summarized, and in a subsequent section an attempt is made the disentangle
the causality of that relationship. A review is made of the policy and action
agenda relevant to poverty and environment, and in a concluding section
some specific areas for action are suggested. Several case study illustrations
are provided of major problem areas and of successful project approaches.
The focus of the paper is on policies and action programmes to address
issues related to poverty and environment in developing countries. Sections
1-5 should be read as descriptive background, sections 6-8 probe the
linkages between poverty and environment, while sections 9—10 provide
suggestions for policy and future action by governments and aid donors.
7
2. Povertyjnd Impoverished Environments
Absolute poverty is the most commonly used concept in quantifying the extent
and trends in poverty worldwide. Levels of absolute poverty represent
income thresholds established by countries or regions, below which a
minimum nutritionally adequate diet plus essential non-food requirements
are not deemed affordable Those thresholds vary by country or region in
broad accordance with the general level of development. They may also vary
within countries and between rural and urban areas3.
Recent estimates by the World Bank, UNDP, the Worldwatch Institute
and, most recently, the United Nations all place the number of people living
in absolute poverty in developing countries at 1,1-1,2 billion people?
However, these estimates may underestimate the extent of urban poverty.
United Nations data indicate that in 1985 there were some 300 million urban
residents, about one-fourth of the total number of poor, living in absolute
poverty.5
However, other estimates indicate that some 600 million urban residents
in developing countries live in "life and health threatening homes and
neighbourhoods",i.e. where provision of water supply, sanitation, drainage
and removal of household waste presents serious health risks6. The total number
of people considered absolutely poor in the developing countries would then
be 1,4 - 1,5 billion, equivalent to 35 percent of the total population in these
countries.
Between 1970 and 1985 the proportion of poor in developing countries
decreased by 8 percent, but because the population grew so rapidly the
number of poor increased by 22 percent. Over the same period the incidence
of poverty decreased by 13 percent in Asia and by 4 percent in Latin America,
while it increased by 3 percent in Africa.
The nature of poverty' varies considerably between countries and regions.
In Africa and Asia poverty remains an overwhelmingly rural phenomenon,
while in Latin America most of the poor are concentrated in urban areas. In
Sub-Saharan Africa about two-thirds of the population is affected by absolute
poverty which is persistent among subsistence fanners, mainly as a
consequence of rapid population growth and low agricultural productivity.
In Asia poverty is caused primarily by high population densities in combination
with landlessness and fragmented holdings, but the numbers of urban poor
8
are increasing much faster than the rural poor. In Latin America poverty
continues to be widespread, despite generally higher income levels than in
the other regions, due to the unequitable distribution of resources, mainly
land, and of income7.
There is some evidence that there is a connection between poor countries
and resource poor environments. While emphasizing that "the relationship
of environment and poverty between nations is understudied, partly because
of various ideological pressures and fears of environmental determinism”
Kates suggests that the least developed nations are found in marginal
environments and locations, primarily semi-arid grasslandsand hill lands that
are "peripheral even within the developing world"8. An African map of
absolute poverty has been said to coincide with the areas deforested on the
continent, and there have been references to a "hunger crescent" across
Africa stretching from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east. A 1984 FAO
report indicated a disturbing degree of correspondence between the areas
at risk of desertification and deficient in fuelwood and those areas having
inadequate land resources to feed their population.
Examples of areas where severe environmental degradation coincides
with high incidence of poverty include the Sahelian countries with the Horn
of Africa, parts of India and especially areas populated by ’scheduled tribes',
Java, northeastern Brazil, parts of Central America, Haiti, the Andes In many
of these areas ethnic factors contribute to deepening poverty, for example
in Latin America the native Indians is the most impoverished group living on
the most degraded land, in India it is the ’scheduled tribes'.
One study estimates that the poorest 20 percent, the 'poorest of the poor',
are frequently found in ecologically vulnerable areas. About 80 percent of the
poorest in Latin America, 60 percent of those in Asia, and 51 percent of the
poorest in Africa were thought to live in marginal lands with low productivity
and high susceptibility to environmental degradation''. While these estimates
must be regarded more as a statement of a hypothesis than an answer to the
question of the correlation of poverty and threatened environments10, there
appears to be good reason for assuming that the poor generally live in
degraded and marginal areas.
9
3. The Deprivation Trap and Development
Using the broader concept of deprivation, Chambers has described what he
calls the "deprivation trap" where five sets of factors interlink like a web to
trap people in deprivation from which they have great difficulty to break
out11. He calls the sets
• poverty,
• physical weakness,
• isolation,
• vulnerability, and
• powerlessness.
Poverty refers to lack of income (flows of food and cash) and of wealth
(stocks of assets) and is a strong determinant of the other sets. Physical
weakness refers to the lack of strength, malnutrition, poor health, physical
disability and high ratio of dependents of active adults and is often directly
related to poverty. Isolation includes the physical remoteness, lack of
education and ignorance, lack of access to services and information.
Vulnerability relates to external and internal stress and the danger of
becoming poorer and more deprived, while powerlessness means inability
to adapt and to cope and weakness in the face of exploitation and demands
by the powerful.
Many of the links between these sets of factors work in both directions,
and the causality is not always clear: people may be unhealthy because they
are poor, and they may be poor because they are unhealthy. From the point
of view of the environment some aspects of deprivation may be singled out
as particularly relevant.
Perhaps powerlessness, in rich and poor countries alike, is one of the most
dominant characteristics of deprivation. The poor lack access to influence
and power and are ill represented at the seat of government. Many Third
World countries are governed by interests representing western middle-class
values and more concerned with raising their own welfare than that of the
poor. Many developing countries therefore lack appropriate institutions for
mobilizing the influence of the poor, be they political parties or NGOs. An
illustration of the powerlessness of the rural poor is the agricultural price
10
policy favoured by many countries, for example in Africa during much of the
1980s, that keeps produce prices low in favour of the politically powerful
urban consumers to the detriment of the politically powerless farmers, most
of whom are poor. The consequence of powerlessness is the inability of the
poor to take initiatives without outside support to improve their welfare, even
though the required support may be very modest in many situations, as will
be further discussed below.
The most important asset that the poor lack is land, many are landless.
FAO has estimated that about 30 million rural households have no land at all,
while some 138 million are almost landless, two-thirds of them in Asia12. In
many Third World countries land distribution is very skewed and inequitable:
for example, in several Latin American countries one percent of landowners
own about half of all arable land ,}.
Development efforts are usually concentrated to high potential areas
causing land values to increase and often forcing poor smallholders off the
land, leaving them with the options of staying on as landless labourers,
migrating to areas with lower potential or moving to the cities Security of
tenure is clearly a prerequisite for poor farmers to be willing to make long
term improvements on their land.
Deprivation will include lack of access to credit: only 5 percent of farmers
in Africa and 15 percent in Asia and in Latin America have had access to
institutional credit. In the absence of credit, poor farmers will be reluctant to
make near term sacrifices for future gains.
Physical isolation means lack of access to infrastructure, markets and the
social services and amenities resulting from development. With development
typically concentrated to urban and rural high-potential areas the poor living
in remote, low potential areas lack access to improved technology to sustain
their livelihood Agricultural research has been persistently biased against
marginal lands, and the failure of research to generate significant findings for
the low-yield risk-averse peasant farming that characterizes much of SubSaharan Africa is often cited as an underlying cause of the African food crisis.
The lack of access to social services, another aspect of isolation, cause the
poor to have lower life expectancy, higher child mortality, higher fertility and
lower rates of literacy than the non-poor. In the Third World nearly 900
million adults remain illiterate, 1,5 billion people lack access to primary'
health care, 1,75 billion have no access to safe water”. In rural Punjab in India
child mortality among the landless was 36 percent higher than among
landowners, in Mexico life expectancy was in the early 1980s 20 years less
in the lowest income decile and in the highest income decile.
The worst deprivation is often suffered by women and children. In many
ethnic cultures the men eat first, the children last; if food is short the children
suffer most. While the division of agricultural and other tasks between men
and women differ from one region to another, in general men tend to have
greater access to the cash economy' and public life while women's work
11
revolves around the subsistence economy, the family and the household. In
developing countries overall women are thought to account for half the
production of food, in parts of Africa they devote probably as much as 90
percent of all the time required producing, processing and preparing it15.
A study by ILO emphasized the triple burden of women in poor
households of household maintenance including collection of fuel and water
and child rearing, income-earning from crafts and trade, and work in
agriculture16. The study estimated that women in the five sample countries
worked 11-14 hours daily compared to 8-10 hours for the men When it
principally is the women who work the land innovations that reduce the time
of their chores become of importance, for their ability to do additional work
on conservation. Further, the female-headed households are often those
most deprived in all respects. Case study 1 in the Annex illustrates the
difficulties of female-headed households in Malawi to raise their income and
make long-term improvements on their land.
Many developing countries still suffer from a colonial legacy that has left
them with fundamentally distorted political, economic and social structures.
In particular, that legacy has created the structure of land ownership referred
to above and a related economic system, the dual economy, which leaves the
majority of the population in the so-called traditional sector largely outside
the mainstream of development It has also contributed to a world economic
system with profoundly unequal relationships between rich and poor
countries which systematically prejudices the efforts of developing countries
to grow out of their poverty.
For deprivation and poverty in developing countries to be reduced in any
major way, those relationships must change. That said, internal distortions in
the developing countries, land distribution being one of them, are probably
the greatest immediate impediments to development and the removal of
deprivation. In the short term governments must address those aspect of
policy that contribute to income disparities and poverty, if they are serious
about improving the welfare of the poor.
12
4. Environmental Trends and the Poor
Generally, degradation of the environment in poor countries is characterized
by a reduction in the productivity of natural resources, principally because
of overuse. A shortage of environmental statistics makes it difficult to measure
trends in the environment in these countries. However, all indications are that
these trends are accelerating in a negative direction.
The three major environments of usual concern in the Third World are the
hill lands, arid and semi-arid grasslands and tropical rainforests. There are
other threatened environments but these are comparatively understudied
compared to the big three. These include wetlands of all types and coastal
wetlands in particular, the marine coastal zone, high potential agricultural
land and irrigated areas in particular, and urban environments17.
Deforestation is occurring in all the three major environments of
concern of unprecedented proportions and over an exceptionally short
period of time. In many developing countries the tropical forest is fast
disappearing as an economic resource. Tropical forests that could have
sustained a timber industry in, for instance, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and
Thailand, have already disappeared. Only 10 of today’s 33 tropical timber
exporting countries will have any timber left to export by the year 2000. The
ratio of afforestation to deforestation is very low, in the early 1980s it was 1:29
in Africa and 1:10,5 in Latin America. Deforestation is a particular threat to
the approximately 200 million people, often referred to somewhat inaccurately
as the indigenous people, who live in or near the moist forests, who are
among the poorest of the poor, and who risk losing their livelihood as a result
of logging and deforestation.
Deforestation, collection of fuelwood, often biomass in the form of tree
branches and twigs, cattle grazing and inappropriate agricultural practices all
contribute to denuding the land of its vegetative cover and hence to
desertification. This process is common for example in Sub-Saharan Africa,
where biomass is estimated to account for 60-95 percent of total energy use,
where soils are often light and easily erodible, and where the pressure on the
land from people and their livestock is increasing rapidly.
Soil erosion ensues from overuse of land that has been stripped of its
vegetative cover for purposes of settled agriculture, as the topsoil is washed
away by rainwateror by wind and the productivity of the land is progressively
13
reduced. This is common both in the hill lands and in the arid or semi-arid
agricultural areas, both in rich and poor countries. But it is particularly
debilitating in countries or regions where the pressure on arable land is high,
there are few opportunities for alternative employment, and the resources to
address the problem are limited. FAO has estimated that 40 percent of India’s
cropland is subject to soil erosion, and that agricultural production would fall
by one-fourth between 1975 and 2000 in the absence of forceful soil
conservation. Case study 2 illustrates the problems arising out of soil erosion
in Ethiopia, a country in the ’hill lands environment' where soil erosion has
caused acute threats to food security and to the livelihoods of large numbers
of rural poor.
In the wake of deforestation and soil erosion there follows a rapidly
increasing threat to the world’s biodiversity, due mainly to the exceedingly
rich flora and fauna in the tropical forests. As a result, a quarter of all currently
existing species may be extinct by 2025. The main cost is the loss of ecological
resilience, biological information and the capacity of adapting agricultural
and health systems, as well as an important part of man’s biological and
cultural heritage. For the poor living in or near the forests it is the breakdown
of biological diversity that is destroying their livelihood.
Throughout history poor people have depended on a resource base far
larger than their own, the so-called commons, to gather fruit, firewood, fish,
game and other resources. It is useful to distinguish between open access
resources, like air or water of the sea, and common property resources like
a parcel of land managed jointly by a community. For example, in the dryland
regions of India, the poor are said to gather one-fifth of their annual income,
along with numerous non-marketed goods, from the harvest of natural
products from land that had been protected from overuse by traditional
management regimes controlled by local communities. In recent years the
destruction of such communal lands through privatization, often sponsored
by the government, and overuse caused by population pressure have
increased and encroached on the income-earning possibilities of the poor.
It is the open access resources that are now under various global threats,
for example the risk of the greenhouse effect. Some large and rapidly
industrializing developing countries are not only contributing increasingly to
greenhouse gas emissions but also causing considerable air pollution and
acid rain within their own borders, China being one example. Several
examples from large Third World cities illustrate how the health effects of air
pollution are worst for the poorest18.
Another open access resource increasingly under threat is the tropical
coastal zone. The highest density of people and the highest rate of
population growth occur in the coastal zone, by the year 2000 it is estimated
that 75 percent of the world’s population will live within 60 km of the shores
of the continents”. In Asia alone over 1 billion people depend totally on fish,
mostly from the nearshore marine environment, for their high quality protein.
14
However, this environment is being destroyed in many parts of the zone by
sediment from soil erosion washed downstream by runoff and rivers, by
deterioration of coral reefs through the use of explosives and poison in
fishing and through tourism, by discharge of untreated sewage, and by
overfishing using inappropriate techniques. Again, it is the livelihoods of the
poor coastal fishing communities that are threatened as a result. Case study
3 describes the consequences of overfishing off the coast of Kerala, India.
In parts of the Third World availability of freshwater can no longer be
taken for granted. About 63 percent of total freshwater use is for irrigation
that accounts for 17 percent of all cropland but one-third of the global harvest.
In many developing countries, for example parts of India, government
subsidies of tube wells and subsequent over pumping have caused ground
water tables to drop and saltwater to invade aquifers. Many African countries
will in coming years face increasing water shortages, as growing populations
conflict with water resources. Deforestation and overgrazing contribute to
water shortages in these countries. Water shortage will typically affect the
poor more than the non-poor and may force them to migrate in search for
livelihoods based on better water supplies.
Urbanization is one of the dominant demographic trends of the late 20th
century. United Nations forecasts suggest that the urban population of
developing countries will increase from 37 to 61 percent of the total
population in developing countries over the period 1990-2025. An increasing
number of the world’s urban residents will live in large agglomerations of 5
million people or more: in 1990 there were 33 cities of this size of which 22
were located in developing countries, in 2000 there will be 44 such cities of
which 33 will be in developing countries20. The cities are already today
unable to provide infrastructure and social services to their growing
populations, let alone mitigate the air pollution problems mentioned above.
The urban environmental quality problems are therefore rapidly
worsening: for example, in Latin America less than 2 percent of total urban
sewage flows receive treatment.
The urban poor usually live in overcrowded shantytowns in areas
eschewed by the non-poor: on steep slopes, near garbage dumps or
industrial zones. There they suffer the health problems caused by pollution
from burgeoning industry or incessant traffic: it was no coincidence that the
victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India overwhelmingly were poor. Case
study 4 illustrates the health problems of the poor in some large cities.
15
5. Natural Resource Dependence
and Foreign Trade
Historically, development can be seen as a process of gradual reduction of
direct use of natural resources for purposes of economic growth and
increasing indirect use, while continuously attempting to improve efficiency
of resource use. In the industrialized countries the environment tends to be
degraded mainly by the pollutants resulting from profligate consumption, in
the developing countries environmental degradation arises mostly out of
overuse of natural resources.
The link between natural resource dependence and income is illustrated
by the following table (most data from 1988):
Low Income
Countries
Middle Income
Countries
High Income
Countries
320
1,930
17,080
Agriculture as
% of GDP
33
12
4
Employment
in agriculture
as % of total
employment
65
60
13
Exports of
primary
commodities
as % of total
exports
48
42
21
GNP per
capita,
USD
Many of the poorest countries depend heavily on natural resources for
employment and economic growth, frequently this dependence is extreme:
in Tanzania agriculture contributes 66 percent of GDP, Nepal has 93 percent
of its labour force in agriculture, Uganda derives 96 percent of its export
revenue from coffee, 95 percent of Zambia’s exports is copper ore. Typically
16
the poor countries supply primary commodities for processing in middle or
high income countries.
Real prices for primary commodities have declined since the 1950s, while
the prices for the manufactured goods imported by developing countries
have increased over the same period. An index of the purchasing power of
primary commodities exported by developing countries was 153 in 1951, 100
in 1961, 92 in 1971, 91 in 1981 and 73 in 1985. This deterioration in the terms
of trade, when combined with the increase in real interest rates during the
1980s, has been severe for developing countries as a group, particularly
serious for several of the poorest countries. The World Bank has estimated
that this combined effect for the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa is equivalent
to a cost of 14,4 percent of GDP, if changes during 1985-88 are compared to
the average for the 1970s21.
Foreign debt exacerbates the situation still further and particularly for the
26 countries classified as both severely indebted and low income22. Many of
these countries are subject to structural adjustment programmes, under
which they are encouraged to expand their exports to foster economic
growth.
The combined effect of dependence on primary commodities, mainly
from agriculture, and the added impetus arising out of indebtedness and the
need to raise exports places a heavy strain on the natural resource base of
many poor countries. Land under export crops will be under pressure to
expand. The temptation to ’mine’ available resources for short term gain,
setting aside considerations of sustainability, will be considerable.
Whether pressure to raise agricultural exports will, in fact, have deleterious
environmental effects would partly depend on the crops involved. Perennial
tree crops like coffee and cocoa would be expected to have more benign
effects on the environment than annual crops that tend to be soil erosive, for
example groundnuts. Farming practices would also play a role, for example
the large mechanized farms established in the Sudan with external support
to boost exports have added considerably to wind erosion of the soil. Cash
crops for export and import substitution are often grown on irrigated land,
where scarce water resources are used wastefully due to inefficient irrigation
systems; in many large Asian systems no more than 30 percent of the water
is said to actually benefit crops23.
While the pressure to increase exports often accelerates environmental
degradation, the poor loose out as well in the short term. Development
efforts, including agricultural research, remain focused on the high potential
areas where pay-off is highest. With governments’ attention concentrated on
raising export revenue, resources allocated to social services tend to suffer
to the detriment of the poor.
This has led to calls for an alternative to the export led development
model. Development must, it is said, first satisfy domestic needs for food and
be more sensitive to the needs of the poor. Besides being at time
17
environmentally deleterious a shift to marketed crops has in some countries
been found to be accompanied by a detenoration of the nutritional status of
women and children, as traditional non-marketed food crops are neglected.
But there is little alternative to raising exports as a means to propel
development. For all the talk about alternative development models, there
is no example of a country that has successfully improved the welfare of its
citizens by pursuing inward looking development strategies. However, there
are plenty of cases, for example the East Asian countries, to show that
international trade allows countries to develop their comparative advantage
which results in gains in economic efficiency and incomes among all trading
partners.
The issue for purposes of this paper is how increasing exports can be
reconciled with safeguarding the natural resource base while raising the
incomes of the poor. Eliminating barriers to trade in export commodities from
the Third World would be one such step. Policies that redistribute the gains
from exports more equitably within the exporting country would be another.
Increased attention to the effects on the environment of certain export crops
and farming practices would be yet another, as would diversification of
export crops. The answer cannot be to reduce exports, even for countries
which are heavily natural resource dependent but to design policies that
mitigate against negative effects on poverty and on the environment.
18
6. Poverty and Population Growth
Carrying capacity is a term frequently used to indicate the maximum number
of people that can be sustained by the resources on a given area at a given
level of technology. It is evident that with current population growth rates
in most developing countries of 2 - 4 percent per year, that is doubling every
20 years or so, many countries are fast approaching the limits of their carrying
capacity.
The relative weight of the different forces that contribute to population
growth has been the subject of much research but are not fully understood.
In a recent report UNICEF raises four consistent elements in that process as
particularly important2':
• economic progress,
• improvements for women,
• availability of family planning programmes, and
• reduced child mortality.
The report notes that rising living standards - reduction in poverty,
modernization and urbanization - are usually accompanied by falling birth
rates. Economic progress tends to erode the advantages of large families. For
poor families dependent on agriculture for their sustenance the marginal
benefits of the additional child will tend to be positive, as children supply onfarm labour and larger families provide necessary social security25.
There are several important examples, notably China, Sri Lanka and the
Indian state of Kerala, where birth rates have been brought down without any
accompanying significant rise in incomes. The common feature of all these
cases is social progress, especially in education and health2'’. In particular,
the education and status of women seems to be one of the most consistently
powerful factors in reducing birth rates. Falling birth rates are also closely
correlated with the availability of family planning services.
High infant mortality is consistently associated with high fertility. When
child death rates are high many parents compensate for the anticipated loss
of one or more of their children by giving birth to more children than they
actually want Further, an infant death ends the suppression of ovulation
caused by breast-feeding, making a new pregnancy more likely. The infant
19
mortality rale would appear to be closely related to income, as illustrated by
the following summary' (infant deaths per 1 000 live births)2’:
All low income countries
Low income countries, excl.
China and India
Middle income countries
High income countries
86
107
52
12
Data on the under-five mortality' rate for children show a similar pattern.
Il is evident that the four broad factors listed by UNICEF, as its reports
points out. are symergistically related. Women's advancement is often (not
necessarily' always) promoted by' economic progress. Such progress will
create not only' demand for but also resources necessary for the social
programmes, including family planning, that contribute to reducing birth
rates. Conversely, slower population growth will contribute to increasing
economic progress.
We can also note that poverty’ is closely associated with all the four
mentioned sets of factors. With some exceptions population growth tends to
be faster the poorer a given country'. Poverty can often be used to explain.
albeit incompletely' in some instances, low status of women, the absence of
mother and child care programmes, and the lack of family planning services.
In particular, poverty is linked to child mortality, a determinant of high birth
rates. The link between poverty and high rates of population growth would
appear fairly well established.
20
7. Poverty and Environment: the Debate
Poor countries tend to be highly natural resource dependent and therefore
need to protect their environment as a basis for future growth and poverty
reduction. Poor countries also tend to have higher rates of population growth
than the not-so-poor. But does poverty itself degrade the environment, as
postulated by the Brundtland Commission?
If we accept that hypothesis, a number of questions arise. Does that not
mean that degradation of the environment would decline with reduced
poverty or rising income? What is the relationship between income and
environmental degradation? And is it not a fact that some of the most pressing
environmental problems today facing the planet, like climate change or the
hole in the ozone layer, originate in the wealthy countries?
To examine what we may call the Brundtland hypothesis a review of the
literature may provide some answer. As stated early on in this paper, research
in this area is yet limited. Available writings can broadly be divided into two
camps, those that unequivocally support the hypothesis and those that adopt
a more guarded attitude2".
The majority of the authors are in the first camp. They emphasize the
interrelationship between poverty and environmental degradation, what
some refer to as the process of cumulative causation’. The poor are forced
to adopt short planning horizons to satisfy the urgent needs of the present,
they are unable to protect the resources on which they depend for future
needs, in so doing they degrade the environment, this reinforces their
poverty, and the process continues.
In this view, environmental problems and poverty are inseparable in
developing countries. Social, economic, demographic and even climatic
factors interact to push poor groups onto low-productivity marginal lands.
This interaction sets off a downward spiral of ecological deterioration that
threatens the physical security, economic well-being and health of many of
the world’s poorest people. The pressures of wood gathering, inappropriate
farming techniques, population growth and overgrazing all contribute to the
spread of desert-like conditions that further decrease the productivity' of
marginal lands and make the rural poor even more susceptible to drought
and other natural disasters.
There is a strong temptation to point at unchecked population pressure
as the direct cause of degradation of marginal lands through overuse and
21
misuse. Indeed, some will call for population policies, including family
planning, as the major course of action to arrest environmental degradation
It is clear that population density often is a major factor and that family
planning programmes have an important role to play. However, as Murdoch
pointed out 1980 in a major study, the same forces that are important in
maintaining high birth rates and constraining food production and economic
development are dominant: the suppression of the welfare of the rural
population, inequality within the rural society, the impoverishment of
peasants. Even if environmental degradation were the result only of
population pressure, he says, this in its turn has its origins in the structural
poverty of the rural population.
Other authors see poverty more as a ’disabling factor' rather than an
underlying cause. They conclude that the poverty/environment relationship
postulated by the Brundtland Report is not that straightforward and prefer to
stress ’misdirected public policies'. Barraclough and Ghimire are of the view
that "poverty, profligate consumption by the better-off and rapid population
growth are all symptoms of unequal exploitive development, as is indiscriminate
deforestation itself .. To blame poor migrants for destroying the forest is like
blaming poor conscripts for the ravages of war”29.
One illustration of misdirected policies' would certainly be Brazil where
deforestation in the Amazon until recently has been accelerated by the
general tax policies, special tax incentives, rules of land allocation and the
agricultural credit system. Such policies increased the size of land holdings
and reduced the chances of the poor to become farmers. The Asian
Development Bank in a recent report stresses that poverty and environmental
degradation are closely associated and virtually two sides to the same coin
However, the report goes on to say, "low levels of income by themselves do
not lead inexorably to degradation of the environment" and places responsibility
for the downward spiral on "the failure of policies to adapt to new
circumstances", citing inequitable land distribution as an example”.
Others emphasize the influence of economic and institutional policies
that shape incentive structures, physical and social infrastructure and hence
affect natural resource usage. They stress that due to the paucity of empirical
research data little is known about the dynamics between poverty and
environmental degradation, and that much of the literature on the subject
tends to work forward from what appears to be a plausible but yet untested
hypothesis.
There are clearly different perceptions of the poverty/environment
linkage in the academic debate. One camp emphasizes the process of
'cumulative causation' in keeping with the Brundtland Report, while the
other maintains a certain distance to this process and prefers to stress the role
of government policies and their effect on the process. While the differences
may be more apparent than real, it is clear that what many authors adopt as
an obvious causal relationship is treated with great scepticism by others.
22
8. Poverty and Environment:
an Appraisal of the Causality
In pre-historic times man lived in perfect harmony with nature as hunter
gatherer, in some parts of the world man still lives in this fashion. In this
primal state there is utter poverty, at least in monetary terms, but no
degradation of the environment. With development mortality rates fall as a
consequence of improved communications and social services, and pressure
on the environment increases. But with development incomes also increase.
Man has always changed his environment as part of the process of
development. In ancient times the Greeks cut down the trees on their islands
to get wood for their ships, the Romans deforested the Appenine peninsula
to provide farmland for demobilized soldiers. European forests were largely
cleared between the 11th and 13th centuries, and much of North America was
deforested in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some developing countries will
today argue that the deforestation of their lands is part of a natural process
of growth and a response to demand for cropland that yields higher returns
and more employment than closed forests.
What is the cause of environmental degradation is, to a degree, in the eyes
of the beholder, a matter of perspective. Worldwide, 50-60 percent of
deforestation in the Third World is estimated to be caused by clearing of
forests for purposes of agriculture. Much of this is the result of shifting
cultivation, the poor farmer’s way of maintaining the productivity of his soil,
in combination with population pressure. The proximate cause of this
environmental degradation would then be poverty. But often the forest has
been opened up for poor farmers by not-so-poor loggers who build roads
into the forest. The underlying cause may then be the market forces that drive
demand for tropical timber and the economic needs that poor countries have
to exploit their timber resources.
The explanations for environmental destruction can be analyzed as a
chain of related causes that successively grow out of each other, rather like
the Russian babushka dolls. Poor settlers in Brazil burn forest to clear land
for agriculture. But a underlying reason why the settlers encroach on the
forest is the grossly inequitable land distribution in Brazil that forces the poor
to migrate in search of land. The reason underlying the land distribution is
the political power structure in the country that, apparently, makes equitable
land reform highly unlikely and that enacts legislation that favours, indeed
23
subsidizes, large-scale agriculture. That power structure in turn is the result
of historical and cultural factors.
In the Brazilian example poverty would be a proximate cause, the settlers
would not behave as they do if they were not poor. However, the major
underlying cause would appear to be legislation that in a variety of ways
favours the large landowning interests or. in the terminology of some authors,
’misdirected public policies’. It would appear that this would apply particularly
to a country' like Brazil, where average income is relatively high and the
means to reduce the extent of poverty would seem to be at hand, given
different policies.
It is evident that the poor suffering health problems in urban slums, as
illustrated by' case study 4, did not themselves primarily cause the environmental
problems they suffer from. Those problems were caused, in most cases, by
industry' and vehicle traffic and exacerbated by' governments unwilling or
unable to abate pollution and provide services, like garbage collection. This
would seem to be a situation of the poor suffering as a result of production,
or of negligence, by the rich. The poor fishermen off the coast of Kerala
suffering declining catches as a result of overfishing by trawlers, described
in case study 3, would be another example of rich producers causing
environmental degradation and contributing to increasing poverty. In these
situations poverty' could barely be seen even as a proximate cause of
environmental degradation, and it might be more appropriate to talk of the
poor as victims of degradation caused by others.
Then there are situations where it would be difficult to argue with the view
that there is a process of cumulative causation’ linking poverty and
environmental degradation, where poverty' is so pervasive that it dominates
all parameters, and poverty' is associated with lack of access to productive
resources, with high rates of population growth and with simple low-yield
technology. The poor often have no alternative but to cultivate marginal,
easily erodible lands and to degrade the common lands. There is a social
dynamic in this process that leads to deeper poverty and continued
environmental degradation. Since many of the countries involved have
economies based on agriculture, the process contributes to reducing overall
growth and hence to deepened poverty. Chart 1 describes this vicious circle
This is the process of ’cumulative causation’, or the downward spiral of
environmental degradation, referred to in the previous section and illustrated
by case study 2 on the Ethiopian highlands. Here poverty is the factor
underlying population growth, the level of technology used in agriculture,
and to a large extent the level of knowledge of officials and farmers. Another
major field study carried out on Nepal with support from British aid and
referred to in the recent report from the Asian Development Bank has similar
findings'1.
It would then seem that we may separate out three cases of poverty/
environment relationships, namely'
24
1. where poverty is the major underlying factor in what is essentially
a two way causal relationship between poverty and environment,
2. where poverty is a proximate cause of environmental degradation,
but where failure of policies, markets and institutions is the underlying
cause, and
3. where environmental degradation is caused primarily by the opposite
of poverty, namely wealth, often reinforced by policy failure, where
poverty is exacerbated as a result, and where it would hardly be
appropriate to talk about poverty even as a major proximate cause.
Stretching this analysis further two additional, albeit possibly less significant,
cases may be distinguished, namely
4. where poverty causes no or even reduced environmental
degradation (tribal 'indigenous' people living in harmony with their
environment or poor people organizing themselves to protect their
environment, such as the Chipko movement in India), and
5. where there are knock-on effects caused by poverty affecting the
poor in another area (floods in Bangladesh and caused by deforestation
in the Ganges river valley); this is really a subset to case 3 above, where
environmental degradation is caused by outsiders and not by the poor
themselves.
It would probably be possible to distinguish some further cases, but for
purposes of the following we shall confine ourselves to the first three.
It is clear that it is difficult to generalize about the poverty/environment
relationship. Two caveats need to be made. One is that the cause/effect
relationship will often bespecific to a particular situation or mix of ecological,
economic and social factors. That mix may differ within a country' or within
a region; it will be different in rural and in urban areas. Pervasive poverty may
in one region be a principal underlying cause of environmental degradation,
(case 1) while in another region the poor may suffer from, say, poisoning of
ground water caused by excessive use by pesticides on large-scale farms,
(case 2).
The other is that the cases listed above are not clear-cut, in practice they
often overlap. For example, in the case illustrated by the example of the
Ethiopian highlands, where poverty is a major explanatory factor, there
certainly also is present as an underlying cause the policy failure of the
government to address land tenure. In the Brazilian example poverty would
explain wasteful approaches used by settlers to cultivate the land. And in the
Kerala example artisanal fishermen could have contributed to exhaustion of
fish stocks by, for example, overfishing certain species close to the shore.
We then have three principal cases of causal poverty/environment
relationships: where poverty is the main underlying cause, where poverty is
only a proximate cause, and where poverty cannot be said to be even a major
proximate cause. However, the cases overlap and generalizations are
difficult.
Is it then possible to say whether poverty causes environmental degradation?
The answer would seem to depend on the focus of analysis. At an immediate,
proximate level it is suggested that the process illustrated by chart 1 obtains
in many cases, where poverty underlying population growth is a powerful
explanation of increasing environmental stress and reduced carrying capacity.
However, at a higher level it is necessary to look further afield and at the
policies and other factors that explain poverty (chart 1 again). Here it would
be more relevant to ask. forexample, to what extent poverty can be alleviated
by different economic and social policies or by better terms of trade, debt
reduction etc. But at a still higher level of abstraction it becomes difficult to
sort out what is cause and effect of poverty do countries have inefficient
policies because they are poor, or are they poor because of them? Besides,
we have noted above (page 3) that poor countries tend to be located in poor
and fragile environments, and at this level the two-way causality would seem
to be valid.
It is evident that the poverty/environment relationship is much less clear
than the hypothesis stated by the Brundtland Commission. What we can say
with some certainty is that poverty' in many Third World situations is closely
associated with environmental degradation, often directly and sometimes
indirectly, and that abatement of poverty is an essential but insufficient step
toward creating a better protected environment.
The purpose of analysis of development problems is to design policy
remedies. To improve the design of policies relating to the poverty/
environment linkage it would be useful to explore also the relationship
between rising income and environmental degradation.
As developing countries industrialize and their economies grow, they will
first adopt the 'cheap and dirty', badly polluting technology, accelerate
deforestation and degrade their environment in other ways. Weak institutions
and regulating mechanisms, or weak governance, in combination with such
technology’ and economic growth will cause environmental degradation. A
useful illustration is China where "the dependence on coal to power factories
and heat homes is choking cities in toxic fumes, showering wide swaths of
countryside with acid rain and swelling the ranks of lung-cancer victims”32.
In rural areas growth may degrade the environment as roads are built,
chemical farm inputs are introduced, cropland expands and forests are
cleared. All environmental degradation, whether rural or urban, has associated
economic costs. Failure to internalize environmental costs will mean that the
polluters are not paying for the damage they are causing. In other words, it
is very' profitable to go on degrading the environment, like destroying tropical
forests, because the environmental costs are being charged to society at large
and not to those directly' responsible. This will cause economic rents and
profits to increase and go on fuelling an unsustainable economic growth This
process is illustrated by' chart 2.
26
9. The Policy Agenda
The policy agenda arising out of the poverty/environment linkage is discussed
below starting with three basic assumptions continuing with key macro-level
policy requirements, providing a discussion of the meaning of empowerment
for sustainable development, discussing primary environmental care and
finally the role of supportive services and institutions. By examining charts
1 and 2 some of the main elements of this agenda may be identified.
When discussing the policy and action agenda relevant to the poverty/
environment linkage it is easy to lead on to a variety of issues of importance
either to the elimination of poverty or to protection of the environment, not
necessarily both. An effort has been made in the following not to raise the
entire gamut of development issues of governments and donor agencies but
to focus on the linkage at hand. What is at issue is either how to reduce
poverty without degrading the environment further or how to protect
or improve the environment without worsening poverty
9.1 Some Basic Assumptions
Three basic assumptions, or points of departure, underlie the reasoning that
follows. The first is that governments accept responsibility for addressing
issues relating to poverty and environment within the confines of their
country borders. There has been a train of thought that poverty and
environmental degradation in the Third World is, to all intents and purposes,
the responsibility of the First World to set straight3-’. The defoliation of tropical
rain forest in parts of Latin America brought about by the fight against
producers of the coca plant has been cited as an example of environmental
degradation caused by rich countries but affecting the poor in developing
countries. Those environmental (and related poverty) problems should be
addressed by the rich countries that are the markets for cocaine, this
argument goes.
Those rich countries may well support and assist, indeed should do so.
But the responsibility for designing the appropriate policy framework, that
would put such support to good use, must rest with the developing country
government concerned. Protection of the environment cannot be seen as a
luxury issue, something to be attended to later in the development process,
27
'when resources pennit'. The natural resource dependence of many developing
countries requires priority attention to conservation of the very environment
on which future growth depends.
The international environment debate has largely been led by First World
representatives which has caused suspicion in developing countries and
caused concerns for the environment to be associated with wealth. But as the
foregoing analysis has tried to show, neglect of the environment by
governments in poor countries, or waiting for initiatives from rich countries
to provide resources, will only contribute to deepening poverty.
The need for governments to take more forceful change of their own
development with regard to poverty and the environment is related to the
second key assumption, namely that foreign aid is unlikely to increase
significantly in real terms in future years. A quick review of the political
support for foreign aid programmes in the major donor countries would tend
to support this assumption. Much can be done to improve the performance
of aid itself, and a good case can be made to increase the proportion of aid
that is allocated to combat poverty- and environmental degradation. But the
role of aid can only be catalytic, to contribute to identifying problems and
to show what can be done Foreign aid can never solve the problems. Again,
governments must create the policy' framework that is conducive to
disseminating widely the findings of aid programmes.
The third basic assumption is that the large, centralized, top-down action
programmes, that became common in the 1970s to address poverty and
related issues, on the whole did not work. The 'blue-print' approach
prescribing standardized solutions to what, in effect, were complex problems
of considerable diversity has been tested and found to be unsatisfactory. The
new approaches tend to focus on smaller, location specific solutions in
addressing poverty and environment issues, as will be further elaborated
below. It will suffice here to note that the experiences from the past two
decades of development point at a need for a change of paradigm, a need
to depart from the previous emphasis on central planning and big solutions,
to begin to think in terms of solving big problems by thinking small. The big
programmes will have to be built from the bottom and up and not, as in the
past, the other way around.
9.2 The Macro-economic Framework
A conclusion from the discussion in previous sections is that there need not
be any contradiction between policies and programmes that promote growth
and that protect the environment respectively. In many developing countries
environmental degradation is a growing threat to the ability of the poor to
feed themselves. There will always be a trade-off between programmes to
feed to hungry today and to conserve the environment to prevent famines
in the future, but that trade-off is intrinsic to development itself.
28
Another conclusion is that macro-economic management must be
sound as a prerequisite to reduction of poverty and environmental degradation.
Growth is necessary to eliminate poverty, and growth in agrarian societies
must be based on positive returns to farming in general and small-scale
farming in particular Low-price agricultural policy and overvalued exchange
rates have deleterious effects on the returns to subsistence agriculture and
hence on poverty as well as on the willingness of farmers to conserve their
soils, plant trees etc. The ultimate objective of policy must be to provide the
incentives for individuals to protect the environment and that, at the same
time, are conducive to growth.
In countries where there are manifest imbalances in the economy and
where the requisite incentives for growth and for environmental protection
are not present, it will therefore be necessary to embark on programmes for
macro-economic adjustment. While this is not the place for a dissertation on
the arguments for and against structural adjustment, it may suffice to refer to
the fairly comprehensive body of past development experience that indicates
that poverty cannot be eliminated in the absence of growth, that growth will
not happen without the appropriate economic incentives, and that those
incentives will be not be present in economies with structural imbalances.
There are many signs that economic progress to date has been measured
with misleading indicators, leading to what some call a ’schizophrenic
perspective’. During the 1980s the world economy grew by some 3 percent
per year adding USD 4,5 trillion to the gross world product, a remarkable
perfonnance. At the same time virtually all measures of global environmental
change are distressing”. Evidently conventional indicators of economic
growth are misleading in so far as they treat changes in the environment as
'externalities’, something left out of the analysis. For example, an effort was
made to adjust GNP for Indonesia to include the cost of depreciation of
critical natural resource stocks over the period 1971-1984, when the country
had enjoyed an average rate of growth of 7,1 percent. The adjusted rate was
found to be 4 percent, almost half the annual growth rate had been
unsustainable (chart 2).
To raise concerns for the environment in the determination of priorities
and resource allocation it is necessary to begin to include environmental
costs in government decision making processes Hard-pressed finance
ministers will not pay attention to calls for caution by environmental
protection agencies, unless such calls can be substantiated by estimates of
the costs to the economy and to the exchequer of environmental degradation.
These costs can only begin to be assessed if environmental change is
regularly monitored and data bases are established. This is a first necessary
step toward a macro-economic policy framework that takes into account
degradation of the environment.
One element in the macro-economic, or perhaps socio-economic,
framework that is an essential but insufficient condition for both poverty
29
alleviation and environmental protection is equitable land distribution
Policy failure in this area is, as has been stated earlier in this paper, often an
underlying cause of the marginalization of the poor onto degraded lands and
urban squatter settlements. Yet this is one of the most difficult policy areas
to change, since entrenched political interests basing their wealth on land and
often reaching the very top of governments will resist land redistribution.
Here there may well be cases where gradualism will be insufficient and where
more comprehensive change will be called for, if poverty and resultant
environmental degradation is to be reduced. In this area many governments
both bear full responsibility for policy change but at the same time are most
recalcitrant to such change.
9.3 Empowerment and the Role of Governments
Many recent reports stress the need for sensitivity to local conditions in the
design of solutions to poverty and environmental degradation. Poverty
eradication and resource conservation are location-specific activities. Pressures
on natural resources are strongly interlinked with local production systems.
Eradication of poverty requires a clear understanding of local environmental
and socio-economic characteristics and of local opportunities and constraints.
What is needed is an approach that empowers local people to organize their
own resource management”.
The last two decades of development work in the South (and the last two
centuries of development worldwide) provide conclusive evidence that
development will never be sustainable unless the people meant to benefit
also participate actively in the design and implementation of the various
ventures intended to improve their welfare. Development will not happen
from the top down, one of the basic assumptions listed above. In short,
people cannot develop without gaining power over their own futures56.
Empowerment requires devolution of power by governments,
decentralizing authority to local administrations and municipalities, bringing
government closer to the people. It means representative government, better
government at the local level. It challenges governments to be less
interventionist and more supportive of private entrepreneurs, local communities
and NGOs. It is consistent with the World Bank’s call upon governments in
its 1989 report on Africa to provide their people with an 'enabling framework
for growth57.
In its study of seven Asian countries the Asian Development Bank
underlines 'the unanimous and very powerful call for more political and
financial autonomy to manage environmental problems locally'58. Yet in
most instances local governance was found to be too weak to take on any
added responsibilities, a common situation in developing countries Clearly
devolution of government will have little meaning, unless capabilities at
district and municipality levels are at hand to effectively use devolved
30
authority. There will therefore be a strong need to focus increasingly on
providing managerial competence and other resources to foster better local
government. This will, again, require political decisions by governments
who may be willing to pay lip service to the need for decentralization but
reluctant to delegate real authority.
Again, this is an area for policy decisions by governments. All experience
indicates that tackling poverty and environmental degradation on the
ground, where the people live and are directly concerned, will require the
active involvement or empowerment by these people. That in turn will
depend on the structure and role of government and on effective support by
that government at local levels. Often this will require fundamental rethinking
at central government level.
9.4 Primary Environmental Care
The concept of primary environment care (PEC) builds directly on the debate
on rural development that originated in the 1970s with which it has in
common the objective of raising the productivity and welfare of the poor but
with an added concern for protection of the environment. It includes
processes by which local groups or communities, not necessarily only in rural
areas, organise themselves with varying degrees of outside support to apply
their skills and knowledge for the care of their environment whilst satisfying
livelihood needs. PEC has three integral elements, namely
• the meeting and satisfying of basic needs,
• the protection and optimal utilisation of the environment, and
• the empowering of groups and communities.
The basic ideas behind PEC are not new and have been endorsed by
governments, NGOs and donor agencies for years. What is new is that an
increasing consensus is emerging that success of PEC will depend on the
degree to which
• local groups and communities are permitted to organise,
participate and influence development priorities,
• local groups and communities are permitted access to natural
and financial resources,
• local groups and communities participate in the generation
and extension of productive and environmentally sensitive
technologies,
• outside institutions give political support and open access
to information, and
• planning and implementing agencies take an adaptive and
flexible approach.
A review of 80 bilateral and multilateral projects carried out by 11 ED
31
suggests that there are common elements essential to success of PEC39. One
such element is building on local knowledge, including management
systems and technical solutions. The livelihoods of poor households are
usually diverse, in rural areas depending on a mix of agricultural produce,
wild planks and animals, remittances and trading. Decision making is
complex, and it is impossible for outsiders to predict needs and preferences.
Local management systems developed over generations are tuned to the
needs of local people and the characteristics of available resources. PEC
therefore requires taking detailed stock of local knowledge as a starting point
and then building on it.
PEC approaches are also most successful when they manage to build on
existing social organisation, preferably when dealing with homogenous
groups. Local organisations, in which members have decision-making inputs
and a measure of control over management,
become efficient mechanisms to mobilize local energies and initiatives.
PEC gives preference to locally available resources and technologies by
emphasizing the opportunities available for intensification of resource use.
The complete involvement of local people in the design, implementation and
maintenance of infrastructural development and services in urban areas
produces more sustainable and effective results than solutions imposed from
the outside
PEC projects typically begin small and do not over-innovate
Successfully introduced technologies are commonly low risk, easy to teach
and demonstrate, tested locally, and offer prospects of clear, on-site benefits
in the coming season or year. These projects are flexible in their design and
of medium to long term duration (5-10 or more years). Outsiders play the
role of bringing interested groups together and facilitating the process of
information exchange. External inputs are small and focus on catalytic
functions. PEC approaches apply in all situations where local groups wish to
improve or protect their own immediate environment They are multi-sectoral
and may include forestry', agro-forestry, soil and water conservation, livestock
husbandry, crop husbandry etc. They have often been successful in involving
women in their role as resource managers by building from the outset
on women's knowledge and participation.
PEC approaches are illustrated with three appended case studies. Case
study 5 describes a soil conservation project in Honduras where yields were
tripled on marginal lands without use of external inputs. Case study 6
documents experiences from an agro-forestry and soil conservation project
in Burkina Faso which has restored the productivity of land threatened with
desertification. Case study 7 illustrates how the problem of solid waste
management was solved in urban squatter areas in Recife, Brazil.
All these three projects used simple, locally developed technology, a
minimum of external inputs, engaged existing groups of beneficiaries to
evolve solutions, and were based on active participation by these groups in
32
all stages of implementation'10.
Clearly PEC is no panacea and several problems exist. One relates to
scaling up the process which led to success of a small-scale project to have
an impact on a regional or national level. This usually requires close
collaboration with a government extension service attuned to the flexible,
beneficiary-steered approach that characterizes PEC. Case Study 8 documents
experiences from a national soil conservation programme in Kenya that,
while being centrally designed in the 1970s, over the years has succeeded in
adapting to local priorities and needs.
Other problems relate to the heterogeneous composition of many
communities, even at local or village level. Unity within a community is the
primary requirement for good natural resource management, since the more
powerful elements of the community will always tend to marginalise
resource use, like grazing rights, by the poor. A report from India has
described how two strategies are being adopted to tackle this problem. In
areas where levels of inequality and social stratification are not very high,
universal election of a village committee is practised, while in areas where
levels of inequality are high, efforts have been made with outside support to
form institutions bringing together only poor households11. In these latter
areas open public forums allowing all villagers to participate in decision
making work much better than elected committees.
A third problem with PEC relates to the level and quality of outside
support. Collecting and analyzing the views of villagers or squatter citizens
in an interactive process that is difficult and requires training. It is not
necessarily something expatriate outsiders are good at doing and therefore
usually requires special training of local specialists familiar with the local
vernacular. In particular, familiarity with techniques like rapid (or participatory')
rural appraisal will be valuable12.
9.5 Supportive Services and Institutions
PEC will not happen by itself. The need for a sound macro-economic framework
has already been mentioned, as has the necessity for an approach to
governance that encourages devolution of authority and empowerment of
the poor. However, there are also some more specific requirements.
Some of these can be identified in charts 1 and 2. In the downward spiral
of ’cumulative causation’ (chart 1) the pressure on the land can be reduced
by the introduction of better farming technology or by reducing the rate of
population growth. Both usually require some form of empowerment of the
beneficiaries involved. PEC approaches may be used to introduce yield
raising farm innovations and arrest degradation of the land. A policy of out
migration may also relieve the pressure on the land. In the case of growth
and environmental degradation (chart 2) strengthened institutions and less
polluting technology would contribute to reducing degradation of the
55
environment. Internalising environmental costs, something often difficult to
achieve in developing countries, would give a more correct measure of
economic activity.
The report of the Bnmdtland Commission emphasized that the environment
cannot be seen as a sector apart, and that concerns for the environment must
be built into all economic sectors. However, tackling poverty and environment
successfully will also require better management of the environment. There
must be strategies for doing this. There must be within governments some
unit with responsibility for such strategies, a unit with a lead role in analyzing
the environment issues and with an advocacy role in placing these issues high
on the government agenda.
Such duties are usually vested in environment protection agencies or
similar organisations.
These agencies are typically weak, often low in the government pecking
order, and yet rather cynically expected to assume responsibility for
problems caused by the bigger and more powerful ministries: industry,
agriculture, finance, energy, and so on. They often have large shortcomings
in their capacity to plan and manage development of a society in a more
environmentally sound direction, a complex and difficult task under the best
of circumstances. Stronger political support, more and better trained personnel,
and an improved data base would be important steps toward that end.
There will be a need for expanded research, particularly agricultural
research. The pressure on marginal landswill be relieved by the introduction
of yield-increasing agricultural innovations, like fertilizers and improved
seeds, for peasant farmers in areas thought to respond to such inputs, one
important issue for research. However, research needs to take a fresh and
holistic view of livelihoods in marginal areas, focusing not only on the cash
crops (as in the past) but increasingly also on food crops and other sources
of sustenance. More work needs to be done on improving the traditional
techniques used by small farmers and adjusting and improving them in close
collaboration with PEC projects. More work is also needed in techniques for
soil and water conservation.
Credit will be important to enable the poor to accumulate assets and
support consumption in hard times. In urban and rural areas alike, availability
of credit may provide the requisite means for the poor to undertake measures
to protect their environment. However, providing credit in small amounts to
each of large numbers of poor tends to be expensive. To protect the poor
against the cost of administering large, formal credit schemes governments
and donor agencies have experimented with subsidizing credit However, as
mentioned above (page 5), these programmes have generally not been
successful in extending credit to significant numbers of poor, repayment rates
have been low, and cheap credit has become a bonus for the not-so-poor.
The World Bank is therefore suggesting that more attention be devoted
to learning from the informal finance systems that exist in many countries'13.
34
This would be consistent with the PEC approach in building on traditional
institutions: saving and loan associations, rotating funds, mobile bankers,
financial dealings among family and friends, and so on. Examples are cited
of African countries where such arrangements have grown into relatively
large financial organizations linked to the formal credit system.
Another approach found successful is the closely supervised group credit
approach devised by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Similar schemes
have been designed by MYRADA in southern India and AKRSP in northern
Pakistan1'.
In rural and urban areas alike more effective policies and programmes for
family planning will be necessary to reduce population pressures on
environmentally fragile areas. Such programmes can often be linked to
primary health services with a focus on mother and child care and be useful
areas for increased foreign support. However, the cited report of the Asian
Development Bank states that it is "the unanimous finding of the seven
country reports that the hoped for demographic transition to lower popu
lation growth rates ... will not occur without active and explicit government
support"'''. Providing targeted family planning services to rural and urban
poor merits increasing attention by many governments that almost by default
make such services available only to the urban middle and upper classes.
As stated previously and illustrated by chart 1, family planning programmes
become more effective if accompanied by improved education of women
and girls. Raising educational levels for the poor will also impact on
environmental degradation in other ways than contributing to lower popu
lation growth. Some environmental destruction takes place because people
do not understand the harm they are doing, for example by ploughing
sloping fields in the direction of run-off rather than on the contour'6. Besides,
education will increase income The World Bank has estimated private
returns to primary' education to be as high as 31-42 percent in Africa, Asia and
Latin America. For developing countries as a whole, average social returns
for every level of education lie in the 10-15 percent range'7.
The Asian Development Bank emphasizes employment creation as one
of the most important areas where an impact may be made on poverty and
environmental degradation at the same time Landlessness is widespread
among the rural poor, particularly in Asia. At issue is how to adopt policies
that result in creation of jobs at rates high enough to absorb adults from the
age group which is growing more rapidly than the population as a whole and
in which there is a backlog of unemployment. Policies to promote rural
employment should consider the concept of livelihood, including income
sources off-farm: in construction, labour intensive rural works, trading,
cottage industries, and so on.
By creating job opportunities consistent with sustainability pressures to
encroach on fragile lands may be reduced, and people may begin to afford
to pay for public amenities and an improved environment, for example in the
35
dwelling18. It is important to recognize, as does the Bank, that governments
themselves do not create jobs in large numbers, that those that are created
are not always productive, and that most jobs are created by people for
themselves, if provided with the right incentives.
36
10. Some Specific Areas for Action
Above the point has been made that developing country governments must
be assumed to be responsible for creating the policy framework that is
conducive to alleviation of poverty and environmental degradation. The
point was also made that foreign aid resources are unlikely to increase at a
rate that is commensurate to increasing needs in poor countries. It then
becomes incumbent on donors and recipients of aid alike to use available aid
resources as efficiently as possible and to target them strategically where their
’ripple’ effects can be maximized.
Going beyond the policies some specific and strategically important areas
for action relating to poverty and environment have been listed in the
following. Inevitably, what to include is a matter of judgement as these two
areas taken together could easily be interpreted to include most of the
development agenda in many countries.
1. Primary environmental care. The foregoing discussion has placed
much stress on PEC as an approach to addressing poverty and environmental
degradation. In the light of increasing demand for available aid resources PEC
is welcome, since it does not necessarily imply any need for large external
resources. The most successful PEC projects, including those documented in
case studied 5-7, were supported by donors who encouraged starting on a
modest scale. For example, the project in Honduras (case study 5) is tripling
farmers’ yields at a total project cost of about USD300 per farmer; other
similarly designed projects in Honduras and Guatemala achieve the same
result at a cost of USD200 per farmer.
At issue for project planners is how to design the appropriate mix of inputs
at a suitable level that will not unduly tamper with the incentives of
beneficiaries to participate actively. Ambitions to quickly raise spending
levels, not uncommon in the donor community, could easily contribute to
distortions that would render the projects unsustainable. The widely held
belief that there are economies of scale in project size do not necessarily
apply to PEC approaches.
Present definitions of PEC assign no special role to women. Yet, in many
areas, they are the most import, often unpaid, agents of PEC sustaining the
resource base for development. Women fare worst on the deprivation trap
37
and have the least access to land, credit, extension sendees etc. and yet have
a great deal of environmental knowledge. The role of women as resource
managers needs often to be more explicitly recognized in the design of
projects. Many of the more successful projects, like those described in case
studies 6 and 8, have been successful also in this regard.
2. The role of NGOs. It is necessary for governments and donor agencies
to take a close look at what their comparative advantage is relative to that of
NGOs. There is evidence to suggest that PEC approaches often work best if
carried out by NGOs, and that NGOs often are better placed than public
agencies to stimulate a process of change involving the poor. Once that
impetus has been provided a collaboration between NGOs and public
agencies is often fruitful.
A strategy increasingly adopting PEC approaches would therefore also
imply channelling more development resources through NGOs, a need now
recognized by many donor agencies. This in turn has several implications.
Many Third World governments do not share the enthusiasm of western
donors for involving NGOs in the process of development, in many countries
NGOs are viewed with considerable suspicion. Donor agencies will have to
be supportive of NGOs in a variety of ways, even in situations where this may
place NGOs in conflict with their governments. For example, local NGOs are
often the last to benefit from training opportunities provided under bilateral
or multilateral aid channelled through governments. Through their current
dialogue with governments, in some cases perhaps going so far as to impose
conditionality, donors should assist and strengthen NGOs in their ability to
reach the poor.
That said, it is obvious that some NGOs suffer from problems of
bureaucracy and corruption, as do governments. In some countries NGOs are
being established wholesale to capitalize on the growing donor interest. Not
all NGOs are innovative and not all NGOs do well in reaching the poor. At
the same time the very nature of NGOs, their independence and right to selfdetermination, at times make them difficult partners for the donors. Many
southern NGOs complain about heavy-handed, know-all attitudes from their
northern partners and clearly have a somewhat schizophrenic relationship
to them''9. Broadening the agenda of collaboration with NGOs will place new
demands on some donor agencies and governments, forcing them to adjust
their working procedures and be more receptive to the motley views and
approaches of a burgeoning NGO community.
3. Strengthening local government. To bring about the type of government
that creates an environment propitious to the PEC approaches advocated
above requires, as has been said, strengthening of local government
institutions at district or municipality level to enable them better plan and
implement provision of government services at that level and, mainly, to be
more attuned to the wishes of people in need of such services.
38
This will require both quantitative and qualitative improvements. More
development resources should be placed a the disposal of local authorities.
This in turn will need strengthening of local institutions in a variety of ways,
including staff training programmes, provision of better housing and office
facilities, computerized accounting and planning tools, and so on In many
countries service in local government is seen as a place of exile for staff and
therefore does not attract the most competent manpower, and it is necessary
to make local government service more attractive.
In many countries much additional financial resources may not be
forthcoming from the centre to the periphery, and it will be necessary to look
for ways to strengthen local tax revenue collection. One specific area for
action in that context is the creation of land registers and cadastral surveys
to that end. In squatter settlements in urban areas land demarcation is often
the first step towards gaining acceptance for poor citizens of their rights to
municipal services and improvements of their housing.
4. Institution building. There are a variety of actions relating to the broad
field of institutional building that will need to be taken in support of PEC
projects, only a few will be mentioned here. The point was made above that
tackling successfully poverty and environment requires sound management
of the macro-economy; this has attendant institutional implications that need
not be elaborated in this context. Another basic requirement, that also the
environment needs to be well managed on a macro-level, deserves a few
further comments.
Strengthening the analytical capability within governments to design
policies relating to the environment will include support to the central
agencies that formulate such policies, possibly through twinning arrangements
with similar institutions in donor countries. It will also include monitoring the
environment and building up a data base on environmental change as a first
step towards linking such change to economic growth and gradually creating
measures of national income that are adjusted for ’consumption' of the
environment. With time it will then be possible to build into the government
decision-making process an attention to the costs of this 'consumption’ and
initiate training in environmental economics of centrally placed staff in
ministries of finance, planning and other agencies concerned with economic
resource allocation
The need for strengthening institutions working on research was also
mentioned above, particularly research relevant to the livelihoods of the
poor. But research will be of little value, unless its findings can be
disseminated and translated into practical use for the poor. This will call for
support to extension services that are not only collaborating closely with
research institutes but also flexible and attuned to PEC approaches in the
field. The project in Kenya illustrated by case study 8 has a good record in
that regard.
39
In the general area of institution building foreign aid could play a very
useful catalytic role by improving governance and enabling governments to
multiply successful but isolated project experiences. By using aid to build
absorptive capacity through strengthening key institutions relatively limited
aid resources can have important multiplier effects.
5. Basic infrastructure. The poor are often isolated, both literally and
figuratively, lacking access to the services and amenities that potentially
could improve their livelihoods. Breaking their physical isolation by
construction of rural roads would give them better access to markets and to
public services, besides providing them with some employment as roads are
built and later maintained. They would not only become more involved with
the cash economy and gain more income from their produce but they could
also gain more from trading and employment in nearby towns. With increases
in income resulting from better access to markets their propensity to
undertake conservation measures would also likely increase.
A particularly important element of basic infrastructure investments is the
provision of water resources. Experience indicates that viable water projects
must be based on local socio-cultural traditions, called for PEC-type project
approaches. However, the increasing need to treat water as a finite and fragile
resource also calls for strengthening those government agencies that are
responsible, centrally and locally, to plan and manage the use of water,
another important area for institution building.
6. Family planning services. The availability of family planning services is,
as we have shown above, one of the determinants of population growth and
hence of pressure on the environment. Such services are often unavailable
to the poor. Yet they are much in demand: UNICEF has found that an
estimated 300 million couples in the developing world do not want any more
children but are not using any effective means of avoiding another
pregnancy50.
At present no more than 1,3 percent of total official development
assistance is used for family planning, a figure that SIDA has estimated should
be raised to 3 - 4 percent. However, to be successful increased attention to
family planning programmes should be accompanied by efforts to address
the social conditions leading to high birth rates, including raising the
education and status of women and girls in general and among the poor in
particular.
7. Degraded urban environments One area deserving much more sup
port by governments and foreign aid donors is the problem of environmental
degradation in urban squatter areas and, in general, policies and issues
related to urbanization and human settlements. Third World cities have been
straining under the weight of population increases since the 1950s, but the
40
worst is yet to come and already today provision of basic services in urban
areas is totally inadequate. Governments are not expected to be able to boost
significantly their spending on such services in the 1990s.
There will therefore be a need for new, low-cost solutions to the problems
of housing, water, sanitation, garbage removal in urban environments and
for such solutions to be largely self-financing. Promising approaches exist,
as illustrated by case study 7, but they need to be much more widely
disseminated. Pollution abatement in industry, transport and energy also
requires more attention. Foreign aid to urban areas at present is only a few
percent of the total, an amount that would need to increase to perhaps 8 10 percent to better correspond to the severity of the urban crisis in
developing countries.
Will it be difficult to accommodate action in all the fields listed above
within heavily constrained government development budgets and stagnating
foreign aid programmes? There are, of course, many other areas than these
that are also, rightly, calling for more resources, humanitarian emergency
support being one of them. But it should be recalled that in a macroeconomic climate that places increasing emphasis on a less interventionist
and more decentralized government, on policies conducive to growth with
equity, and on market-based solutions, some resources would be freed and
others mobilized. Direct state interventions in productive sectors, like
industry and agriculture, would be reduced. Many of the approaches
advocated above, like PEC and various forms of institution building, are not
particularly costly.
If scarce aid resources are better targeted on projects of that kind they
should in many instances be adequate to make important contributions to the
overall goal of securing sustainable livelihoods for the poor in environmentally
degraded areas, provided that they are accompanied by the appropriate
government policy framework.
Notes
1.
2.
3
4.
World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future.
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987, page 3
World Bank: The World Bank and the Environment, First Annual Report, Fiscal
1990. The World Bank. Washington DC, 1990, pages 45 and 85.
United Nations: World Population Monitoring, 1991 (draft). Department of
International Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York, 1991.
page 489.
See World Bank: World Development Report 1990. Oxford University Press,
New York and London, 1990, page 28; United Nations Development Programme
Human Development Report 1990. New York and London, page 172; Duming.
Alan B.: Poverty and Environment: Reversing the Downward Spiral. Worldwatch
Paper 92, Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC, November 1989, page 20;
41
United Nations, op. cit., page 490.
United Nations, op cit., page 490.
Hardoy, Jorge E., Canncross, Sandy and Satterthwaite, David, eds: The Poor
Die Young: Housing and Health in Third World Cities. Earthscan Publications
Ltd, London, 1990, page 4
7. Linked Nations, op. cit.. pages 489-491.
8. Kates, Robert W: Hunger, Poverty’ and the Human Environment. Michigan State
University, Center for Advance Study of International Development,
Distinguished Speaker Series, May 6th 1990 (mimeo), page 39. Leonard, H. Jeffrey and contributors: Environment and the Poor: Development
Strategies for a common Agenda. Overseas Development Council, Washington
DC, 1989, pages 16-22.
10. Kates, ibid.
11. Chambers, Robert: Rural Development, Putting the Last First. Longmans, New
York, 1983, page 112.
12. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations: The Dynamics of
Rural Poverty. FAO, Rome, 1986.
13 Duming, Alan B.: Poverty' and the Environment: Reversing the Downward
Spiral. Worldwatch Paper92, Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC, November
1989. page 26.
14. UNDP, op. cit., page 27.
15. Leonard, H. Jeffrey, op. cit., page 12.
16. Cecelski, Elisabeth; "Energy and Rural Women's Work: Crisis, Response and
Policy Alternatives", in International Labour Review, ILO, Geneva, Vol. 126,
No 1, January-February 1987. The study drew from ILO country studies from
Indonesia, India, Ghana, Mozambique and Peru
17. Kates, Robert W , op. cit., page 5
18. Hardoy, Jorge E., Cairncross. Sandy and Satterthwaite, David eds, op. cit.,
passim.
19. Linden, Olle: "Human Impact on Tropical Coastal Zones”, in Nature &
Resources, UNESCO, Parthenon Publishing, Volume 26, Number 4, 1990.
20. United Nations, op. cit., page 311-312.
21. World Bank: Commodity Trade and Price Trends, 1986 edition John Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, 1986, table 21, and also the World Bank, World
Development Report 1990, op. cit., page 107.
22. The World Bank: World Debt Tables 1989-90. World Bank, Washington DC,
1989, volume 1, page xix.
23. Postel, Sandra: Water for Agriculture: Facing the Limits. Worldwatch Paper 93,
Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC, December 1989.
24. United Nations Children's Fund, the State of the World's Children 1991. Oxford
University Press, Oxford and New York, 1991, chapter 5.
25 Pearce, David: "Population Growth”, in Pearce, David editor: Blueprint 2:
Greening the World Economy. Earthscan Publications Ltd, London, 1991
26. UNICEF, op. cit.
27. United Nations Development Programme, op. cit., page 177.
28. Some, by no means all, of the literature on the poverty/environment linkage
is listed below for those interested to probe the subject further:
•
Leonard et al., op. cit.
5.
6.
42
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Duming, Alan B , op. cit.
Mellor, John M: "The Intertwining of Environmental Problems and Poverty",
in Environment, November 1988.
Barbier, Edward B: Sustainable Agriculture and the Resource Poor: Policy Issues
and Options. LEEC Paper 88-02, London Environmental Economics Centre,
IIED, London, 1988.
Asian Development Bank: Economic Policies for Sustainable Development.
Asian Development Bank, Manila, 1990.
Foy, George and Daly, Herman: Allocation, Distribution and Scale as
Determinants of Environmental Degradation: Case Studies of Haiti, El Salvador
and Costa Rica. Environment Department Working Paper No. 19, World Bank,
Washington DC, September 1989Murdoch, William: The Poverty of Nations: The Political Economy of Hunger
and Population. John Hopkins, Baltimore and London, 1980.
Binswanger, Hans P: Brazilian Policies that Encourage Deforestation in the
Amazon. Environmental Department Working Paper No. 16, World Bank,
Washington DC, April 1989.
Jagannathan, N. Vijay: Poverty, Public Policies and the Environment. Environment
Department Working Paper No. 24, World Bank, Washington DC, December
1989.
Pearce, David and Warford, Jeremy: Environment and Economic Development.
Unpublished manuscript, forthcoming 1991.
Gammage, S: "Poverty and the Environment”, in Environmental Economics
in the Development World Report to the United States Agency for International
Development. London Environmental Economics Centre, IIED, London, May
1990.
29- Barraclough, Solon and Ghimire, Krishna The Social Dynamics of Deforestation
in Developing Countries: Principal Issues and Research Priorities. UNRISD
Discussion Paper 16, UNRISD, Geneva, November 1990. page 13.
30. Asian Development Bank, op. cit., pages 52-54.
31- Environmental Resources Ltd: Population Pressure and Natural Resource
Management: An Assessment of Key Issues and Possible Actions by the ADB.
Asian Development Bank, Manila. February 1990.
32. Time Magazine, April 29 1991, No. 17, page 54.
33- For example, this view was widely expressed at a seminar with representatives
of NGOs discussing poverty and environment that the author attended in
March 1991.
34. Brown, Lester R., "The New World Order”, in State of the World 1991.
Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC, 1991, page 6-7.
35. Asian Development Bank, op. cit., page 69. and Pretty, Jules and Sandbrook.
Richard: The Primary Environmental Care Approaches: Building on Best
Practice. IIED, April 1991 (mimeo, draft of paper for DAC).
36. Holmberg, Johan; Bass, Stephen; Timberlake, Lloyd: Defending the Future: A
Guide to Sustainable Development. Earthscan Publications Ltd., London, 1991,
page 36.
37. World Bank: Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. World
Bank, Washington DC, 1989, passim.
43
38.
39.
40.
Asian Development Bank, ibid.
Pretty and Sandbrook, op. cit.
For a fuller documentation of case studies of sLx PEC soil conservation in Mali,
Burikina Faso and Kenya, see Critchley, Will and Graham, Olivia: Looking after
our Land: Soil and Water Conservation in Dryland Africa. Oxfam in collaboration
with 1IED and ALIN/R1TA, Oxford, 1991.
41. Agarwal. Anil and Narain, Sunita. Towards Green Villages: A Strategy for
Environmentally Sound and Participatory Rural Development. Centre for
Science and Environment, New Dehli, 1989, page 24.
42. McCracken, Jennifer; Pretty, Jules; Conway Gordon: An Introduction to Rapid
Rural Appraisal for Agricultural Development IIED Sustainable Agriculture
Programme, IIED, London, 1988.
43. World Bank: World Development Report 1990, page 67.
44. Pretty and Sandbrook, op. cit., page 15.
45. Asian Development Bank, op. cit., page 55.
46. Mellor, op. cit.
47. UNDP, op. cit., page 26
48. Asian Development Bank, op. cit.. page 74-75.
49. Again, this view was expressed at the seminar in March 1991 referred to in
note 33.
50. UNICEF, op. cit.
44
Annex: Illustrations and Case Studies
Chart
1: Poverty/environment: the process of cumulative causation
2: Growth and environmental degradation
Case study
1: Women and land management in Malawi
2: Soil erosion in the Ethiopian highlands
3: Ruining the commons: coastal overfishing in Kerala
4: Health problems in rich and poor areas within cities
5: Low input soil restoration in Honduras
6: Agroforestry in Burkina Faso
7: Household garbage collection in Recife
8: The national soil conservation programme in Kenya
45
Chart 1:
Poverty/environment: the process
of cumulative causation
46
Chart 2:
Growth and environmental degradation
CASE STUDY 1: Women and Land Management in Malawi
In the agriculturally based economy of Malawi, declining soil fertility and soil
erosion constitute a serious problem. The direct linkage between women,
poverty and the environment is very strong. Female-headed households
make up a large percentage (42 percent) of the "core-poor” households They
typically cultivate very small plots of land (less than 0.5 ha) and are often
marginalized on to the less fertile soils and slopes as steep as 12 percent or
more. They are often unable to finance agricultural inputs such as fertilizer,
to rotate annual crops, to use "green manure” crops or to undertake soil
conservation As a result, poorer female-headed households generally face
declining soil fertility and lower crop yields, further exacerbating their
poverty and increasing their dependence on their land.
However, women's relationship with the environment is not just confined
to the poverty link. Even in those households that are not classified as poor,
the women are active participants in agricultural and household production
Thus, women’s use, perception, knowledge and management of the land can
be contrasted to that of men across all households. For example, a detailed
study of the effects of agricultural commercialization among smallholders in
the Zomba district of the southern region of Malawi emphasizes how the type
of crops cultivated differ between men and women. Female-headed households
on average cultivate the food crop maize on 90 percent of their land and
rarely grow any cash crops, whereas men grow maize on 81 percent of their
land, with the remainder mostly under the cash crop tobacco.
Women confront a multitude of constraints - non-existent or less binding
for men - which hinder economic opportunities and improved land
management. For example, female-headed households often have extremely
low income and are unlikely to be able to raise sufficient financing from their
own sources or to obtain credit to purchase hybrid maize and fertilizer: in a
sample of 883 farmers 37 percent of the men and 28 percent of the women
had purchased fertilizer.
Large labour demands on women within the household - such as
childbearing and rearing, fuel and water collection, cooking, land preparation.
planting and weeding - further limit their ability to undertake sound land
management - constructing ridging along contours, building bunds,
maintaining buffer strips, planting trees, and so on. Off-farm employment
opportunities for women to supplement farm income may also be constrained
by gender discrimination in the labour market; for example, male labour is
usually preferred to female labour for wage employment on tobacco estates
Smallholders in Malawi appear to be aware of the problems posed by
persistent soil erosion - especially farmers cultivating steep slopes, who
frequently cite problems of runoff and declining yields. Extension advice on
how to deal with the problems posed by soil erosion is generally reaching
only larger, male farmers who are credit club members. Extension messages
48
tend to be very general and are not customized to the needs and requirements
of women, particularly the labour and other economic constraints they face.
This is indicated in the relatively poor adoption of soil conservation measures
by female as opposed to male farmers.
Source: Barbier, Ed: ’’Environmental Degradation in the Third World”, in
Pearce, David, editor: Blueprint 2 — Greening the World Economy.
Earthscan Publication Ltd, London, 1991.
CASE STUDY 2: Soil Erosion in the Ethiopian Highlands
FAO and the Government of Ethiopia with finance from the World Bank in
1983-1985 carried out a study to present a rural development strategy for the
severely eroded Ethiopian highlands. The study was a major effort absorbing
a total of 292 man-months of professional staff resources. It was an attempt
to address the vulnerability to drought and the severity of consequent famine
which in 1972-73 had claimed some 250 000 lives in northeast Ethiopia and,
again, in 1984 a similar number. It is possibly one of the most detailed field
studies of land degradation, its causes and possible remedies. The study was
never officially accepted by the Government of Ethiopia and is available in
the archives of FAO.
The study estimated that over 1 900 million tons of soil are lost from the
Highlands of Ethiopia annually. These losses are of productive top soil, and
they are for all practical purposes irreversible. The study characterizes the
highlands of Ethiopia as ’one of the largest areas of ecological degradation
in Africa, if not in the world’.
One of the findings of the study (chapter 7) is that, if present trends
continue, by the year 2010 some 38 000 sq.km of the highlands would be
eroded down to bare rock, a further 60 000 sq.km would have a soil depth
of 10 cm or below which would be too shallow to support cropping This
would mean that in that year almost 10 million people would have to derive
their food and income from sources other than cropping their own lands, and
that they would have to be absorbed elsewhere in the economy.
About half of this number would come from the regions of Eritrea, Tigray,
Welo and northern Shoa, areas that today in 1991 are subject to major drought
and famine. A paper written for the government in 1984, drawing on analyses
covering recent decades, concluded that severe drought in Ethiopia has
about seven to ten years recurrence'. The resultant famines, the paper
suggested, would gradually become more severe as the process of soil
degradation proceeded. With serious drought and famine resulting in many
thousand deaths having hit the Ethiopian highlands in 1972-1973,1984-1985
and again in 1990-1991 this forecast would not seem to be too widely off the
mark.
49
The study notes the simple fanning techniques practised by the Ethiopian
peasants (chapter 5). A simple plough has been used in the highlands ’for
probably 2 000 years, and the implement is still basically unchanged’. Most
peasants keep their own seed from season to season, the use of improved
seeds is negligible. Use of fertilizer is also ver)' low, confined to 2,5 percent
of land cultivated by peasants. Once seeds have been sown, little effort is
generally spent in weeding.
Discussing the causes of land degradation in Ethiopia, the study (chapter
6) notes that the original natural vegetation over most of the highlands was
forest or woodland. The growth of population has resulted in accelerating
deforestation and the spread of cultivation and grazing to newer and
frequently more marginal areas. ... Fundamentally, accelerated erosion may
be regarded as the result of incorrect use of land, and the principle abuse is
failure to recognize the protective role of vegetative cover'.
The study then goes on to discuss 'the many socio-economic conditions
which contribute to degradation through inappropriate land use’ and lists
them under four headings: knowledge; resources; motivation; and
organizational and policy arrangements:
Lack of knowledge. ’In much of the highlands there is, among both
peasants and local officials, an awareness of the degradation problem but not
of the underlying causes. Similarly, at the level of national government the
problem is recognized, but understanding of the basic causes appears to be
too limited - except possibly among those in the Ministry of Agriculture
most directly concerned. Even here, awareness of solutions seems to be more
or less confined to structural methods of conservation and reafforestation . .
There appears to be little awareness at any level that land abuse is the major
cause of the problem and that long-lasting and nationwide solutions have to
be achieved through improved land use. Thus, for example, the Ministry of
Agriculture has recently commissioned the preparation of a large animal
health project which, if approved and successfully implemented, would
increase the number of livestock ... and so put even more pressure on the
overgrazed grasslands of the highlands’.
Lack of resources. The lack of land resources results in excessive
population pressure, increasing cultivation intensities, deforestation and
overgrazing, which puts the eco-system at, or well beyond, its carrying
capacity at the level of inputs and technology currently being practised. The
lack of inputsand financial and/or management resources prevents indivudual
peasants, farmers' groups or the government from carrying out work or
practising methods which would solve or prevent the problem on the scale
and intensity now required.'
Lack of motivation. If the farmer has complete security of tenure and
therefore thinks of his land as a personal asset, to be preserved, improved,
and passed on to his descendants, he has a strong incentive to improve the
soil, drain, plant trees, terrace the hillsides, etc. But if his tenure is temporary,
50
partial, circumscribed, or at risk, then his incentive is reduced, or may often
become a disincentive (or an incentive to "mine’’ the land). In the highlands
today the peasants do not have sufficient incentive to improve and conserve
their land.’
Lack of appropriate planning, policy and organizational
arrangements. 'The inappropriate use of land is being prolonged and in
some cases even encouraged by inappropriate and occasionally conflicting
policies (e.g. animal health, agricultural research) and inefficient organizational
arrangements’.
Source: FAO: Ethiopia — Highlands Reclamation Study, Final Report.
Report AG:UTF/ETH/037/ETH, FAO, Rome, 1986.
CASE STUDY 3: Ruining the Commons: Coastal Overfishing in Kerala
The sea off the South-West coast of India, comprising the maritime states of
Goa, Karnataka and Kerala, forms a relatively homogeneous aquatic ecozone. The average fishery productivity potential in these waters works out
to 30 tonnes per square kilometre making it the most productive fishing zone
in India. The fishery resources off Kerala state are marked by a multitude of
species attaining varying sizes at age of maturity. They are widely dispersed
in the coastal commons. Each species is available in relatively small
quantities, and there are complex prey-predator relationships between them
as well as competition for food.
Kerala state has been the leading maritime state in India contributing 2035 percent of the total fish harvest during 1956-1985. Fish catches increased
steadily until 1973 and declined 1973-1985. In the main landing centre in
Kerala the catch per unit effort declined from 83 kg/hour of fishing effort in
1973 to 20 kg/hour in 1984. The total demersal fish harvest in Kerala declined
from 148 000 tonnes per year in 1971-1975 to 94 000 tonnes in 1981-1985.
When traditional technologies predominated the fish economy, the
common property nature of the marine resource did not pose a major
problem. Technical barriers, such as the need to have fishery specific skills.
and social barriers, like fishing being the occupation of a lower caste,
prevented free entry of capital and persons from outside the traditional
fishing community into the fishery.
The introduction of mechanized boats and the perceived profit opportunities
from prawn exports changed this scenario considerably. The merchant class
of Kerala took the first initiatives to break the barriers, investing in the fishing,
processing and exporting of prawns. With support from foreign aid (the Indo
Norwegian project) and state subsidies, the fishing industry was mechanized
and the number of trawlers increased from a few hundred 1966 to around
2 800 1985. Meanwhile, the international market for prawns caused prices to
51
O^602_
rise rapidly: the landed price of prawns increased seven-fold between 1971/
72 and 1984/85, while prices for oil sardines and mackerel doubled.
The traditional fishing technologies were in general evolved to suit the
particular ecological context of the seas off the coast of Kerala. However, the
new technologies introduced were based on temperate waters and used
trawling (the method of scraping the sea bottom with a bell-shaped net to
catch demersal fish) or purse-seining (quickly encircling whole shoals of
pelagic fish). Extensive and indiscriminate use of these techniques contributed
ver)' significantly to overfishing.
The impact of overfishing dampened the growth of the fisheries sector
and widened the gap between it and the rest of the state’s economy. The
major economic brunt of this was taken by the fishermen and their families.
Per capita income of artisanal fishermen fell by about 50 percent between
1974 and 1982. The availability and quality of fish sold in the local markets
deteriorated while prices increased. While higher income households shifted
to other and cheaper sources of protein, such options were not available to
poorer households who had to bear the adverse nutritional impact.
Source: Kurien, John: Ruining the Commons and Responses of the
Commoners: Coastal Overfishing and Fishermen’s Actions in Kerala
State, India. Research paper for UNRISD, undated (mimeo).
CASE STUDY 4: Health Problems in Rich and Poor Areas within Cities
Bombay and Delhi, India: In some low-income settlements (bustees) in Delhi,
the child mortality rate was 221 per 1 000 but reached nearly twice this rate
among poorer castes within these settlements. In Bombay, the crude death
rate on Bombay island (the central city area) was twice as high as that of the
suburbs and three times that of the extended suburbs.
Bangladesh: In 1978, the infant mortality rate in ’urban slums’ was 208,5
per 1 000 live births, more than twice the rate for ’non-slum’ urban areas.
Urban areas in Guatemala: Infant mortality rates for different popula
tion groups in urban areas vary from 113 per 1 000 for the children of illiterate
women in the poorest socio-economic group to 33 per 1 000.
Karachi, Pakistan: In three low-income areas, between 95 and 152
infants per 1 000 live births died before the age of one; in a middle class area,
only 32 per 1 000 died.
Manila, Philippines: A series of surveys in the mid-1970s revealed the
disparities between health problems in a large squatter settlement (Tondo)
and other non-squatter areas of the city. In Tondo, the level of severe
malnutrition among infants and young children was three times the level for
non-squatter areas. Tondo’s infant mortality rate was 210 per 1 000 live births
compared to 76 for non-squatter areas in Manila. The proportion of people
52
with tuberculosis inTondo was nine times the average for non-squatterareas,
while diarrhoea was twice as common. In Tondo, anaemia was twice as
common and typhoid four times as common.
Panama City, Panama: A study in 1979 found that of 1 819 infants with
diarrhoeal diseases, 68 percent came from those living in slums or shanties
with zero infection rates observed among children in better quality housing.
Sao Paulo, Brazil: Infant mortality rates can vary by a factor of four,
depending on the district. In the core area, 42 infants die before the age of
one for every 1 000 born alive, while in one of the predominantly poor peri
urban municipalities the rate was 175 per 1 000 live births. Infant death rates
from enteritis, diarrhoea and pneumonia on the city's periphery were twice
as high as in the core area.
Source: Hardoy, Jorge E., Cairncross, Sandy and Satterthwaite, David editors:
The Poor Die Young: Housing and Health in Third World Cities.
Earthscan Publications Ltd, London, 1990, pages 15-16.
CASE STUDY 5: Low Input Soil Restoration in Honduras
In 1983 NGOs working in Honduras began experimenting with green manure
crops that could be grown while incurring no cash costs, using no land that
has an opportunity cost, and requiring a minimum of additional labour. The
objective was to restore soil quality in areas where it had deteriorated badly
due to increasingly intensive farming of marginal, poor lands. The systems
tried could include growing green manure crops during the dry season, or
intercropping them with traditional maize crops. By 1987 it was obvious that
farmers preferred intercropping of velvetbean (Mucunapruriens) which had
proved to be the best adapted species for most of Honduras. However,
management practices for intercropped velvetbean still had to be developed
and tested.
In early 1987 the Cantarranas Integrated Development Programme was
launched by the same NGOs. The programme identified soil restoration as
its most important challenge and adopted a goal of tripling farmers’
traditional basic grain yields through the use of entirely on-farm sources of
fertility. Traditional yields of maize, found to average 850 kg/ha, would be
tripled using neither chemical nor organic fertilizers originating outside the
villagers’ farms.
Farmers were shown velvetbean experiments and told that no ready
made management solutions existed to management of intercropping with
maize. However, several alternative options were available. After scores of
experiments and the cross-fertilisation of ideas between fanners, the most
common practice became to plant vetvetbean and maize simultaneously
53
(thereby saving labour) and prune back the vetvetbean twice to about knee
level.
The results have been very promising. Soil colour, tilth, and drought
resistance of crops have visibly improved where velvetbean has been used.
The vetvetbean can fix as much as 150 kg nitrogen/ha, and the increased
organic matter has made it unnecessary to apply any additional fertilizer. No
subsidies or give-aways are provided to farmers, and all the village teaching
is done by villager farmers who have themselves already succeeded in
improving their yields. The programme believes that no one from the outside
can understand what will motivate a farmer to change better than a
neighbouring farmer who has just made some major changes.
The Cantarranas Programme, already after three and a half years, was
working with over 600 families. Nearly all of these had made contour rock
walls or ditches to stop erosion, most had experimented with in-row tillage,
some 90 farmers had already tripled their previous average yields, another
200 were expected to reach that goal within another few months, at least 50
farmers had multiplied their incomes from horticultural crops by more than
five times. Now at its halfway point the Programme expects to have spent
about USD 400 000 at the end of seven years of work and to have reached
some 1 300 farmers by that time. If the rains permit, it should by then have
helped some 1 000 fanners to triple their basic grain yield, another 350 or so
would have tripled their yield through spontaneous spread of the programme
technology.
Source: Bunch. Roland: Low Input Soil Restoration in Honduras: The
Cantarranas Farmer-to-Farmer Extension Programme. HED Gatekeeper
Series No. 23. IIED. London 1990.
CASE STUDY 6: Agroforestry in Burkina Faso
The Agroforestry Project (PAF) of Yatenga Province in Burkina Faso has built
up a reputation of being one of the most successful soil and water
conservation projects in sub-Saharan Africa. The project has been carried out
with Oxfam support since 1979.
It is located on the central plateau of the country, where rainfall has
decreased significantly from the long-term average of 720 mm/year to 440
mm/year within the last 20 years. Not only is rainfall low, but it is also very
unreliable. The project area has the double problem of high population
density and severely degraded land. Over half of the land is now under
cultivation and little or no fallowing is practiced. Much of the remaining land
is eroded, encrusted with a hard cap and cannot be cultivated without
improvement Overgrazing adds to the problem
54
Early efforts to improve land and increase cereal production were
generally unsuccessful. In the 1960s under a large scale, internationally
funded project heavy machinery was used to construct earth bunds over
entire catchments, whether the land was used for agriculture or not. The work
was carried out without any active participation by the local people, who did
not bother to maintain the bunds which quickly lost their effectiveness.
PAF first aimed to improve tree planting using "micro-catchment’’
techniques which collect rainfall runoff and concentrate it around tree
seedlings. However, gradually an increased attention was devoted to the
restoration of degraded land. Traditionally simple stone lines had been used
to help reduce erosion in fields, but this practice had largely been forgotten.
Through discussions with the people PAF resurrected the technique and
improved it by building the stone lines along the contour. Contour stone
bunds became the focus of the project’s attention from 1982. In combination
with stone bunds, another traditional technique was reintroduced. It involved
preparation of wide and deep planting holes to collect and concentrate runoff
water for improved plant growth, placing manure or compost in each hole.
The combination of contour stone bunding and deep planting holes lead
to rapid benefits for farmers. Yields were often improved by 40-60 percent
in the first season after the land had been treated, and even in very dry years
these techniques ensure some yield. They have therefore proved very'
popular, and by 1989 some 8 000 ha in over 400 villages had been treated
with stone bunds.
PAF’s training and extension system is the cornerstone of the success. The
project collaborates closely with the national extension service. A very
effective farmer training programme has enabled thousands of farmers to use
simple surveying equipment to lay out contours in the fields and build
improved bunds.
Planning and coordination of conservation activities is carried out through
village committees, and the local people participate in all stages of planning
and implementation. Conservation work is normally carried out by groups
on a voluntary basis in fields belonging to members of the group with the
owner of each field paying for the work with food. A minimum of incentives
is provided by the project and then only in response to a specific need, for
example a shortage of work tools. However, there is some concern that
project benefits do not reach the very poorest farmers who have difficulties
to provide food for group labour. To address this problem PAF has made food
available to village committees to loan to the poorest farmers to enable them
feed groups working on their fields.
Source: Critchley, Will and Graham, Olivia Looking after our Land: New
Approaches to Soil and Water Conservation in Dryland Africa Oxfam
in collaboration with IIED and ALIN/RITA, Oxford, 1991 ■
55
CASE STUDY 7: Household Garbage Collection in Recife
Most developing country governments perform poorly in collecting and
disposing of urban household waste. An estimated 30-50 percent of solid
waste generated within urban centres is left uncollected, in some cities the
proportion is higher.
Poorer households suffer most from the health hazards resulting from
uncollected garbage. Many live in settlements regarded as illegal by the
public authorities, and there is no recognition of their need to public services.
Often most poor households are in the poorest municipalities which have the
least resources to pay for public services. In addition, many poor settlements
are located on difficult terrain, for example steep hills, where houses are built
close together with access to them only by pathways. Conventional garbage
collection trucks therefore cannot get close to them.
Meanwhile, most engineers and public officials see the solution to the
problem as an increased use of large, sophisticated collection trucks and
solid-waste treatments plants whose cost is far beyond the means of local
governments.
The municipality of Recife in northeastern Brazil has grown rapdily in
recent years, its present population is 1,3 million inhabitants. It suffers
increasingly serious problems of declining financial resources, growing
population, worsening pollution, low efficiency in service provision and
growing demands from local inhabitants. Within the boundaries of the
municipality there were in 1985/86 195 neighbourhoods classified as favelas
covering an estimated 15 percent of the city's inhabitable area but housing
about half of its population. Some 75 percent of the households in the favelas
earned less than USD150 per month. Since the inhabitants were too poor to
pay for garbage collection, rubbish was usually left uncollected.
Drawing on experiences from a neighbouring municipality a pilot project
was started in one favela with a population of 15 000 to ensure effective
collection of refuse from every house. The first stage involved development
of a piece of equipment appropriate for rubbish collection in the particular
conditions of the terrain. This was a simple device consisting of a basket
hanging from two poles held at either side by one person. Local workers were
hired and trained to collect the rubbish with the help of the basket. Collection
routes were designed in such a way that the two-person team would always
carry the basket full downhill. In strategic points small containers were placed
from where the garbage was collected by lorry' and brought to a composting
and recycling plant built with simple techniques and locally available
materials. There re-cyclable matter (glass, paper, plastic, etc.) was removed
by hand, classified and finally sold. The compost was eventually used as
organic fertilizer and sold for use within the municipality.
The system is very' labour intensive and has proven effective for adequate
collection of refuse in the rough topographical conditions of the favela. The
56
volume of garbage collection increased from three tonnes a day under the
old mechanized system to six tonnes. The higher collection rate has
considerably reduced health hazards for the local inhabitants, particularly
children, as people have ceased disposing of their refuse in the open spaces.
In addition, the system has generated employment among local residents.
With the positive results from the pilot project in this favela the municipality
decided to expand the collection system to cover similar poor and hilly
settlements throughout the city, with a potential coverage of some 200 000
of Recife’s poorest inhabitants. It is hoped that this expansion of the system
will combine the goals of generating employment, eliminating (or at least
reducing) garbage transport costs, cost recovery through the sale of recycled
materials and organic compost and, in general terms, reaching a more
appropriate solution from a sanitary, environmental and cultural point of
view.
Source: Stenio de Coura Cuentro and Dji Malla Gadji: "The Collection and
Management of Household Garbage” in Jorge E. Hardoy, Sandy Cairncross
and David Satterthwaite, eds: The Poor Die Young: Housing and Health
in Third World Cities. Earthscan Publications Ltd, London, 1990.
CASE STUDY 8: The National Soil Conservation Programme in Kenya
The national soil conservation programme in Kenya started in 1974 on a small
scale and has gradually expanded into a national wide programme. Supported
since its inception by SIDA, it has so far been mainly concentrated to the high
and medium potential areas of the Kenyan highlands
These areas cover some 20 percent of the country but include over 85
percent of the rural population which is growing at one of the world's highest
rates (about 4 percent per year). The pressure on arable land is intense and
will increase further in future years. Potential arable land per capita in Kenya
was estimated at 0,4 ha in 1980, the projected figure for the year 2010 is 0.12
ha.
The main project concept was to improve farmers' cropping practices to
avoid a need to revert to legislation banning areas susceptible to erosion. An
educational approach was adopted to convince farmers that conservation
would not only maintain but also improve their yields, and a broad education
and training programme was launched through the extension service of the
Ministry of Agriculture. One component of this programme was long term
training of extension officers, government officials and primary' school
teachers.
The technical components of the programme were kept simple and
adjusted to the means of poor farmers Farmers were given advice through
the extension service on how to control erosion by growing grass in strips
on the contour or, in more erosion prone areas, digging terraces. Suitable
grass and tree crops were provided for planting on terrace edges to enhance
stability.
The practical work was carried out by individual farmers with advice from
extension agents. Heavy work like digging terraces was done by local
farmers’ groups, often with women in large majority. The programme
provided limited material support in the form of handtools, planting materials
and seedlings.
After a modest beginning the programme gained momentum during the
early 1980s. By 1990 some 800 000 small farmers had carried out soil
conservation measures on their land, and it is now difficult to travel on the
highways in the Kenyan highlands without seeing these measures on either
side of the road.
Some of the factors contributing to success include
♦ start on a small scale and slow expansion into a national programme;
• the programme has throughout been implemented by existing
government institutions at central and local levels;
• education has been the main tool to achieve programme objectives, and
the education messages have been kept simple and easily understood;
• a flexible technical package was devised that allowed adaptation to
local conditions and income levels of poor farmers;
• the programme has throughout enjoyed strong political support from
the government of Kenya;
• long term commitment by the government of Kenya and by SIDA.
Source: SIDA records
58
his publication arises out of an in-house
analysis of SIDA's own work with poverty
and environment. It was prepared for the
secretariat of the 1992 United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development.
The point of departure is the dictum of the
Brundtland Report that poverty is a major cause
and effect of global environmental problems.
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