Global Ecological Problems and Issues

Adequate supply of food is the most basic human need, and democratic systems can never function very well before people can become free from hunger and from the fear of starvation: it is too easy to threaten people who are afraid of not having enough food for their families. For example in the Nordic countries the organizers of the workers' movement realized this very well. To acquire small patches of farmland and gardens for the urban factory workers in order to reduce their dependence on food and food relief became a very important project for the Nordic trade unions and workers' parties. It was thought that the workers will be too scared to demand better salaries for themselves unless they are certain that their families will, in any case, have enough food to eat during the next winter.

The analysis was, to some extent, correct, and the numerous patches of workers' own gardens and farmland around the cities helped the trade unions to become so strong a force promoting democracy and equality in the Nordic countries.

Most countries of the world still have a very unequal structure of land ownership. In Brazil 20 largest landowners control 17 million hectares of land, while at least seven million rural families do not own any land at all.

Land reforms are a very important way of reducing poverty and of increasing agricultural production. According to a study conducted by the US ministry of agriculture in fifteen Southern countries the farms which had a size of two hectares or less produced, on average, USD 3500 worth of food per hectare per year. The production of farms that were larger than 2000 hectares was only worth USD 30 per hectare per year. Such a 120-fold difference is very significant. The main explanation for this astonishing piece of statistics is that the small farmers use much of their land as a multi-storey home gardens: they grow various food-producing trees, shrubs and vines and different annual food plants on the same, small patches of land. The large landowners, on the other hand, keep much of their land as pasture for cattle.

Land reforms, however, have not always been good for the environment. In many cases governments and large landowners have promoted land reform programmes in which landless families have been resettled in rainforest areas. This has happened in a very large scale for instance in Indonesia and Brazil. In such resettlement schemes the land has usually been taken from the indigenous forest peoples by force.

Numerous indigenous peoples have cultivated rainforest lands on a sustainable basis for a very long time with different farming methods incorporating trees with annual plants, but the settlers have not usually been familiar with such methods. When they have tried to utilize the rainforest lands to conventional field farming or transformed them to pasture, the lands have often lost most of their nutrients in only a few years. After this the settlers have usually been forced to clear new fields into the middle of the forest, and this process of destruction has been repeated over and over again once in a few years. The settlers have also been plagued with malaria and other serious diseases thriving in the rainforest areas.

We should probably start thinking in terms of a concept known as the Ecological Land Reform. The concept was first developed by the Brazilian Rubber-Tappers Union (CNS), and it originally meant the establishment of the so called extractivist reserves in the Amazonian rainforest areas. In the extractivist reserves the trees are not felled but the forest will be reserved for collecting nuts, fruits and natural rubber.

Ecological land reform, however, can also mean many other things. If the families that are given land will transform much or all of their land to multi-storey home gardens they will effectively protect it from erosion and from other depletion of soil fertility.

Community forest programmes in Nepal, which have reforested badly degraded or barren hillslopes and created a system of much better village-based management of the forest lands, have also been an outstanding example of ecological land reforms. Nepal's community forest programmes have probably benefited millions of people, and they are an important model worth studying in other countries, as well.

It is most unfortunate that the World Bank and many other international aid agencies have started to lobby Nepal and many other Southern governments to dismantle their community forestry and land reform programmes, as well as all kinds of communal or village-based land ownership structures, and to move towards full privatization of all land properties. The counter-land reforms now aggressively promoted by the World Bank will, if they are implemented, will increase poverty and hunger, destroy large areas of forests now controlled and managed by indigenous forest peoples and worsen the problems related to erosion and depletion of soil fertility.

The loss of soil fertility is one of the most serious environmental problems in the world, in terms of the number of people affected. In spite of this the problem often receives much less attention in the media than many perhaps less important environmental issues. When the problem is covered, most of the attention is often reserved for the most dramatic aspects of it, like the creation of desert-like conditions (desertification) on the edges of actual deserts. This is not to say that desertification would not be a real and serious issue - it is. The point is that it would be important to cover also the the more mundane aspects of the problem and the various, often simple and non-dramatic, solutions to these problems.

Probably the most important mechanism causing widespread loss of soil fertility is erosion, or the loss of soil matter through the work of water and wind. For a long time, agricultural scientists practically equated soil degradation with erosion and soil conservation with the control of erosion. More recently they have started to approach the conservation of soil fertility through a somewhat broader framework. This makes sense because erosion is not the only mechanism that can lead to decreased productivity, even though it could be the most important one.

Besides the control of erosion, maintenance of soil fertility also requires the maintenance of organic matter and nutrients in the soil and the maintenance of the soil's physical properties. In some areas like in tropical rainforests the loss of nutrients through leaching, by being washed by water to lower soil levels in the ground, can be the most important mechanism of declining fertility. Moreover, fertility can also be lost through toxification (pollution of the soil) or through salinization caused by irrigation.

The United Nations Environmental Programme has estimated that 6-7 million hectares of cropland are being lost, every year, due to soil erosion. Besides this perhaps 1.5 million hectares are lost due to salinization or waterlogging of irrigated farmland. Between one third and one half of the world's 230 million hectares of irrigated farmland is suffering from salinization or waterlogging. According to the 1992 Global Assessment of Soil Degradation almost 20 million square kilometres of land became degraded between the years 1945 and 1990, of which 12.2 million square kilometres suffered serious loss of productivity. In India it has been estimated that one third of all arable land area is seriously threatened with complete loss of topsoil.

According to the Worldwatch Institute about 65 per cent of all agricultural land in Africa, 45 per cent in South America and 38 per cent in Asia has already been degraded, at least to some extent.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization erosion might reduce the overall productivity of the world's rainfed farmlands by 30 per cent within a few decades. Even larger areas are suffering from declining fertility. Phosphorus deficiency affects 73 per cent of farmland in China and 80 per cent in Pakistan.

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