Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Plates
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Global perspectives on Africa's drylands
- 3 A smallholder's perspective
- 4 Risk in the rangelands
- 5 Risk for the farmer
- 6 Risk for the household
- 7 Degradation
- 8 Intensification
- 9 Conservation
- 10 Systems in transition
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Intensification
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Plates
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Global perspectives on Africa's drylands
- 3 A smallholder's perspective
- 4 Risk in the rangelands
- 5 Risk for the farmer
- 6 Risk for the household
- 7 Degradation
- 8 Intensification
- 9 Conservation
- 10 Systems in transition
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The ‘crisis of sustainability’
This study's findings confirm the hypothesis of strong synergies and causality chains linking rapid population growth, degradation of the environmental resource base, and poor agricultural performance.
Farmers seek to maximise production per unit of land only when land becomes scarce relative to labor. This is now occurring in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. The weakness of the traditional coping strategies [however] is that they are not capable of adjusting quickly enough to prevent serious negative impact of rapid population growth and increasing population pressure on soil fertility, farm size, fuelwood availability, land tenure systems.
Because agricultural technology adapted to dryland areas is so marginal, land tenure reform so exceedingly difficult to implement, and carrying capacity so low, sustainable management of dryland areas will be very problematic.
(Cleaver and Schreiber 1994: 1–2, 126, 118).In the previous chapter, it was argued that the crisis of sustainability is often represented in terms of negative feedback loops in an equilibrial system, disturbed by ‘external’ factors, such as the growth of the human (and livestock) populations, drought, or the market. For neo-classical economic analysts, population growth is uppermost; in socialist critiques, the market; while technical appraisals emphasise the role of rainfall and bioproductivity constraints. In this chapter, the hypotheses that population growth, rainfall variability and monetisation cause increased environmental degradation will be put to empirical test by means of a comparison of two farming systems in which these parameters vary.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Roots in the African DustSustaining the Sub-Saharan Drylands, pp. 140 - 158Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998