2. Complete the paragraph below by putting one word in each of the blank spaces and then check your version with the final para­graph in the chapter.

The plight of the disappearing tropical is one of the most ur­gent environmental crises the world today. The lungs of the world

are sacrificed for the rich man's love hardwood fur­niture and hamburgers and the poor man's for fuel and a basic income the rainforests is an ecological

imperative demands personal sacrifices from rich and poor alike.

The rich must their consumption habits. The poor must find al­ternative sources of fuel income so that they no longer need to

plunder the precious rainforests to their own survival. The de­struction of the rainforests is an example of poverty and envi­ronmental destruction are interdependent . Both require interna­tional dialogue and political .The Tropical Forest Action Plan

and the UNCED statement of principles been relatively ineffec­tive. In reality the fight to save the rainforests has begun.

SUPPLEMENT

BLEEDING GREEN Test problems are worse today than ever before; the soil is too tired to produce good crops, and the peasants, confronted by falling peanut prices, can no longer afford to buy artificial fertiliser.'

We live in a world ofplenty and of want. In Europe and North America, farmers are producing much more food than the people of those continents can eat. In 1986, the grain harvests in many countries set new records, and by the end of the year, the European Community was having to spend £1 million a day just to store its unwanted dairy surpluses. But while butter and beef mountains, wine and milk lakes, got ever larger in the North, more than half a billion people in the Third World had to go to bed hungry every night.

Over the past half century, farming practices have been revolutionised. The availability of artificial fertilisers, chemical pesticides and a range of highly efficient machines, coupled with the introduction of high-yield crop varieties, has brought about massive increases in output. Since 1950, for example, British cereal yields have more than doubled. In the 1930s, Britain imported two thirds of its food from elsewhere; today it is self-sufficient in most temperate food. This 'green revolution' has also had a profound effect on food production in the developing world. In many parts of Asia, rice farmers have tripled their yields, and the green revolution technology has done far more to boost output in most countries than land reclamation.

Farmers in Europe and the United States have become victims of their own success. Quite simply, they have been too efficient for their own good. By the middle of the 1980s, surplus production reached such a high level that prices for many commodities began to fall. While governments in Europe continued to guarantee their farmers a price way above that which they could get on the world market (and over two thirds of the EEC agricultural budget now goes towards the storage and disposal of surpluses), the United States government was less helpful: many farmers who had borrowed heavily in the 1970s found themselves deeper and deeper in debt, and the number of bank­ruptcies rose steadily through the 1980s. The Live Aid concert, whose pur­pose was to raise money for Africa's starving, was followed by Farm Aid, a concert which raised over $10 million to help America's distressed farmers.

Farmers in the developing world face very different problems. In recent years many African countries have been plagued by drought, and by March 1985, some 10 million people in sub-Saharan Africa had been forced to leave

their land in search of food and water. Rapid population growth is also encour­aging farmers to bring marginal lands into cultivation, and severe deforestation and erosion often render them useless within a very short period. Traditional systems of cultivation and pastoralism, which could be practised generation after generation without ruining the environment, have often been forsaken— with dire consequences. Overgrazing, for example, has conspired with drought to turn grassland into desert in many parts of the Sahel, and intensive peanut cultivation has destroyed soil fertility in many West African countries.

Agricultural fortunes in the developing world have been mixed. While food production in India, China and other countries in South-east Asia has managed, over the past decade, to keep slightly ahead of population in­creases, the story in Africa has been very different. Africa, tragically, is not well suited to productive farming. Only about a fifth of the continent has fertile soil, and half of that is so dry that rain-fed farming is impossible. Yet only 2 per cent of Africa's cropland is irrigated compared to 30 per cent in Mexico and India. (The consequences of irrigation range from beneficial to disastrous, depending to some extent on its scale, but generally its effect is to protect farmland from the vagaries of rainfall.) In the past decade, food production per person has fallen by 20 per cent in countries like Sen­egal, Mozambique and Ghana.

To some extent, Africa's poor showing can be blamed on government policy. While governments in Asia and Latin America increased the amount of money they spent on farming between 1978 and 1982, African govern­ments did the opposite. At the same time many held down the prices of basic foodstuffs. This may have prevented the urban masses from rioting (as they did, for example, in Zambia when President Kaunda increased maize prices in 1986), but it has also discouraged farmers from raising their productivity.

Mass hunger may be a reflection of food shortages. It was during the African famine of 1984-85, when over a million people died. But people often go hungry not because there is no food to buy, but because they have nothing to buy it with. India, for example, has rapidly increased its food exports over the past decade. Between 1970 and 1980, rice exports rose from 32,000 tons to 726,000 tons, and fish exports more than doubled. Yet less than 15 per cent of Indian children under the age of five are well-fed; the rest suffer from varying degrees of malnutrition. On paper, the country appears to be self- sufficient in food, but vast numbers of people simply do not have enough money to feed themselves properly.

Vicente Martines lives and works on the Tabasco plains in Mexico's tropical south. He is a sharp-minded, handsome man in his mid-thirties and he has discovered, at first hand, what it is like to be one of the green revo­lution’s victims. His life, like that of his friends and family, has been trans­formed by the Plan Chontalpa, a vast project which the government set up in the 1960s to turn an area of swamp, forest and pasture into a grain basin.

"Things have gone from bad to worse," he says. "The government spent millions of pesos on big machinery, new roads, forest clearance and drain­age works. They sent technicians down from Mexico City, but they have done more harm than good." The tropical soils proved very fragile and the crops which the peasants were encouraged to grow — maize, rice and beans —failed miserably. "We've put so many chemicals on our fields," says Vicente, "that we've worn the soil out. Every year the yields fall. Soon we won't be able to grow anything at all." Indeed, Plan Chontalpa has become a cattle-ranching project, raising meat for the urban middle classes rather than grains for the poor.

The story of Plan Chontalpa is a familiar one in many parts of the world. Governments, often with the help of the international development banks, inpose upon a peasantry a system of agriculture based on the use of high yielding crop varieties (HYVs). The advantage of HYVs is that they help increase food production, but they also require high inputs of fertiliser and pesticide, which poor farmers often cannot afford. Pesticides and fertilisers are not only expensive - they can be dangerous to the health of both humans and wildlife, and they may actually make pest problems worse. All too often, little or no attention is paid to ecological constraints which soils impose on agricultural development. The soils under tropical forests are very poor in nutrients. They are quickly exhausted by arable cropping. Over the past 40 years the amount of severely eroded land in Mexico has increased threefold.

The green revolution has often meant that peasants are turned, frequently against their will, into wage earners. This has happened in Tabasco. Fami­lies who, not long ago, sustained themselves on small plots of their own land have become poorly paid labourers in other people’s. And peasants often end up growing food not for themselves, but for city dwellers.

Of course, the intentions of green revolution policies were good: they aimed to boost food production and supply Mexico's rapidly growing population with an adequate diet. Before 1960, the diet of the rural population was supe­rior to that of many town dwellers; today it is worse. Far from alleviating mal­nutrition, the grandiose development projects in Tabasco have helped to in­crease it. (On many of the better-quality soils in Mexico, food crops have been replaced by cash crops, and increasing quantities of maize have been diverted from human mouths into the bellies of the expanding cattle herd.)

The great tragedy of many of Mexico's green revolution schemes — Plan Chontalpa included — is that they usurped farming systems which were both highly productive and sustainable. Tabasco supported a popula­tion during Olmec times (before the tenth century AD) which was not sur­passed until the beginning of this century.

The Olmecs and the Mayans had developed a system of agriculture which was well adapted to the wetlands and forests and which has always pro­duced remarkably high yields of a great variety of crops. The great drain­age schemes which have made Plan Chontalpa possible have destroyed forests and lagoons as well as a highly successful system of farming.

Meanwhile, in what little remains of Tabasco's upland forest, a few Mayan Indians still practice the highly efficient and ecologically benign 'shifting cultiva­tion' of their ancestors. Pepe is one of the survivors. He is a squat character with long russet-coloured hair. His forest plots support a wealth of herbs, vegetables, grain and fruit. He practices what scientists call 'inter-cropping', and it is difficult to imagine a more complicated farming system It is one which relies on nature and ingenuity rather than chemicals to keep pests and weeds at bay.

The soil never becomes completely exhausted. After working a plot for three years or so, Pepe leaves it fallow for the next twenty. It will only be brought back into cultivation once organic matter has built up again.

Pepe and his people are threatened by new settlers, who have little sym­pathy for their way of life. "As soon as the cattle farmers come, the forest goes," says Pepe. "They even tell us we should wear trousers and cut our hair." He understands all too well what forest clearance will do to the cli­mate: "Once the trees have gone, the rain will stop falling". This is happen­ing over much of Central and South America.

We have already seen how man has frequently overworked the soils to the point where they can no longer produce food or fodder. It happened in Greece two millennia ago; it happened in the US 50 years ago; and it is happening in every continent today. And the continent that feels the effects of soil loss more than most is Africa.

Dam Diop is the chief of Temefeul, a small village of 600 people near Diourbel, the capital of Senegal's 'peanut basin'. "In the old days," says Diop, "we used to get a fine harvest of peanuts and millet every year. Now, even when we have good rains, we're lucky if we get a quarter of what we used to get." When Diop was a boy — he's in his thirties now — the peasants of Temefeul had to do everything by hand — sowing, weeding, harvesting. One man could cultivate about a third of his land each year. This meant that two thirds of the land always lay fallow, its fertility being restored by the manure from the nomads' cattle and by a rest from cultivation.

"But gradually we began to change our fanning methods," explains Diop. The introduction of horse-drawn machinery meant that each family could cultivate a 11 its land all the time. The change was welcome.. "Life became easier. With the new methods we were no longer falling sick from exhaus­tion every three days," Diop says.

They began to use artificial fertilisers and less manure, and the govern­ment introduced pesticide spraying programmes. For a while yields im­proved, but the strain on the soil soon began to tell. Pest problems are worse today than ever before; the soil is too 'tired' to produce good crops, and the peasants, confronted by falling peanut prices, can no longer afford to buy in artificial fertiliser. Nor can they afford to revert to the old method of fallowing: the population has been steadily rising, and families seldom have enough food to see them through the year.

The soils around Nanet, a small nomadic settlement some 300 miles north of Temefeul and a little way south of the Senegal river, have also taken a battering over the last decade or two. Nanet is in the region of Podor. It is, at the best of times, extremely dry, but the rains have been chronically poor for many years now. In 1963, the rainfall was 33cm. By 1973 it had dropped to 15cm, and in 1983 there was an all-time low of 7cm. The nomads of Nanet lost nearly all their cattle. Many herders moved south during the 1970s in search of pasture, and only now are they returning.

But drought is not entirely to blame for the blown soils and wrecked pastures of northern Senegal. Paradoxically, the sinking of deep water wells has caused many of the problems. "Where there is grass, there's no water," explains the village chief, Mamoudou Isma Ba, "and where there is water, there is no grass."

The reasons for this are simple. The wells — some of which were sunk by the French colonial administration, others by the government after in­dependence -provide a permanent source of water, and they attract nomads from far and wide. Sometimes settlements have sprung up beside them. Rather than shifting from one impermanent water hole to another, as they used to, the nomads allow their cattle to overgraze the areas round the wells. Circular deserts gradually spread out from the wells.”

Sometimes it is so bad that we have to graze our cattle three days' walk away from the nearest water," says Saidou Amadou Ba, an old man who can remember the days when there were forests here, rather than bare sand, and when lions posed more of a threat to the cattle than thirst and famine.

These two stories illustrate the dilemmas which confront both peasants and governments. Environmentalists have been all too eager to blame pea­nut cultivation for soil erosion and declining fertility around villages like Temefeul. Cash crop cultivation, goes the argument, has taken over land which formerly produced food crops, and the abandonment of fallowing has had a severe effects on soil fertility.

All this is true. But the peasants were not forced against their will to grow peanuts; once the crop had been introduced, early this century, they lifted themselves out of a subsistance economy and into a market one. Pea­nuts were exhanged for money, and money for candles, clothes, pots and pans and all the other things which they had not had before. Mechanisation may not have done the soils much good — but it reduced the time which the peasants had to spend performing backbreaking tasks. As Diop says: "We are better off now than before" - even if the environmental audit makes depressing reading. It is all very well for outsiders to extol the past systems of'sustainable' farming - they didn't have to practise them.

The people at Nanet are nomads whose history is bound up with cattle, not crops. They have always lived in an environment which is far from robust, and its survival has always depended on the nomads ceaselessly shifting across it and allowing areas which they have grazed to recover. Their impermanence was essential. All this changed with the sinking of deep, permanent wells. The intentions were praiseworthy. Wouldn't life be less precarious for the nomads if water was available all the year round? The answer would have been yes, had there been a large number of wells spaced not too far apart — in which case the cattle would have been more evenly spread, and overgrazing would have been less likely to occur.

In both instances we witness the real dilemma of development. Subsist­ence farming may have been sustainable - but haven't peasants around the world every right to join the market economy if they wish to, and to adopt lifestyles which are less arduous? The trick is to find ways in which peas­ants can participate in the advances of modem times without destroying the soils upon which their livelihoods ultimately depend.