Climate Change and Agriculture - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 460

on soil degradation and deforestation among the poorest subpopulations within a coun-
try. Most of the existing literature on the EKC focuses on national average incomes
rather than activities among the poorest citizens. Activities among the poorest are likely
to differ from the population average because of marginalization from markets, lack of
public safety nets that effectively reach them, and fewer chances to invest in human and
physical capital. Although most research that focuses on national average incomes finds
that higher incomes generate more deforestation, one study dealing with regions within
Costa Rica found faster deforestation in lower income areas than higher from 1963 to
2000 (Prates and Bacha 2012).
We have argued elsewhere that the poorest—predominantly subsistence farmers in
rural areas of developing countries -seek to avoid downside risk rather than to maxi-
mize profit (Pinstrup-Andersen and Watson 2011). They are also more likely to face
negative shocks with fewer coping mechanisms. Facing these constraints, the poorest
will likely prioritize current survival over long-term environmental sustainability. They
recognize that by removing more nutrients from the soil they are reducing their land's
future productivity, and that by clearing more marginal lands or harvesting unsustain-
ably many fish or trees, they similarly reduce their livelihoods options for the future.
However, they view unsustainable natural resource management as sacrifices that are
necessary in the present. Severe poverty can thereby cause environmental degradation.
They may also face technical and market constraints because of their poverty, which
prevents them from choosing more efficient and sustainable production processes.
The complementarities between climate change, agriculture, and poverty are, thus,
likely to create environmental poverty traps: farmers will be unwilling to borrow to
invest in better technologies such as high-yielding seeds and proper fertilizer use
because of the risk of being unable to pay the loan back; that risk increases as climate
change reduces the certainty of rainfall coming in good time; the lack of investment in
fertilizer reduces the productivity of the land, sinking farmers deeper into poverty and
increasing their withdrawals from the soil nutrients. Reducing poverty would argu-
ably reduce such environmental degradation (Pinstrup-Andersen and Pandya-Lorch,
1994; Nkonya et al., 2008). As discussed earlier, soil mining is endemic in marginal
rural areas with unreliable rainfall patterns. Reductions in poverty and improvements
in agricultural productivity would presumably enable farmers to invest more in fertil-
izers and thus reduce the necessity of withdrawals from the natural resource base. This
dynamic would produce a sideways-S relationship between soil mining and income
(Pinstrup-Andersen and Watson, 2011). Figure 18.1 depicts this relationship.
During Stage 1, technologies that are inefficient both from a production and envi-
ronmentalist perspective, poverty, and negative shocks from climate change or idio-
syncratic factors leave farmers few options other than degrading their natural resource
base. In Stage 1 there are very strong synergies between poverty, agricultural production,
and the environment. Policies, investments, or interventions that reduce poverty will
enable farmers to purchase more fertilizer and avoid the necessity of harvesting more
from the land than is sustainable. Safety nets that reassure farmers of their survival will
similarly reduce the pressures on farmers and can produce multiple wins (Barrett 2008).