Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
benefit another, and the workers in that sector are thus unable to invest at all in
conservation. In Argentina, throughout the Peron era of 1945-55, agriculture was
burdened with export taxes and revenues were invested in manufacturing
industry support. In South Korea the same thing happened in the 1960s, not
through export taxes, but through the control of internal markets for grain and
compulsory purchase at low prices (Edwards 1992). Under the pressure of low
prices, peasant farmers were forced into more intensive cultivation with less
rotation of crops and less rest for the soil, resulting in soil erosion.
Other explanations
Another reason for the environmental problem is that LDCS have insufficient
local capital available to be able to contemplate any kind of investment in
protection and conservation. Controlled development of the Amu Darya and Syr
Darya rivers irrigation programme in Central Asia would have required
additional expenditure on diversion of north-flowing rivers such as the Ob to
replenish the Aral Sea. Such expenditure was not within the capacity of central
Asia republics, and in the event, not seen as possible for the Soviet Union as a
whole when compared with other possible schemes for investment.
Another set of phenomena explaining the special problems of the LDCS is
that surrounding the knowledge systems involved. Sudden invasion of a region
for growing a new, or even an old, crop, commonly fails to take up local
knowledge about the environment from the indigenous population, people who
may have developed sustainable management systems over centuries. An
extreme case is that of interior Brazil, currently being opened up by loggers,
ranchers and small farmers from outside the region. They commonly have little
experience of rainforest environments, and as a result, set up destructive land-use
systems. In the Amazonia region, the Amerindian natives have long evolved forest-
using systems of shifting agriculture and silviculture that do not destroy
(Browder 1989), and the mixed-race peoples who gather forest products such as
rubber and Brazil nuts also do so on a sustainable basis. These local systems are
ignored by the invaders. Up to the present, the record is more of elimination of
the local population or its removal to other regions, rather than incorporation into
the development process.
In other regions, such as the Central Andean mountains of Ecuador, there is a
peasant population that has lost its traditional links with the environment and
much traditional knowledge. Pressed for production on tiny farms, it
overexploits these by growing maize as a monoculture on steep, unprotected
slopes, causing soil erosion and flooding or sedimentation problems downstream
on the rivers. In this kind of case, now common in India and Africa, the local
population has lost traditional knowledge but does not have the advantage of
modern scientific knowledge to compensate.
All these problems exacerbating the overall environmental pressure in LDCS
are further aggravated in specific regions. At the national level, there is usually
