Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Lack of access to credit and capital for purchasing technological inputs among the
rural poor in developing countries fosters increased dependence on labor to sustain
farming operations. Rather than invest in labor to increase yield, poor rural farmers
often adopt practices such as cropping more densely and weeding and harvesting
more rigorously. “Over time,” Barbier (1997, 303) says, “this type of intensification is
'unsustainable' as it depletes soil nutrients and cannot be sustained without shifting
toward 'capital-led' investments such as inorganic fertilizers”. The unsustainability of
this type of agricultural intensification drives farmers off the depleted lands in pursuit
of nutrient-rich frontiers to convert to agriculture. These frontiers are often forests.
The development of sustainable methods for large-scale agricultural operations,
such as low or no-till cultivation, use of cover crops, application of organic fertilizers,
and low-input production, may help to reduce the loss of soil nutrients and organic
matter (Follett 2001). Although incentives for adopting these practices may help to
mitigate rates of deforestation and land degradation among larger farmers, a variety of
economic factors influence the ability of the rural poor to adopt conservation practices.
Such factors include insecure tenure or ownership of land, distorted market prices
for inputs and outputs, imperfect competition, and incomplete markets. Also, lack of
access to credit is a major factor preventing the adoption of soil conservation practices
among the rural poor, since conservation practices can be costly to implement in terms
of lost production (Lipper and Osgood 2004) and lack of capital necessitates borrow-
ing toward such practices. However, credit lenders tend to reserve credit for those they
perceive to be less likely to default on their loans (Thampapillai and Anderson 1990).
One aspect of poverty is the size of landholdings. As parcel size decreases, so does
the ability of farmers to economically benefit from agriculture alone. Small landhold-
ings often drive farm families to seek off-farm income, which creates labor constraints
to implementing soil conservation practices. The distance farmers have to travel to
their fields is associated with erosion, because the less time farmers have for conser-
vation practices, the less attention the fields receive. This is especially damaging in
windy regions such as the West African Sahel (Warren et al. 2001). For near-landless
households, the lack of rural employment opportunities also factors into the decision to
migrate to frontier lands in pursuit of greater economic returns (Barbier 1997).
There is a feedback look from soil conditions to poverty at work here, interact-
ing with fertilizer inputs. Typically, poorer farmers are on the most degraded lands.
These lands have low levels of organic matter. Because application of nitrogen fer-
tilizer increases production in the presence of soil organic matter, but shows poor
returns when organic matter is low, fertilizer inputs on these soils become unprofit-
able. Poor farmers investing in nitrogen fertilizers are not getting a good return on
their investments, which creates a “poverty trap” (Marenya and Barrett 2009). This
interaction is a reminder that although our description in this chapter focuses on
the link from human dimensions to soil degradation, feedback mechanisms further
complicate our understanding of the system.
7.4.3 g
LobaLIzatIon
and
o
ther
e
conomIc
f
orces
Over the last 30 years, the economic forces influencing environmental decision mak-
ing have shifted from state-based economic policies to global free market structures.
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