Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
land use appears to be occurring in all low- and middle-income countries, regardless of
their resource dependence or economic performance. This is a persistent, long-term trend
that is unlikely to abate in coming decades. Over 1970-90 increased harvested area
accounted for 31% of the additional crop production in these countries, and over
1990-2010 this contribution is expected to rise to 34% (FAO, 1995). Throughout the
developing world, cultivated land area is expected to increase by over 47% by 2050, with
about 66% of the new land coming from deforestation and wetland conversion (Fischer
and Heilig, 1997).
Stylized fact 4 is the outcome of two important trends in rural population growth in
developing countries. First, in the coming decades rural population growth will be much
higher for those low- and middle-income economies that are more resource dependent;
and second, a large share of the rural populations in these economies is concentrated in
poor, or 'fragile', lands (World Bank, 2003). The World Bank de
fi
nes 'fragile lands' as
'areas that present signi
cant constraints for intensive agriculture and where the people's
links to the land are critical for the sustainability of communities, pastures, forests, and
other natural resources' (ibid., p. 59). Currently one quarter of the people in developing
countries - almost 1.3 billion - survive on fragile lands, which include 518 million living
in arid regions with no access to irrigation systems, 430 million on soils unsuitable for agri-
culture, 216 million on land with steep slopes and more than 130 million in fragile forest
systems. Barbier (2005) has shown that resource-dependent LMICs contain large con-
centrations of their populations in fragile lands. Moreover, greater resource depen-
dence is associated with a large percentage of population on fragile land. For example,
as the concentration of populations on fragile lands in low- and middle-income
economies increases from 20-30% to 30-50% to 50-70% to over 70%, the average
share of primary products in exports rises from 62.9% to 72.8% to 87.6% to 98.3%
respectively.
Each of the four stylized facts on its own has important development implications.
However, taken together, these facts also suggest some key underlying relationships
between exploiting new land and resource frontiers and unsustainable economic devel-
opment in LMICs.
For example, the
fi
rst three stylized facts suggest that developing countries today are
embarking on a pattern of resource-dependent development that culminates in frontier
resource exploitation, particularly in the form of agricultural land expansion and com-
mercial raw material exploitation, but the end results do not yield much in the way of sus-
tained economic progress. Stylized fact 4 indicates an additional 'symptom' of malaise
associated with frontier-based development today: in many developing economies a
signi
fi
cant proportion of extremely poor households are concentrated on fragile lands,
and both rural population growth and the share of population on fragile lands seem to
increase with the degree of resource dependence of a developing economy. That is, fron-
tier land expansion appears to be serving mainly as an outlet for the rural poor in many
developing countries.
There is now some empirical evidence to support these structural linkages in develop-
ing countries. For example, Barbier (2003; 2005; 2007) demonstrates that for the major-
ity of today's developing countries long-run agricultural land conversion appears to be
associated with lower GDP per capita levels. The analysis was extended to prove oil and
natural gas reserves, experienced expansion of those reserves, and the expansion in these
fi
