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8 - Intensification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2010

Michael Mortimore
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The ‘crisis of sustainability’

This study's findings confirm the hypothesis of strong synergies and causality chains linking rapid population growth, degradation of the environmental resource base, and poor agricultural performance.

Farmers seek to maximise production per unit of land only when land becomes scarce relative to labor. This is now occurring in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. The weakness of the traditional coping strategies [however] is that they are not capable of adjusting quickly enough to prevent serious negative impact of rapid population growth and increasing population pressure on soil fertility, farm size, fuelwood availability, land tenure systems.

Because agricultural technology adapted to dryland areas is so marginal, land tenure reform so exceedingly difficult to implement, and carrying capacity so low, sustainable management of dryland areas will be very problematic.

(Cleaver and Schreiber 1994: 1–2, 126, 118).

In the previous chapter, it was argued that the crisis of sustainability is often represented in terms of negative feedback loops in an equilibrial system, disturbed by ‘external’ factors, such as the growth of the human (and livestock) populations, drought, or the market. For neo-classical economic analysts, population growth is uppermost; in socialist critiques, the market; while technical appraisals emphasise the role of rainfall and bioproductivity constraints. In this chapter, the hypotheses that population growth, rainfall variability and monetisation cause increased environmental degradation will be put to empirical test by means of a comparison of two farming systems in which these parameters vary.

Type
Chapter
Information
Roots in the African Dust
Sustaining the Sub-Saharan Drylands
, pp. 140 - 158
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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  • Intensification
  • Michael Mortimore, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Roots in the African Dust
  • Online publication: 05 October 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511560064.009
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  • Intensification
  • Michael Mortimore, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Roots in the African Dust
  • Online publication: 05 October 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511560064.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Intensification
  • Michael Mortimore, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Roots in the African Dust
  • Online publication: 05 October 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511560064.009
Available formats
×