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English
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Small farmers are held responsible for environmental destruction as if they had a choice of resources to depend on for their livelihood, when they really don't. In the context of basic survival, today's needs tend to overshadow consideration for the environmental future. It is poverty that is responsible for the destruction of natural resources, not the poor.
Geoffrey Bruce
Canadian International
Development Agency
WCED Public Hearing
Ottawa, 26/27 May 1986
return because of the spread of desertification.[1] These trends are expected to continue despite some local improvements.
35. Desertification is caused by a complex mix of climatic and human effects. The human effects, over which we have more control, include the rapid growth of both human and animal populations, detrimental land use practices (especially deforestation), adverse terms of trade, and civil strife. The cultivation of cash crops on unsuitable rangelands has forced herders and their cattle onto marginal lands. The unfavourable international terms of trade for primary products and the policies of aid donors have reinforced pressures to encourage increasing cash-crop production at any cost.
36. A Plan of Action conceived by UNEP and drawn up at the 1977 UN Conference on Desertification has led to some slight, mainly local gains.[2] Progress on the plan has been hampered by lack of financial support from the international community, by inadequacies of the regional organizations established to respond to the regional nature of the problem, and by the lack of involvement of grass-roots communities.
III. THE CHALLENGE
37. Food demand will increase as populations increase and their consumption patterns change. In the remaining years of this century, about 1.3 billion people will be added to the human family (see Chapter 4); rising incomes, however, may account for 30 to 40 per cent of the increased demand for food in developing countries and about 10 per cent in industrial nations.[3] Thus over the next few decades, the global food system must be managed to increase food production by 3 to 4 per cent yearly.
38. Global food security depends not only on raising global production, but on reducing distortions in the structure of the world food market and on shifting the focus of food production to food-deficit countries, regions, and households. Many of the countries not growing enough food to feed themselves possess the largest remaining reservoirs of untapped agricultural resources.
