"As land and water become scarce, competition for these vital resources intensifies within societies, particularly between the wealthy and those who are poor and dispossessed," says Lester R. Brown, President of Earth Policy Institute, in a recent release. "The shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person that comes with population growth is threatening to drop the living standards of millions of people below the survival level, leading to potentially unmanageable social tensions."
Access to land is a prime source of social tension. Expanding world population has cut the grain land per person in half, from 0.23 hectares in 1950 to 0.10 hectares in 2007. One tenth of a hectare is half of a building lot in an affluent US suburb. This ongoing shrinkage of grain land per person makes it difficult for the world’s farmers to feed the 70 million people added to world population each year. The shrinkage in cropland per person not only threatens livelihoods; in largely subsistence societies, it threatens survival itself. Tensions within communities begin to build as landholdings shrink below that needed for survival.
The Sahelian zone of Africa, with one of the world’s fastest-growing populations, is an area of spreading conflict. In troubled Sudan, two million people have died and over four million have been displaced in the long-standing conflict of more than 20 years between the Muslim north and the Christian south. The more recent conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan that began in 2003 illustrates the mounting tensions between two Muslim groups, camel herders and subsistence farmers. Government troops are backing Arab militias, who are engaging in the wholesale slaughter of black Sudanese in an effort to drive them off their land, sending them into refugee camps in neighbouring Chad. At least some 200,000 people have been killed in the conflict and another 250,000 have died of hunger and disease in the refugee camps.
The story of Darfur is that of the Sahel, the semiarid region of grassland and dryland farming, that stretches across Africa from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east. In the northern Sahel, grassland is turning to desert, forcing herders southward into the farming areas. Declining rainfall and overgrazing by exploding livestock populations are combining to destroy the grasslands, sowing the seeds for conflict.
Rwanda has become a classic case study in how mounting population pressure can translate into political tension, conflict, and social tragedy. In 1950, Rwanda’s population was 2.4 million. By 1993, it had tripled to 7.5 million, making it the most densely populated country in Africa. As population grew, so did the demand for firewood. By 1991, the demand was more than double the sustainable yield of local forests. As trees disappeared, straw and other crop residues were used for cooking fuel. With less organic matter in the soil, land fertility declined.
As the health of the land deteriorated, so did that of the people dependent on it. Eventually there was simply not enough food to go around. A quiet desperation developed. Like a drought-afflicted countryside, it could be ignited with a single match. That ignition came with the crash of a plane on April 6, 1994, shot down as it approached the capital Kigali, killing President Juvenal Habyarimana. The crash unleashed an organised attack by Hutus, leading to an estimated 800,000 deaths of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days. Many other African countries, largely rural in nature, are on a demographic track similar to Rwanda’s.
Visit http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Seg/PB3ch06_ss5.htm to read the full report.
