Introduction Poverty and Environment

CHAPTER NINE INTRODUCTION Against this background, the two variables most strongly correlated with rural poverty are Poverty and environment are closely unemployment and limited or no access to land. interrelated. Whilst people living in poverty are Studies have shown that in the poorest areas, more seldom the principal creators of environmental than three quarters of unemployed are concentrated damage, they often bear the brunt of environmental in just two classes: landless workers and small damage and are often caught in a downward spiral, farmers (TWE 1993). Many small land holdings have whereby the poor are forced to deplete resources to been bankrupted due to the absence of co-operative survive, and this degradation of the environment farming, lack of access to credit and the large capital further impoverishes people. When this self- investments required for new technology. In addition, reinforcing downward spiral becomes extreme, large landholders have in many cases evicted tenants people are forced to move in increasing numbers to in an attempt to consolidate their land in response to marginal and ecologically fragile lands or to cities. threatened land reforms or amendments to tenancy This chapter examines the interrelationships of laws. poverty and environment and discusses their status The second form of poverty occurs in areas of and trends. It also highlights the impact of poverty marginal lands (deserts, uplands, and already on environmental health and the vulnerability of the degraded lowlands) with few opportunities for poor to natural and man-made disasters. increasing agricultural productivity or for economic diversification. Such areas are generally very low in productivity, and problems are compounded by POVERTY AND ENVIRONMENT: unsustainable agricultural practices. Approximately STATUS AND TRENDS 60 per cent of the poor in the region are estimated to be living on these marginal lands. A. Definition-Forms of Poverty The third group of impoverished people are Usually referred to in terms of income or those which inhabit coastal areas with inadequate or deprivation, poverty has been measured in many depleted marine resources. People are attracted to ways. Increasingly, equal emphasis is being placed such areas due to economic development, but, in on social definitions (life expectancy, literacy rate etc.), many cases, the pace of this development destroys along with the traditional economic ones (Gross or depletes the very resources that are fuelling its Domestic Product (GDP) etc.), to indicate the status growth. and trend of poverty, or to develop poverty related The fourth form of poverty is experienced by indices such as human development index, human the poor inhabitants of urban slums and squatter poverty index and gender development index (ADB settlements, where there is a constant exposure to 1999). Whatever the cause, poverty is often poor sanitary and environmental conditions (see concentrated in environmentally fragile ecological Chapter 7). zones, where communities face and/or contribute to The geographical concentration of the worst different kinds of environmental degradation. poverty causes serious localized degradation. High Four forms of poverty based on land use and population density and growth against a background environment are evident in the region. The first form of an inequitable distribution of productive assets of poverty occurs in areas characterized by active make sustainable development more difficult to and productive agricultural land, the efficient and achieve. Impoverished communities also tend to rely equitable utilization of which by the poor is hampered disproportionately on common property resources by low levels of access to land, resources or jobs. For such as forest and pasture, which are vulnerable to example, the Green Revolution, whilst increasing degradation when exploited by growing numbers of absolute food production, did little to enhance the people. income of the small subsistence farmers and At the country level, developing countries tend sharecroppers. In comparison with large landowners, to be reliant on natural resources products for the these farmers lacked resources for the requisite capital overwhelming majority of their exports, which makes investment in the new technologies, and so mostly their economies extremely vulnerable to environmental sold their lands to large landowners and became changes and pressures. Macroeconomics, trade and further impoverished. The overall result has been a sectoral adjustment policies alter incentives governing bi-polar distribution of land-holdings in the region, natural resources by altering aggregate demand, as with fragmentation of small farms upon inheritance, well as by distorting relative prices of natural and a parallel increase in the size of the large resources and related goods and services. Markets holdings. at local, national and international levels also 198 POVERTY AND ENVIRONMENT influence local-level environmental management, as Figure 9.1 Poverty by Developing Regions of the do market interventions such as the maintenance of World food subsidies that benefit net purchasers rather than producers of food (ODA 1991). In addition, the structural adjustment policies adopted to deal with economic disequilibria (caused by a combination of adverse international economic conditions and internal management), have a disproportionate effect on rates of natural resources exploitation, where exports are from natural resource sectors. B. The Extent of Poverty A frequently applied criterion for the assessment of poverty is whether the daily income of an individual (or the average per capita income of a community) is less than one US Dollar (or ‘a dollar Source: World Bank 1998d. Note: Each figure represents 10 million persons living on US$1 a day’). On the basis of this criterion, some 1.2 billion a day or less at 1985 international prices. of the world’s people may be considered poor. Of these, 900 million (or 75 per cent) live in the Asian and Pacific Region, concentrated primarily in South disappeared in Hong Kong, China, Singapore and and East Asia (Figure 9.1). South Asia has more than almost disappeared in the Republic of Korea and half a billion poor people, with 450 million in India Malaysia (ADB 1997). alone. The extent of poverty in other subregions include Northeast Asia, which is dominated by the C. Causes and Consequenses of Poverty People’s Republic of China (275 million), and around 85 million in Southeast Asia. The remainder of the 1. Causes of Poverty poor are scattered in the small developing island While the causes of poverty (and their inter- countries of the South Pacific (ADB 1999). relationships with the environment) are not always In the early 1970s, half of the population of the discreet, they can be divided broadly into internal Asian and Pacific Region was poor (based upon the (local) and external (global) causes. ‘dollar a day’ criterion), the average life expectancy at birth was 48 years and only 40 per cent of the (a) Internal Causes population was literate. Today, one-third of the There are many internal, or local, causes of people are poor, life expectancy averages 65 years poverty in the region. For example, a lack of essential and 70 per cent of the adult population is literate. assets; living in a remote or a resource-poor area; The economic growth and social progress of the past vulnerability on account of age, gender, health, living several decades have ushered in an era of untold environment or occupation; and discrimination prosperity and health in most regions of the world. against an ethnic minority or a community considered Globally, per capita GDP has jumped from US$2 257 socially inferior. to US$3 168 in the past 25 years; life expectancy has The ‘feminization’ and ‘ageing’ of poverty is climbed from 57.9 to 65.6 (WRI/UNEP/UNDP/ very visible across the Asian and Pacific Region, and World Bank 1997). Parts of the Asian and Pacific is a result, in part, of population growth and changes Region have shared in this prosperity. In Southeast in global trade. For example, as the Republic of Korea Asia, most countries halved the incidence of poverty moved from an agriculture-based economy to one or more in just two decades. The Asian crisis based on heavy engineering, electronics and notwithstanding, these countries have shown how information technology, young men (and also robust economic growth can reduce poverty. The women) moved into the growing industrial enclaves, status of poverty in selected countries is given in leaving the elderly behind, particularly elderly Table 9.1. women, to manage the marginal agricultural lands. Table 9.2 indicates how South Asia lags behind These trends are also visible in People‘s Republic of Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia and the South China, India and Bangladesh (FAO 1998). Pacific in terms of socio-economic indicators. Often ‘population pressure’ is given a direct Southeast Asia has shown the most strides in causal role in driving downward spirals of poverty combating poverty; not only has the incidence of and environmental degradation. However in-depth poverty lowered, but its decline has quickened in analyses of population-poverty-environment linkages recent years. Absolute food poverty seems to have show that there are numerous factors conditioning 199 CHAPTER NINE Table 9.1 Poverty Measurement Indices in Selected Countries of the Asian and Pacific Region National Poverty Lines International Poverty Human Human Gender Related Gender Lines

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