Although the rate at which population is increasing has slowed since 1980, the increase in actual numbers is currently higher than at any time in the world’s history.

Additions have averaged 97 million per year until the end of the last century and 90 million per year until the year 2025.

Ninety-five percent of this increase is expected to take place in developing countries. Present figures indicate that by the year 2050 Africa’s population will be three and a half times its present level, and by the year 2150, almost five times.

The previous hundred years has seen great advances in the technology of production, such as the development of more productive crop varieties and the extension of irrigation and fertilizer use.

Nevertheless, it is becoming more difficult for technological progress to keep up with the rising demands generated by population growth.

This is partly a result of the extension of cropping to more marginal areas where physical factors limit potential productivity and the risks of failure are higher.

The success of technology in meeting these demands has been geographically uneven, being most successful in areas of low recent population growth, such as Europe and North America, meeting with varied success in Asia and Latin America, and generally being least successful in sub-Saharan Africa, where food production per capita has actually declined by almost 20 percent since 1960.

Growth in total population over the past 50 years has been matched by a relative increase in the urban population at the expense of the rural population (Figure 1). The impact of this trend is two-fold. On the one hand, movement of people to the cities may reduce the absolute pressure on land for agriculture while stimulating the market for producers.

On the other hand, production of primary products such as food, fibre and fuel must be produced from a diminishing land area by a diminishing relative population, while urban expansion reduces the total land available for agriculture.

A further factor is the disproportionate migration of economically active males to the towns, leaving women, children and the aged to shoulder the burdens of agriculture.

The situation is frequently exacerbated by government policies of urban bias, such as cheap food prices which favour the urban dwellers and their employers, but often penalize the food producers, who are commonly a less organized and less vociferous political constituency.

Urbanization due to population growth and migration effects has also promoted a growth in per capita consumerism which has further increased the demands on land resources.

Source: FAO, 1982

Symptoms of the Problem: The symptoms of the problem of pressure on land resources are manifested both in terms of impacts on people, and in terms of deterioration in the condition of land or impacts on other natural resources (Figure 2).

The deterioration in land condition may be reflected by an impaired ability to carry out any functions of the land listed above, some of which, such as reduced capacity to produce biomass, also, in turn, affect population support or quality of life.

The Cause of the Problem: Many of the above factors are interrelated. Figure 3 presents the relationships between cause, problem and symptoms.

The problem of land resources under stress has physical, social and political causes. At the national level, short-term political gains have often been made at the expense of long-term environmental damage.

Decision-makers often face inordinately difficult decisions when trying to increase production to alleviate poverty and feed people and at the same time conserve resources to stave off environmental degradation.

Often the decision-makers forfeit long-term sustainability for immediate needs. This also holds true for the subsistence level land users who have little choice but to seek immediate benefits for survival. Technology alone cannot be viewed as an answer.

Frequently the technologies to manage such areas in a sustainable way are simply not available, or the land users do not have access to them due to lack of information or resources. However, a key factor is the role of human institutions and land use policies that must be adapted to face the challenge posed by these rapidly changing conditions.

The Point of Intervention: The essential challenge is to address the pressure on land in a way which does not cause further deterioration in land resources or impair their essential functions.

As the foregoing statistics indicate, this will be an extremely difficult task. The immediate priority is to break out of the downward spiral, in which resource-limited farmers are obliged, by shortage of land resources, to degrade these limited resources even further by inadequate land husbandry in order to satisfy immediate subsistence needs. This scenario is shown in Figure 4.

Given that land resources management has a production and a conservation component, an obvious task is to ensure that the rate of production increases in a sustainable way.

Perhaps a less obvious, but equally important, aspect of land resources management is the ability of land users and other decision-makers to take informed decisions regarding the land resources.

As long as rural populations remain significant and vulnerable, there is little opportunity to enhance social capital (education, institutional and social networks) which would lead to enhanced decision making.

As shown in the simplified second scenario in Figure 4, a key to breaking the present downward spiral is to improve land users’ capacity to take informed decisions. One aspect of this is to improve access to information and technology and to enhance the capacity to use them.

In one sense this is the mechanism used in conjunction with the green revolution, which has been extremely successful (especially in Asian countries) in improving yields and even building surpluses.

However, the green revolution technologies have not proven to be sustainable, neither in yield production nor conservation of the natural resources.
Information and technology and the capacity to use them are essential to informed and more conscious decision making.

However, if individuals or institutions are not empowered to make decisions then sustainable land management cannot be the outcome. Establishing land-use policies that enable informed decisions to be made about land resources is therefore the critical factor to be enabling policies that must be built on stakeholder or land user involvement.

There is no universal technological fix for the challenge of meeting human needs while protecting the terrestrial biosphere. Land varies greatly in its productive potential, constraints and responses to management, even within areas as small as an individual farm.

The specific goals of groups of land users also differ, as well as the technology and physical and financial resources at their disposal.

The wide variations in land resources and socio-economic conditions necessitate an integrated planning approach applied with great flexibility to address particular local context questions and propose specific local context solutions.

Email: bbazimya@yahoo.co.uk