Good read II: Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity
I will discuss the four main processes (called as ‘effects’ in the original paper) of global land use change, in the context of my case study- as explained in the paper by Lambin and Meyfroidt (2011). I will draw inferences not only to land use change but also other social-ecological impacts.
I particularly love this series of terms because I have always wondered about these processes but never thought that someone actually cared to put a finger on it.
When an intervention is made to reduce environmental pressure in one part, activities migrate to another. This is called as leakage . In my case study in the Himalayas in Sikkim, India, I question the step of the Sikkim government to ban grazing, in order to protect the forests from degradation. Other than doing it in an unjust manner (selectively as they agree of doing it) there is a serious leakage other than outmigration to bigger towns. In a move for conserving wildlife, there is now pressure on agricultural land. The ex-herders in the lowland of the region are planting monocultures of cardamom, which requires increasing land and adversely affects agrobiodiversity. Additionally, moving on from a subsistence based diet, they import a lot of food now from the markets, which may be a product of unsustainable land-use practice, and globally marketed- where it is hard to uncover the complex dynamics of food chains and internalize the social and ecological cost of food production according to Clapp (2015), giving more power to food industries.
This is a super-cool form of land-use change. Basically, if you bump-up technology to increase production efficiency, it lowers the production price and like-wise its consumption price. This increases income, and increases demand for many other products. The national government of India releases 1000s of hybrid seeds every year for “poor” farmers to buck up their production. What happened in my case study area? Other than replacing the good ol’ pollinated, rich seeds by artificially manufactured seeds, messing with the whole food chain system of the animals, it has loaded the pockets of some farmers (not necessarily making them economically stable). Faster production has given more time for other activities and they are able to consume more goods from outside purchase. Of course you may ask, then should we stop economic growth completely and all abandon luxury and live a forest inhabitant’s life? Not really. I think the point of the authors is to highlight these phenomena and illustrate how these magnify into large global trends. They say, “Jevons had already observed that technological improvements in 19th century England that led to an increase in the efficiency of coal use caused an increase rather than a decrease in coal consumption in most industries (the “Jevons paradox”).”
A cascade effect is extremely well explained in ecology, according to the authors. Extinction of a key species in an ecosystem can trigger a series of other species extinction. Going back to the case study, after former Kingdom Sikkim became a part of democratic India, the national regime was broadly and sometimes directly applicable to the state. Subsidized or free rice was distributed to people below the poverty line, which to-date is carried out with certain reforms. While it benefited some,
The diets got replaced from local and diverse produce such as wheat, buckwheat, maize, barley to outside non-organic rice.
There was no need to produce subsistence crops, so they switched to commercial farming.
Some had excess rice and didn’t need all so they sold the extra rice
It caused a downfall of State rice markets because the subsidized rice comes from outside, plus, it’s subsidized, so who wants to buy expensive rice?
And this we can see could lead to rebound and leakage in many, many ways!
This is not to claim that distribution of rice was the only trigger, it was a key trigger, interacting with many other factors such as a rise of external food markets.
Outmigrants from rural areas send money back home (remittance) giving rise to “remittance” landscapes. It can results in a release in land pressure through families diversifying into non-farm activities. Alternatively, they may invest in farm technology and expand their farms/ buy more land.
As an idea from what the authors write I have a point to elaborate. A maximum of the younger population in my area of case study is living outside the villages. Over time, a loss of ties with the villages can lead to land encroachment by governments once the remittance money stops going. The encroachment could be for dam construction or creating a base camp for tourism or military camps, that already have a base higher up in this region.
To wrap it up, these processes of land use change should be trends observed in most rural parts of the world. My case study did not focus on these trends as such but looked more into changes in the agriculture practice itself.
Lambin, E. F., and P. Meyfroidt. 2011. Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(9):3465–3472. Online: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/9/3465.full.pdf
