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The political economy of soil erosion in developing countries
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cumstances. It concludes that more physical facilities are needed at the farm level to achieve better water management. These include those for water supply and distribution m particularly tertiary irrigation channels which would lead to a more efficient use of scarce irrigation water. For water is in short supply: in an average year water in the reservoirs is reportedly sufficient to supply only 23% of the total water requirements in the project area. One may wonder whether, under such conditions, a less individualistic society, with stronger social cohesion, would really do much better than the Malay farming community. P.J. DIELEMAN
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Via delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOIL EROSION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
The political economy of soil erosion in developing countries. Longman Development Studies, Longman Group Ltd., London/New York, 1985. 188 pp., £6.95. ISBN 0-582-30089-4. Writing on developing countries these days is writing on vicious circles or perhaps vicious downward spirals; this book is no exception. One of the major conclusions is that small producers cause soil erosion - - here taken to mean any degradation of the soil - - which reduces its ability to grow crops because they are poor and desperate; in turn soil degradation exacerbates that condition, keeping the spiral going. This is not a new point of view. However, the lines along which this conclusion is derived, and especially the collection of up-to-date examples from the literature with which it is illustrated, make this book essential reading for those politicians, senior bureaucrats and policymakers, foreign consultants and agricultural scientists, who perceive third world development as largely social change for the benefit of rural and urban poor. For them also the other well demonstrated principal conclusion of the book, that soil erosion in lesser-developed countries will not be substantially reduced unless it seriously threatens the accumulation possibilities of the dominant classes, will not come as a surprise. The main problem of writing on the political economy of environmental degradation is that, as the author states, two sets of specificity have to be tackled - - that of the physical system, and that of the social/economic system - and they both have to be brought together and analytically integrated. An omission of the first would lead to a failure to specify the physical processes of soil erosion, their spatial variability and interaction, and indeed the immediate causal variables such as slope, soil structure, vegetation cover, land use, rainfall intensity and so on. The omission of the second leads to a purely technocratic
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and physical study of the processes of soil erosion and perhaps the immediate land-uses leading to it, without any analysis of other political-economic relationships at the local, regional and international scales which determine the actions of the land-user in the affected area. A good example of this second point, recently getting more and more attention, is the following: pricing may well be a critical factor in returns to farmers and in decision making about extension of cultivation and precise agronomic practices with direct implications for soil erosion, yet prices of foodstuffs for urban-based elites are naturally a highly sensitive political issue. However, omitting to study the physical domain would cause us to miss such facts as that technical failures" in soil conservation techniques have been the cause of a number of problems in conservation policy and that many techniques are not compatible with existing agricultural or pastoral practice nor are chosen or implemented with the participation of the land-users themselves. Being engaged in research on traditional techniques of environmental management, this reviewer wants to compliment the author with his bottom-up approach in which he successfully paints the actual situation of poor farmers under erosion-prone conditions. His attention to (our lack of) knowledge of traditional techniques and decision-making and his conclusion that this is perhaps one of the few areas in which more research may provide genuinely useful insights for more realistic conservation programmes is highly commendable. But a good book also has its weaknesses. This one is, most likely due to the author's experience, heavily biased towards water erosion compared to aeolian erosion. I personally find the comparison of family planning and soil conservation programmes not entirely successful. Also I feel that the reduction of the author's pessimism for future successes in soil conservation could have come somewhat earlier than at the very end, from the point of view of his own earliermentioned principal conclusion. I do believe that the dominant classes in some countries are now starting to suffer from their own failures or those of their predecessors and that the rhetoric and the 'deflected action' so far practised can, if intensified, in such cases become a platform for strategic action. We can but agree with the author that a resulting reduction in surplus extraction from rural areas implies among other things a shared perception of the problem by land-users and institutions or arrangements of their choice to ensure a reasonably equitable sharing of costs and benefits of conservation. And that there has to be the technical knowledge of conservation which may bring direct producers in close contact with officials who have to be able to offer solutions in such a way as to be utilisable by land-users. And that indeed it is a matter of swimming against the current because, still in the author's words, cheap methods of reclaiming eroded hills, further research on agrosilviculture, nutrition-enhancing and soil conserving intercropped rotations, fuelconserving improved cooking stoves, and other cheap energy-saving devices are all relatively unattractive "maintenance research" which need to be put-
170 sued by an act of will. I have met this will recently at a higher frequency. May this book encourage us to act as fast as our scientific knowledge and social understanding allow us. C.J. STIGTER TTM1-Project, Agricultural University Duivendaal 1, 6701 AP Wageningen, The Netherlands
cumstances. It concludes that more physical facilities are needed at the farm level to achieve better water management. These include those for water supply and distribution m particularly tertiary irrigation channels which would lead to a more efficient use of scarce irrigation water. For water is in short supply: in an average year water in the reservoirs is reportedly sufficient to supply only 23% of the total water requirements in the project area. One may wonder whether, under such conditions, a less individualistic society, with stronger social cohesion, would really do much better than the Malay farming community. P.J. DIELEMAN
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Via delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOIL EROSION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
The political economy of soil erosion in developing countries. Longman Development Studies, Longman Group Ltd., London/New York, 1985. 188 pp., £6.95. ISBN 0-582-30089-4. Writing on developing countries these days is writing on vicious circles or perhaps vicious downward spirals; this book is no exception. One of the major conclusions is that small producers cause soil erosion - - here taken to mean any degradation of the soil - - which reduces its ability to grow crops because they are poor and desperate; in turn soil degradation exacerbates that condition, keeping the spiral going. This is not a new point of view. However, the lines along which this conclusion is derived, and especially the collection of up-to-date examples from the literature with which it is illustrated, make this book essential reading for those politicians, senior bureaucrats and policymakers, foreign consultants and agricultural scientists, who perceive third world development as largely social change for the benefit of rural and urban poor. For them also the other well demonstrated principal conclusion of the book, that soil erosion in lesser-developed countries will not be substantially reduced unless it seriously threatens the accumulation possibilities of the dominant classes, will not come as a surprise. The main problem of writing on the political economy of environmental degradation is that, as the author states, two sets of specificity have to be tackled - - that of the physical system, and that of the social/economic system - and they both have to be brought together and analytically integrated. An omission of the first would lead to a failure to specify the physical processes of soil erosion, their spatial variability and interaction, and indeed the immediate causal variables such as slope, soil structure, vegetation cover, land use, rainfall intensity and so on. The omission of the second leads to a purely technocratic
169
and physical study of the processes of soil erosion and perhaps the immediate land-uses leading to it, without any analysis of other political-economic relationships at the local, regional and international scales which determine the actions of the land-user in the affected area. A good example of this second point, recently getting more and more attention, is the following: pricing may well be a critical factor in returns to farmers and in decision making about extension of cultivation and precise agronomic practices with direct implications for soil erosion, yet prices of foodstuffs for urban-based elites are naturally a highly sensitive political issue. However, omitting to study the physical domain would cause us to miss such facts as that technical failures" in soil conservation techniques have been the cause of a number of problems in conservation policy and that many techniques are not compatible with existing agricultural or pastoral practice nor are chosen or implemented with the participation of the land-users themselves. Being engaged in research on traditional techniques of environmental management, this reviewer wants to compliment the author with his bottom-up approach in which he successfully paints the actual situation of poor farmers under erosion-prone conditions. His attention to (our lack of) knowledge of traditional techniques and decision-making and his conclusion that this is perhaps one of the few areas in which more research may provide genuinely useful insights for more realistic conservation programmes is highly commendable. But a good book also has its weaknesses. This one is, most likely due to the author's experience, heavily biased towards water erosion compared to aeolian erosion. I personally find the comparison of family planning and soil conservation programmes not entirely successful. Also I feel that the reduction of the author's pessimism for future successes in soil conservation could have come somewhat earlier than at the very end, from the point of view of his own earliermentioned principal conclusion. I do believe that the dominant classes in some countries are now starting to suffer from their own failures or those of their predecessors and that the rhetoric and the 'deflected action' so far practised can, if intensified, in such cases become a platform for strategic action. We can but agree with the author that a resulting reduction in surplus extraction from rural areas implies among other things a shared perception of the problem by land-users and institutions or arrangements of their choice to ensure a reasonably equitable sharing of costs and benefits of conservation. And that there has to be the technical knowledge of conservation which may bring direct producers in close contact with officials who have to be able to offer solutions in such a way as to be utilisable by land-users. And that indeed it is a matter of swimming against the current because, still in the author's words, cheap methods of reclaiming eroded hills, further research on agrosilviculture, nutrition-enhancing and soil conserving intercropped rotations, fuelconserving improved cooking stoves, and other cheap energy-saving devices are all relatively unattractive "maintenance research" which need to be put-
170 sued by an act of will. I have met this will recently at a higher frequency. May this book encourage us to act as fast as our scientific knowledge and social understanding allow us. C.J. STIGTER TTM1-Project, Agricultural University Duivendaal 1, 6701 AP Wageningen, The Netherlands