|
     
   
3.2 Dimensions of Land Scarcity in the Development Process
The United
Nations has estimated that the world's population will grow from approximately six billion
to eight and a half billion people in the next 30 years. Other prognoses are even more
pessimistic. Ninety-seven percent of the growth will occur in Africa, Asia and Latin
America (WBGU 1993). The growing population must
be fed; higher demands on the quantity and quality of food products must be satisfied
(increased percentage of animal products). Because expansion of arable land is quite limited, increasingly areas are being cultivated that
are hardly appropriate for the production of food or livestock production. In addition,
croplands the size of the Netherlands have to be eliminated
from agricultural production every year due to overuse or misuse. Land is also
increasingly being required for settlements, traffic routes, industrial plants and
recreational areas. |
Population
growth and land scarcity |
| Population growth and land scarcity |
Poverty and rapid
population growth are positively correlated. Where per caput income increases, population
growth declines and vice versa. In other words, the higher the incidence of poverty, the
higher the population growth and consequently more people are afflicted by hunger and
malnutrition. That means poverty, rather than population growth, is the leading cause of
hunger and malnutrition. It is also evident that most of the people afflicted by hunger
and malnutrition live in the poorest parts of the world (particularly South- Asian and
Sub-Saharan African countries) where unemployment is high, income distribution is skewed
and standards of living are low, thus reinforcing the obvious connection between hunger
and poverty and not between hunger and population growth. |
Likewise, scarcity of
agricultural land is not the primary cause of food shortages although it does exacerbate
the problem. There is adequate arable land for cultivation and food production in the
world. A lack of arable land for food and agricultural production is not the cause of
hunger and starvation. |
| (Gebremedhin
1997) |
|
