Ecovaria: Population & conflict p2

Ecovaria: Population & conflict p2...

In troubled Sudan, 2 million people have died and over 4 million have been displaced in the long-standing conflict of more than 20 years between the Muslim north and the Christian south. The conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan that began in 2003 illustrates the mounting tensions between two Muslim groups—Arab camel herders and black African subsistence farmers. Government troops are backing Arab militias, who are engaging in the wholesale slaughter of black Africans in an effort to drive them off their land, sending them into refugee camps. To date, some 140,000 people have been killed in the conflict and another 250,000 have died in the refugee camps of hunger and disease.

In Nigeria, where 130 million people are crammed into an area not much larger than Texas, overgrazing and overplowing are converting 351,000 hectares (1,350 square miles) of grassland and cropland into desert each year. The conflict between farmers and herders in Nigeria is a war for survival. As the New York Times reported in June 2004, “in recent years, as the desert has spread, trees have been felled and the populations of both herders and farmers have soared, the competition for land has only intensified.”

Unfortunately, the division between herders and farmers is also often the division between Muslims and Christians. This competition for land, amplified by religious differences and combined with a large number of frustrated young men with guns, has created what the New York Times describes as a “combustible mix” that has “fueled a recent orgy of violence across this fertile central Nigerian state [Kebbi]. Churches and mosques were razed. Neighbor turned against neighbor. Reprisal attacks spread until finally, in mid-May, the government imposed emergency rule.”

Similar divisions exist between herders and farmers in northern Mali, the Times noted, where “swords and sticks have been chucked for Kalashnikovs, as desertification and population growth have stiffened the competition between the largely black African farmers and the ethnic Tuareg and Fulani herders. Tempers are raw on both sides. The dispute, after all, is over livelihood and even more, about a way of life.”

Water, too, is a source of growing tension. Although much has been said about the conflicts between and among countries over water resources, some of the most bitter disagreements are taking place within countries where needs of local populations are outrunning the sustainable yield of wells. Local water riots are becoming increasingly common in countries like China and India. In the competition between cities and the countryside, cities invariably win, often depriving farmers of their irrigation water and thus their livelihood.

The projected addition to the earth’s population of 3 billion people by 2050, the vast majority of whom will be added in countries where water tables already are falling and wells are going dry, is not a recipe for economic progress and political stability. Continuing population growth in countries already overpumping their aquifers and draining their rivers dry could lead to acute hydrological poverty, a situation in which people simply do not have enough water to meet their basic needs.

Reversing this situation depends on quickly slowing population growth. Otherwise the resulting political instability could soon eclipse terrorism as a threat to society. [e]

Adapted from Chapter 2 of Lester R. Brown,
Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in An Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005)