land use & livelihoods

Key Question: How does globalisation influence the interlacing of over-consumption in the North and poverty in the South?

The supply of the consumer markets in Europe requires the use of land outside of its territory. The demand for more land often creates social, cultural and ecological problems. Generally, land is a scarce good, and its use for livelihood may be in competition with the use for cash crops or the use for the production of renewable resources.

"Land use & livelihoods" analysises how much of productive agricultural land the North - in particular the EU - requires for its imports from the South ("hidden flows"). Taking cotton as an example, it can be shown how the developing countries overuse and degrade their own local resources by targeting their agriculture to exports, how thereby these resources are taken away from their own domestic food production and self-sufficiency.

Furthermore, the following questions have been investigated:
• What factors cause land degradation? What part do soil cultivation methods play that are not suited to the conditions in southern countries because they were developed for industrial countries?
• Which procedures have meanwhile been developed for a better adaptated agriculture, and which economic structures restrain the introduction of these procedures?
• In what way must procedures and production structures be adapted and redesigned in order to be sustainable?
• How far does the displacement or migration of people from their traditional settlements and food cultivation areas lead to the growing imbalance between rural and urban regions, as well as within towns?
• What (traditional) relations to nature, relations between genders and questions of ownership impede a sustainable land use, and what relations support it?
• How can diversity be supported by regional products suited to each specific culture when it is restricted by an export-oriented strategy?

>>> Further literature to read

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Gerhard Scherhorn
Research Group "Sustainable Production and Consumption"
Tel.: +49 / 202 - 2492 - 175
Fax: +49 / 202 - 2492 - 145
E-Mail: gerhard.scherhorn@wupperinst.org