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The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

By Bjørn Lomborg
Published by Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK
Email: information@cambridge.org
Website: www.cambridge.org
2001, 519pp., ISBN 0 521 01068 3 (Pb), £17.95

This is a book that perhaps ought to have some kind of health warning attached - 'Reading this book could seriously damage your perception of the world'. It is radical, and highly controversial, yet appears to be utterly sensible. Lomborg's mission? To challenge and refute the widely held belief that human selfishness and foolishness is threatening the future of the planet. Why would a former member of Greenpeace wish to weaken the environmental cause in this way? Because Lomborg fears that by distorting the facts about the state of the world, the environmental movement is in danger of losing its credibility completely. More importantly he argues, unless we understand what he believes to be the real state of the world, we will not be able to focus our attention and assistance where it is really needed.

His main thesis is that environmental organisations, (and he singles out the Worldwatch Institute and the World Wide Fund for Nature), deliberately misrepresent statistical evidence in order to give an exaggerated picture of environmental dangers. Whether the subject is food production, forest depletion, or water scarcity, Lomborg, himself a statistician, argues that the world is in a far better state than is generally admitted, and that on the whole, prospects for the future are of continuing improvement. Those areas where trends are least encouraging are the poorest areas. Countries burdened by huge debts cannot afford to think long term; nor can farmers living below the poverty line. Uncontrolled and damaging exploitation of natural resources may be their only option for survival and, since only rich people can afford the luxury of environmental conservation, if the world wishes to prevent further destruction, it must support the long term economic growth of the poor.

Water scarcity is often cited as posing the greatest threat for the 21st century. While Lomborg accepts that water scarcity will increase over the next fifty years, as populations rise, he does not believe that this presents an impossible crisis. Agriculture is responsible for nearly 70% of freshwater use, so the first way to tackle scarcity is to reduce the amount of water used in farming. Conventional irrigation systems are very wasteful, often because the water used is either free or paid for at a flat rate. Introducing better water management and appropriate pricing would make agricultural water use more efficient. Israel has shown the potential of drip irrigation to reduce water needs and increase yields. However, for very arid countries, another answer may be to use available water more productively in industry and for domestic consumption, and use industry's revenues to import grain. He repeats the point that poverty, rather than the state of the environment, is the real problem. Inadequate investment in water supply infrastructure is often the reason for poor access to water in many developing countries, not an absolute shortage in water availability. Those countries that face the severest shortage could address the problem - as many already do - if they were able to afford either desalinisation, or increased grain imports. One ton of imported grain saves 1000 tons of fresh water. There is, he argues, more than enough water in other parts of the world to grow the necessary grain.

Lomborg's book undoubtedly throws down a challenge to the international community. If the world is to become a better place for all its inhabitants over the next century, it is poverty that must be dealt with. Environmental scare stories may sell more newspapers and help research funding applications, but, he argues, preserving our natural resources depends on bringing people out of poverty, and it is to this field that political will needs to be directed. Many respected environmental lobbyists clearly feel bruised by Lomborg's attempt to refute what he terms their 'litany'. The World Resources Institute has itself issued a warning, attacking Lomborg's credibility and his statistical analysis. Readers can find more information at www.wri.org. The next few years will demonstrate whether the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist was correct, or overly optimistic about the real state of the world.

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Modifying Africa: How biotechnology can benefit the poor and hungry, a case study from Kenya

By Florence Wambugu
Published by Florence Muringi Wambugu, PO Box 25556, Nairobi, Kenya
Email: dkamanga@world-stream.com
Website: www.modifyingafrica.net
2001, 76pp., ISBN 9966 879 38 2 (Pb), US$25

Modifying Africa is an extremely welcome addition to the debate on biotechnology, and Wambugu puts a very strong case for her science. In the opening chapter she takes on the critics of genetic modification, arguing that those who oppose it are ignoring both scientific evidence as well as the needs of Africa and its farmers. Subsequent chapters look at the use of biotechnology by the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, the potential offered by tissue culture, genetic marking and genetic modification, questions of biosafety and food safety, and how Kenya is benefiting from an informed and reasoned debate on the issues.

Wambugu tackles the social questions as well as the scientific ones. Those who argue for improved distribution rather than increased production are, she argues condemning Africa's rural population to social and economic stagnation. Turning poor people into passive recipients robs them of the means to achieve their aspirations, and fills the cities with unemployed migrants. While some argue that GM varieties, like hybrids, force farmers to buy seeds rather than saving their own, she points to the many African farmers who year after year choose to buy hybrid seeds, their improved yields making the expense worthwhile. And opposing GM seeds on the grounds that the profits go to huge foreign companies is, she suggests, like refusing to use computers because of the money Bill Gates may earn from the software.

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Perspectives on Pastoral Development: A case book from Kenya

By Isabel Birch and Halima A.O.Sharia
Published by Oxfam. 274 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2 7DZ, UK
Email: publish@oxfam.org.uk
Website: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/publications.html
2001, 160pp., ISBN 0 85598 467 8 (Pb), £7.95

Nomadic peoples pose particular difficulties to development planners, especially in the mechanisms of service provision. The Wajir Pastoral Development Project experimented with new ways of tackling poverty among the pastoralists of north east Kenya, a people historically marginalised both geographically and in national development policies. The project was designed with the understanding that the causes of poverty are inter-linked, and that isolated improvements in one area would likely be undermined by the failures of another. Animal and human health, water supply and education were key areas of work, and methods tried and adopted included a system of mobile health workers and teachers, procedures to manage the purchase and distribution of livestock drugs, and restocking for those who had lost their livestock to drought or conflict. Most important was the support the project gave to the pastoral communities' own organisations and to other institutions, including NGOs and government departments, responsible for development in the region. Through this work the pastoralists became more able to organise themselves, and push for greater levels of support from their government and other donors. The case study is honest about the successes and failures of the project, providing both ideas and encouragement for those working with pastoral or other marginalized communities.

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Uganda: An Oxfam country profile

By Ian Leggett
Published by Oxfam. 274 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2 7DZ, UK
and in Uganda by Fountain Publishers, PO Box 488, Kampala, Uganda
Email: publish@oxfam.org.uk
Website: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/publications.html
2001, 92pp, ISBN 0 85598 454 6 (UK) or 9970 02 270 9 (Ugn), (Pb), £9.50

Ian Leggett's account of Uganda is fascinating and moving. The reader will find the expected chapters on colonial and post-colonial history, politics, economics, and education. But it's the personal stories of ordinary Ugandan's that stand out and reveal the harsh realities of this deeply divided country: three children, abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army, who were made to fight in Sudan and kill other children; the people of Karamoja, armed pastoralists who frequently raid cattle from among their own people, or from other tribes, and their elders who put a curse on the pen, and refused to allow their children to go to school. Uganda appears as a country of contradictions; while the problems of northern tribes go unsolved, the government's response to AIDS has been an example to the rest of the continent. The work of The Aids Support Organisation is a prime example, which through it's counselling service enables sufferers to 'Live positively and die with dignity'.

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Africa's Quest for Economic Development: Uganda's experience

By Jossy R. Bibangambah
Published by Fountain Publishers Ltd., PO Box 488, Kampala, Uganda and also available from African Books Collective, The Jam Factory, 27 Park End Street, Oxford, OX1 1HU, UK
Email: abc@africanbookscollective.com
Website: www.africanbookscollective.com
2001, 204pp., ISBN 9970 02 248 2 (Pb), £16.95 /$27.95

In style, content and presentation, the contrast between this and Oxfam's country profile (see above), could hardly be greater. However, readers wanting a more in-depth study of Uganda's pursuit of economic development, the history of government interventions, the priorities to be addressed, and the lessons to be learned from the past, will find these covered in more detail here. The book has the feel of a textbook aimed at students of development studies; it is dense and businesslike, good for reference if not an easy read.

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Land Tenure and Natural Resource Management: A comparative study of agrarian communities in Asia and Africa

Edited by Keijiro Otsuka and Frank Place
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4319 USA
Website: www.press.jhu.edu
2001, 412pp, ISBN 0 8018 6747 9 (Pb), £26

Giving people secure rights to property and land is widely regarded as an essential first step in tackling the problem of resource degradation. However, land tenure reform nearly always presents difficult challenges; customary systems of ownership and use are deeply entrenched, and can easily underpin entire cultures. As the studies in this book show, even fairly small areas of land can house a wide range of land tenure systems, either indigenous or imposed; policy-making in this context poses huge difficulties. However, those who are engaged in this process will find the eight case studies in this volume of value, in illustrating the impact that land tenure systems can have at a local level on forest resources. The style is technical, and includes detailed description of the data collection techniques, and quantitative methodology. The studies come from Ghana, Malawi and Uganda in Africa, and Sumatra, Vietnam, Nepal and Japan in Asia.

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Controlling Newcastle Disease in Village Chickens: A field manual

By Robin Alders and Peter Spradbrow
Published by CSIRO Publishing, PO Box 1139, Collingwood, Victoria 3066, Australia
Email: sales@publish.csiro.au
Website: www.publish.csiro.au
2001, 112pp., ISBN 1 86320 307 9 (Pb), AUS$15

Newcastle Disease, also known as fowl pest, and Ranikhet Disease, is the major constraint to village chicken production, its capacity to kill entire flocks often discouraging villagers from improving their husbandry and the welfare of their birds. Yet village chicken are potentially a rewarding source of income or protein, and have many other important roles, for example as pest eaters and gifts. This field manual is targeted not at farmers but at those who are responsible for implementing disease control strategies, chiefly veterinary departments and extension workers. It covers the characteristics of the disease, such as methods of spread and clinical signs, how to collect samples, and different strategies for controlling the disease, in particular, vaccination. Other aspects discussed include gender and ethnoveterinary considerations, and a final chapter explores how an extension programme for Newcastle Disease, incorporating participatory technology development, could be undertaken. The manual identifies the types of strategies that veterinary departments will need to consider; it cannot offer detailed recommendations as these will vary according to local context, but will certainly be a good starting point for further research and planning. (see also 'Cracking down on Newcastle Disease' Focus On Poultry 00-1 edition)

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Unnatural Disasters

By Janet N. Abramovitz
Published by Worldwatch Institute, 1776 Massachusetts Ave., NW Washington, DC 20036 USA Email: wwpub@worldwatch.org Website: www.worldwatch.org
2001, 61pp., ISBN 1 878071 60 2 (Pb), US$5

An excellent paper from the Worldwatch Institute, which summarises how the 1990s became the decade of disasters, the level of human responsibility for the loss of life and property, and what needs to be done in the face of the more extreme weather that climate change threatens to bring. One of the author's arguments is that nature has its own engineering solutions to disasters, for example, forests, floodplains and wetlands to absorb heavy rainfall, mangroves and dunes to cushion the land against coastal flooding. She cites an encouraging example from China, where the government has recognised that forests are ten times more valuable as agents of flood control and water supply than they are as sources of timber. After floods in the Yangtze river valley in 1998, the government banned logging, and has been paying former loggers to plant trees in the upper watershed.

Other areas in need of reform include emergency warning and response systems, land use plans and building codes. Agriculture too must change, and soil and water conserving methods adopted. Hurricane Mitch had a devastating impact on much of Central America, causing huge flooding and landslides which destroyed vulnerable hillside farms, and put back development in the area by 20 years. Yet researchers found that farmers who had been practising conservation agriculture experienced far less soil erosion than conventional farmers. If entire hillsides could be farmed using such methods the chances of landslides and floods would be much reduced. The author accepts that neither poor people nor politicians tend to put long term disaster prevention as a high priority; why spend money preparing for something that may not happen, or at least not during your period in office? Yet a World Bank report claims that every one dollar spent on disaster prevention saves seven dollars of rebuilding, and with the incidence of natural disaster set to rise, those are cost figures the world needs to take seriously.

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Handbook for the Field Assessment of Land Degradation

By Michael A Stocking and Niamh Murnaghan
Published by Earthscan, 120 Pentonville Road, London, N1 9JN, UK
Email: earthinfo@earthscan.co.uk Website: www.earthscan.co.uk
2001, 183pp, ISBN 1 85383 831 4 (Pb), £25

Conventional methods of land degradation assessment tend to be cumbersome and require long periods of observation. This handbook provides a new set of methods that have two key advantages. First, they are quick and easy and less prone to misreading. Second, they encourage field staff to approach land degradation from the perspective of the land users, the people whose task it will be to reverse the process if their farming is to be sustainable. Thus the authors are attempting to take the strengths of Rapid Rural Appraisal and Participatory Rural Appraisal, normally used to assess social and economic conditions, and apply them to the science of land assessment. One aspect of this is the need to focus not only on the measurable processes of soil erosion, but also on production trends, which tend to be the most obvious indicators of degradation from the farmer's perspective. Approaching land assessment in this way, and giving farmers the tools they need to be researchers, increases their 'ownership' of the assessment process and encourages them to develop and try solutions that will answer their needs for the land. The book focuses on small-scale rain-fed farms in the tropics, and will be an excellent resource for field-based assessors, as well as teachers and students.

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Conservation Agriculture: Case studies from Latin America and Africa

FAO Soils Bulletin 78
Published by FAO, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy
Email: publications-sales@fao.org
Online catalogue: www.fao.org/catalog/giphome.htm
2001, 78pp., ISBN 92 5 104625 5 (Pb), $16

In the last edition of New Agriculturist we reviewed FAO Soils Bulletin 77, which focused on the farmers of Santa Catarina in Brazil, and their steps to introduce low tillage and cover crop techniques to solve their soil fertility problems. The strength of that book was that in focusing on the story of one group of farmers, it allowed a detailed picture to emerge of how they had revolutionised their farming methods, an inspiration for others. In contrast, this bulletin is less successful. While it offers a summary of the harm that conventional, plough-based methods can do to soils, and the benefits to soil health and sustainable crop yields that conservation agriculture can offer, even in this respect it does not really add to what will already be well known by anyone interested in the subject. The case studies from Africa and Asia are also only very brief summaries. One is bound to ask who this book has been written for: not enough detail or new information for extension workers or researchers, but not enough punch and directness to motivate policy-makers.

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Information Revolutions: How information and communication management is changing the lives of rural people

By Paul Mundy and Jacques Sultan
Published by CTA and available from TRIOPS Hindenburgstrasse 33 D-64295 Darmstadt Germany Email: triops@net-library.de Website:www.net-library.de
2001, 241pp, ISBN 92 9081 2289 (Pb) EUR 40.00

Information Revolutions is a lively collection of inspiring case studies highlighting successes in the field of rural communication. The examples profiled are all 'local', not projects being implemented by well-funded foreign organisations, and all have a proven track record of sustainability and 'audience' support. Communication is seen as a three part process: enabling people with information to communicate it to their target audience, for example through radio programmes, training courses, or leaflets; enabling people to access information they want, such as through literacy classes, libraries, and telecentres; and facilitating dialogue, for example between farmers, researchers or extension officers, through farmers organisations, workshops and research networks. Communication is often the first thing to be dropped when budgets are restricted, yet without it years of work can be wasted, the chance of fruitful collaborations missed, and people left without the capacity to solve their problems. This book appears to have been written with western donors in mind, a way perhaps of generating some commitment to a process with a history of neglect. It offers a wealth of ideas and encouragement for those who feel they need to be doing something about communication, but are not quite sure where to start.

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