Environmental Sustainability at a Crossroads

By IPS Correspondents and - - Reprint | | Print |

PANAMA CITY, Sep 8 2008 (IPS) - Latin America needs new sources of wealth and of employment, but sustainable development will require increasingly greater environmentally clean economic expansion, write Ricardo Sánchez, regional director of the UN Environment Program, and Mexican social development expert Enrique Provencio. As predicted by the World Food Program, high prices will be maintained for at least another 10 years, constituting a serious risk of a standstill on the first Millennium Development Goal, at least in the countries with the highest levels of poverty (WFP 2008).

The World Bank, on the other hand, reports that in Latin America and Caribbean the increase of food prices cause “the poorest to become poorer” and a wider poverty gap, with a greater impact in rural areas than in urban ones.

The present food situation is also due to the progressive degradation of soils, to an overly technology-dependent agriculture, to the vulnerability to climate change, to the quantity and quality of available irrigation water resources and concentrated and unfair commercial systems.

Also increasingly, the region’s environmental component is experiencing growing tensions. The international transformations, financial instability and high oil prices generate increased food and energy costs, while urbanization and population growth including productive and export standards lead to environmental problems.

Since the mid-90s there has been an important increase of exports and the growing global demand for primary natural resources has spurred their intensive exploitation. However, the exploitation of commodities such as minerals is not the only cause of environmental pressures. The main impacts have come from the changes in soil use by the agro-industrial export sector (UNEP 2008), particularly of soybean (more than 16 million hectares from 2000 to 2005 have been dedicated to soy crops, while cultivation of corn, rice and wheat are at a standstill) and the livestock sector.

The success achieved by the creation in Latin American countries of environment ministries, of environmental management and research institutions, and the approval of laws, protection instruments and application of policies have not had enough power to stop environmental deterioration. Neither have the regional efforts in regards to the use of energy, if compared to the positive results experienced by other regions.

Responsibility towards the future involves a greater commitment to the protection of ecosystems, to energy efficiency and compatible biofuel, and sustainable territorial use and protection of regional natural resources (WFP 2007).

According again to the WFP, in the present decade, this region has lost a little over 4.7 millions of hectares of forests annually, compared to the 4.5 lost during the previous decade. In regards to world deforestation, 65 of every 100 hectares of forests that are lost globally are from Latin America and the Caribbean.

This region is also one of contrasts and differentiated impacts by countries and sub-regions: this compels us to restate policies, considering all possible adverse consequences for sustainable development and especially the current challenges, at this time of multilateral environmental agreements.

Efforts to set aside more natural protected areas, territorial arrangements and controls on the use of soils will have to be increased and environmental practices and instruments, strengthened, and in some cases even altered.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s warning (2005) that the environmental crisis could worsen requires answers that are not yet included in conventional policies, answers which go beyond the limited scope of specific environmental policies.

These answers are linked to the interdependency between socio-environmental processes and require greater integrated and transversal arrangements.

Increased coordination between central, regional and local authorities is needed, with follow-up systems, and priority given to the most critical and vulnerable zones. Also needed is the application of economic policy measures which limit damages to natural resources and capital and of sustainable development policies. The role of environmental action in the area of the economy should be revalued.

The region needs the generation of new sources of wealth, of exports and employment, however sustainable development will be requiring constantly more environmentally clean economic growth.

Latin America and the Caribbean has managed to get by the crisis being experienced in the United States and other countries because it learned the need to have strict macroeconomic discipline; now it should establish the way to manage natural resources with the same discipline.

The regional biodiversity has numerous examples of products which could guarantee food security for the countries of the region, even becoming export products.

Agro-ecological management options are convergent with climate change mitigation strategies when favoring ecosystem protection and avoidance of deforestation: an alternative which should be valued within an agricultural, commercial and environmental transversal perspective as a sustainable development opportunity.

The cost of not responding could be high, not only in terms of ecological damage, but also of social inequity.