Poverty, as both a cause and an effect of food insecurity, continues to be a major challenge in Asia and the Pacific where the bulk - approximately 75 percent - of the poor in developing countries are located. In this region, as elsewhere in the developing regions of the world, poverty is mainly a rural phenomenon: nearly three-fourths of the poor live in rural areas, with the large majority of them dependent on agriculture for employment and income. Agricultural growth thus offers a potentially enormous source of poverty reduction, particularly when the growth is broadly based.
The Asian economic crisis has heightened the critical role that the agriculture, fisheries and forestry sector plays in the way to economic recovery. More than ever, the sector has been called upon to absorb unemployed people forced out of the industrial and services sectors (as well as new entrants to the labour force unable to find work in urban areas), produce more export crops for foreign exchange, increase domestic food supply to mitigate upward pressure in wages and prices, and generate domestic sources of investment.
At the same time, the crisis has the potential of obscuring lessons from recent decades of Asian experience vis-�-vis poverty alleviation and economic development. For example, it has become fashionable, at least in popular discussions, to belittle the importance of economic growth - especially one resembling the recent East Asian experience - in poverty alleviation. The crisis has also given an opportune window to supporters of status quo to question or even be more skeptical about the benefits of economic liberalisation and globalisation, i.e. the opening up of goods, labour, capital, and services markets to world trade. Indeed calls for reversal - or slowdown - of liberalisation efforts have intensified in developed and developing countries alike, especially as the same East Asian economies that openly welcomed globalisation were the first to tumble in the wake of the regional crisis. But as Amartya Sen aptly put it, it would be a great mistake to underestimate what East Asia did achieve.
Beyond the Asian crisis, enormous development problems and policy challenges await the developing countries of the region. Rising population, shrinking agricultural land, increasing demands on limited water resources from the expanding urban and industrial sector, widespread land degradation, and inadequacy of governance infrastructure appear to be more pressing now than ever before, especially as they mount efforts to recover lost grounds arising from the crisis and deepen their integration with the world economy. As recent experience suggests, these issues cannot be divorced from policy concerns impinging on poverty and food security. Sustainable agricultural resource management (SARM) is critical to the issue of food security in the Asia Pacific Region. The challenge facing the region is one of how to increase output from the agricultural sector while sustaining and enhancing the productive potential of the available agricultural resources.
This report on land resources is part of a series of supporting document that accompany the main volume, Poverty Alleviation and Food Security in Asia: Lessons and Challenges which was published earlier and which assessed recent experiences, policies, and select issues on poverty alleviation in Asian developing countries.
In the context of agricultural development, sustainability is concerned with the adoption of land management practices that will enable the available natural resources to be used, now and in the future, to meet basic human needs. Such a concept of sustainability embraces a number of different disciplinary concerns. From the bio-physical perspective the concern is maintaining and enhancing the potential of the physical environment (the land) to sustain plant growth (crops, pastures and trees) while conserving bio-diversity within the natural resource base. There is an implicit time dimension that requires that immediate or short term productive returns from the land should not be obtained at the expense of potential future production in the medium to long-term. There is a social dimension that addresses the need to use the land to meet human needs in ways that are socially and culturally acceptable. The economic dimension requires that any economic and financial costs incurred by individual landusers and the wider society should be commensurate with the benefits and that there should be no diminution in the value of the natural resource capital stock as a result of using the land for agricultural purposes.
The present report assesses the potentials, status, issues and strategies relating to sustainable agricultural resource management in the context of food security across similar eco-regions and to the farm level with special reference to the endowment and resources of the poor and marginal farmers within the Asia Pacific Region.
To adequately address the multi-disciplinary nature of SARM the report encompasses a wide range of inter-related concerns. Key agricultural resource issues identified include agricultural resource circumstances that are internal and external to the farm household, geographic units for agricultural resource management, farm household level resource management domains, and units of intervention.
Documentation emanating from all countries in the region points to the existence of severe degradation of identifiable (often substantial) areas while light to moderate degradation occurs over extensive areas as result of accelerated changes and mismanagement. Consequently the report describes the causes and components of land degradation, vegetation and water degradation, climate deterioration, and losses of productive land to urban/industrial development. Prospects for reversing degradation and land reclamation are also discussed together with key bio-physical constraints and opportunities.
Farm households and other land users rarely deliberately degrade the land resources on which their livelihoods and welfare needs depend. In reality the root cause lies in the range of economic, social, cultural and political pressures that force farmers to use the land in the way they do. These pressures are therefore reviewed together with financial considerations as the impact of land of land degradation is ultimately viewed in financial and economic terms
There is more to solving the problems of sustainable agriculture than just the development of improved technical recommendations, such as government policy and/or the institutions set up to effect the policy. It is here, with sufficient political will, that the greatest advances could be made in promoting SARM. Consequently, the report considers the policy environment and institutional setting required for the adoption of SARM practices at the field level.
The last 20-30 years have seen increasingly heavy investment of financial and human resources, by both the Governments of developing countries and donor agencies, into implementing soil conservation programmes targeted at small-scale farmers. The return on this investment has generally been poor and the land area adversely affected by soil erosion and other forms of land degradation has continued to increase. The report, therefore, reviews development approaches, project development issues, the formulation of development strategies and implementation plans, and design considerations for SARM, inclusive of extension and training, alternative research strategies, and monitoring and evaluation needs. The report further expands upon a conceptual framework participatory planning process for SARM involving a variety of interrelated activities to be conducted in a systematic manner within an overall holistic development framework.
The main message that can be concluded from the findings of the report is that sustainable agriculture can be economically, environmentally and socially viable. Additional conclusions are presented with respect to six cross-cutting themes, namely: technologies, costs and benefits, processes and methods, institutions, policies and projects and programmes.
Finally, proposals are made for regional and sub-regional programmes, which will provide opportunities for the transfer of experience between countries in tackling SARM. In this regard it is felt that there can be a comparative advantage in developing methodologies and guidelines first at the regional level which can subsequently be fine tuned to meet the specific requirements and circumstances of individual countries at the national level.
PREM NATH
Assistant Director-General
and Regional Representative
for Asia and the Pacific
This report was prepared by M.G. Douglas under the technical guidance of F.J. Dent, Senior Soil Management and Fertilizer Use Officer, FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (FAO/RAP). The work was a part of the upstream activity led by D. B. Antiporta, Chief, and S. L. Kang, Policy Officer, Policy Assistance Branch (RAP) and carried out under UNDP/FAO RAS/95/01T, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in Asia and the Pacific: Issues and Challenges.
Companion volumes of this report have also been produced. The main volume, Poverty Alleviation and Food Security in Asia: Lessons and Challenges, was prepared with the assistance of A. M. Balisacan. In other agricultural sub-sectors, concerned FAO/RAP Officers provided respective technical guidance as follows: M.K. Papademetriou, Senior Plant Production and Protection Officer, for Crop Production by R.B. Singh and Edward M. Herath; D. Hoffmann, Senior Animal Production and Health Officer, for Role of Livestock by Gavin Ramsay and Leith Andrews; P. C. Choudhury, Senior Aquaculture Officer, for Sustainable Contribution of Fisheries by M. Hatta, Yong-Ja Cho, Song Zhiwen, R. Gillet and K. Sivasubramaniam; and P. Durst, Senior Forestry Officer, for Enhancing Forestry and Agroforestry Contributions by Chun K. Lai and Napoleon T. Vergara. Their technical contributions are greatly appreciated.