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Introduction

We, the people of South Asia, have a shared past going back to hoary antiquity; our national identities, however, are barely 62 years old. Our shared values are more pronounced despite diversity of religion, culture, social mores, food habits, language, and rites and rituals.

Nature gave us immense biodiversity and strong natural-resource base. The wisdom of our ancestors ensured that we had abundant food, clean water, fine clothing and excellent habitat. Elaborate systems and rituals ensured a symbiotic relationship of humans with nature. Social inequities did exist, as they do today, but people were well fed, healthy and lived long. In less than 12 decades (1830–1947), the colonial looting transformed this region into an impoverished and degraded land.

Regional Overview

South Asia is home to the world’s largest number of poor and undernourished people. With just 3.22 per cent of the total land in the world, it supports 23.17 per cent of the world population. The density of population—or, the number of people per square km—varies from 49 to 1230, with an average of 319. The population of this region is still growing at 1.65 per cent per year. Three countries (namely, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) account for 92 per cent of the annual population growth (see Table 1.1). The paucity of land in South Asia is such that there is now just one acre of land for 1.3 persons. This land is to be used to produce enough food and fibre for people, and sufficient fodder for animals. Apart from that, from this land enough resources also need to be allocated for ecosystem functions, industries, commerce and various other services required in a modern society. It is our collective responsibility to appreciate this constraint and create conditions for our natural inventiveness to help transit to a sustainable and healthy society.

Consensus Trance of Economic Development

After the problem of huge population, the second constraint faced by South Asia is its leadership. For far too long they have continued with disastrous economic policies in the name of development and poverty alleviation. Add to that their phony ‘security concerns’ that have effectively managed to stymie all environmental concerns. Their favourite economists never fail to convince us that GDP is the most important pointer of development. This term does not explain distribution of income or quality of life, and it does not even factor in social and environmental costs. The obsession with GDP, since the middle of the twentieth century, has effectively trashed the very essence of human progress.¹ Economic policy makers and political elites presume that factor inputs shall remain available and that 5 per cent growth rate can be pushed to 7 per cent or even 10 per cent, provided resources are more intensively exploited. The second fallacy of economic growth is that it assumes that fossil fuel energy shall continue to be available. They seldom pause to think that all economic activities are rooted in natural resources and these are finite.

Table 1.1 Regional Demographics

The third constraint is the consumption-oriented society. The consensus trance of limitless growth and wealth creation is essentially a reflection of a consumption-oriented society. Society at large is ignoring the pitfalls of fossil fuel driven economic growth. Environmental considerations, especially climate change, require a revaluation of GDP-based political and economic goals. As resources deplete and environment degrades, it is the responsibility of our governments to come out of this consensus trance. It will be difficult for them because the trance gives comfort to the rulers as well as the ruled.

Shahbaz and Suleri² show the multifaceted ways in which forests and trees relate to the livelihoods of rural communities. Moreover, they identify various factors responsible for deforestation and ineffective forest management in Pakistan. These include (a) the ignorance of bureaucracies about how local inhabitants pursue livelihoods, (b) lack of political will to improve resource management, (c) the local communities’ sense of loss of stake in state and other ‘protected’ forests to communities that formerly depended on them for their livelihood, and (d) the political connections of powerful timber smugglers. A major contribution of the chapter is in explaining why various approaches to decentralized and participatory management have thus far usually resulted in increased deforestation.

Political Economy of Natural Resources

Threats to our livelihoods, particularly of the rural poor, come from the continuation of the colonial political economy, without exception, in all South Asian countries. It is not the capitalistic economic system per se, where the rich are getting richer and poor are being pushed further down the poverty line, which is at fault. It is the exclusion of the poor from access to natural resources and equitable benefit-sharing that is a continuation of the colonial system. In the race for accumulating personal wealth, with utter disregard for a region’s social values, the pressure on dwindling natural resources has increased and so have the attempts to take control over resources. The state has been systematically misused to marginalize the poor. Consequently, the quality of land, air, water and forests is declining at an alarming rate. Our biodiversity is threatened. Access to natural resources was highly sustainable and benefit-sharing was equitable in the past; its denial since the nineteenth century is abrogation of the fundamental human rights of the South Asians.

The world leaders have done very little to conserve natural resources. The values shared by them are those of rapacious power and wealth, with democracy and human rights made irrelevant.³ They have driven people everywhere to desperate acts of survival that invariably result in a downward spiral of poverty, environmental degradation, more social chaos and more degradation.

Poverty is a major, but not the only, cause of degradation of natural resources in the region. The rural communities depend on forests for fuel wood, subsistence agriculture, food and medicinal herbs to meet their survival needs. Exploitation of these resources beyond sustainable level has indeed caused degradation mostly in the common-property resources. On the other hand, development policies, including militarization in ecologically fragile areas, are also causing environmental destruction. Large infrastructure projects, dams, canals and use of best agriculture lands for industries are further exacerbating the problem. Therefore, policies are directly responsible for environmental degradation, which in turn causes impoverishment; the shrinking survival options of the poor accelerate environmental degradation. It is this poverty–environment nexus that concerns us most. It must be borne in mind that impoverishment and environmental degradation is continuing because resources are directly or indirectly controlled by former colonialists or crony capitalists through powerful corporations. South Asian governments accommodate their interests far more readily than those of the common people.

Institutional capacity to plan and implement sustainable development strategies is weak. Besides, deployment of financial and human resources to meet the emerging challenges is constrained and frequently inappropriate. For example, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) even for mega projects is done essentially to technically satisfy the regulatory norms and rarely as a basis for investment decisions that include environmental concerns. Once these projects are approved, serious monitoring of compliance is seldom done. The fragile mountain ecosystems have been ruthlessly logged for over two centuries; expanding population seeking more agriculture and grazing lands has further aggravated the problem. There are policies and programmes for afforestation and integrated development of habitat but these have been shoddily implemented. In the Himalayas, world’s most heavily populated mountain region, there is no building code and unregulated constructions are destroying the fragile ecosystems.

The Himalayan rivers provide irrigation and drinking water to over a billion people. Although reduced flow is threatening their survival, yet huge hydro-electric projects have been planned around dwindling water resource of the Himalayas. Our fertile agricultural land is now polluted with lethal pesticides and the rivers with untreated industrial and domestic wastes. Marine ecosystems are threatened not only by chemical wastes and untreated solids and liquids from major cities but also by logging and lopping in mangrove swamps. As a result, biodiversity of land, availability of fresh water and marine ecosystems are threatened.

Appropriate rules and laws are in place to address most of these concerns but enforcement is non-existent. Powerful commercial interests are accommodated and the concerns of local communities are frequently ignored. This is not by accident or incompetence. Governments are extremely well-briefed.

Pressures on Natural Resources

Current patterns of natural resource exploitation are environmentally destructive, socially inequitable and contribute to human insecurity, political instability and social conflict. Globalization and supply chains of developed countries, and rapidly growing economies such as China and India, are drivers of unsustainable development and environmental, socioeconomic and related trans-boundary impacts such as the inequitable use of common resources. Apart from that unchecked population growth and urbanization in many parts of the world have led to wasteful consumption patterns and the rapid degradation and depletion of critical natural resources, especially water and forests. In the face of such problems regional cooperation on trans-boundary resources is hindered by nationalism and resource competition, which, unless checked, could be destabilizing to countries and regions.

Community-based resource management is seen as the preferred solution, but reform faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles such as the dominance of bureaucracies and departmental agendas, the collusion with locally powerful individuals and the poverty and political marginalization of affected communities.

Energy from fossil fuel

This is a key resource because it drives the economy now. Out of all the known sources of energy, oil is the most critical. The world has already used up over half of the 2.2 trillion barrels of oil available from known reserves. Demand is growing while production is declining. Some (like Dick Cheney, the former vice-president of the USA) estimated 3 per cent decline; others (like Andrew Gould, who is the President of Schlumberger) predict that 8 per cent decline per year is ‘not unreasonable’.⁴ The general consensus is that ‘the effects of even a small drop in production can be devastating’. For instance, during the 1970s, oil shocks, shortfalls in production as small as 5 per cent, caused the price of oil to nearly quadruple. The same thing happened in California a few years ago with natural gas: a production drop of less than 5 per cent caused prices to skyrocket by 400 per cent.⁵

Chart 1.1 The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to Olduvai Gorge

Duncan has shown that the per capita energy production in 2025 will decline to 1920 level and that the industrial civilization spanning 100 years, 1930–2030, will slowly end (see Chart 1.1).⁶ After 2030, we would need bees’ wax candle or bio-fuel for our lamps.

Few realize that in the developed economies, 10 calories of fossil fuel is used to move each calorie of food from farm to fork. South Asian policy makers believe that industrial farming, energy-intensive warehousing, food processing industry and modern retail outlets will ensure ‘modernization’ of food system. The energy requirement for sustaining that strategy would be 1.45 billion (people) × 1800−2400 (calorie of food energy) × 10 calories of fossil fuel every day. The ominous oil scenario indicates massive food shortages, even famine. Dependent on oil for irrigation and transportation of inputs and outputs, many farmers will face economic collapse.

Oil helped expand the ecological footprint of humans tremendously that led some to believe in globalization; when that resource declines, the footprint must also contract, and that means we must prepare for re-localization. In South Asia, only India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have oil, gas and coal reserves. Oil reserves have already peaked. Soon, gas and coal reserves will follow suit.

Peaking or decline of fossil fuel resource itself is not an issue. It is the unwillingness of decision makers to inform the people of the reality and take timely and decisive measures that would mitigate the impact of the decline that is the real cause of concern.

While all these facts are well known, investment in renewable sources of energy is lagging behind. Unsustainable exploitation of hydro-electric potential, about 250,000 MW from the South Asian side of the Himalayas is being pursued. India is planning to expand nuclear-powered electricity generation when it is well documented that nuclear reactors are financially viable only if subsidized by tax payers, and cause insurmountable toxic waste disposal problems, in addition to posing significant health risks.

Climate change and associated global warming is the most insidious impact of extensive use of fossil fuels, which emit carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases (GHG). The rural poor in South Asia are particularly vulnerable because this phenomenon is disrupting provisioning services of ecosystem. There is now overwhelming evidence that land productivity is falling, water scarcity is reaching alarming proportions, and drought and natural disasters are becoming more intense and more frequent.

Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the variety of life, including both fauna and flora, that supports ecosystems on earth. Expansion of monoculture farming and use of toxic pesticides have destroyed the synergy earlier available from varied life-forms below and above ground through the diverse flora and fauna. To add to our woes, a small group of biotechnological firms, without proper bio-safety assessment, have introduced genetically engineered (GE) crops. They have embarked on risky open-field trials of food crops as well. It should be noted that GE is an untested, imperfect technology. How it will contaminate our environment is not known. But the greatest risk is that GE variants of food and feed crops will contaminate our natural environment in perpetuity and that will also adversely impact biodiversity. Whilst the government of Pakistan has resisted the introduction of GE technology, the Indian government has bent over backwards to accommodate the spurious claims of biotech firms. If Indian regulators approve of the use of GE seeds in food crops, South Asian food security will be lost forever.

Land

Land, the most critical finite resource simply because one can’t create it, is being indiscriminately allocated to industry, urbanization and militarization. In India alone, over 500 planned SEZs are at different stages of implementation that will displace millions of people, and many of these are being set up on best agricultural lands. Displacement of local population as a result of sequestration (forced acquisition of their lands), wars (US–NATO occupation of Afghanistan), civil unrest (i.e., Nandigram in West Bengal) and natural disasters has affected millions. Pakistan is bearing the burden of almost 3.5 million Afghan refugees since early 1980s, impacting fragile upland watersheds and quality of land due to increased demand for wood, clearing of forest for making agricultural land, construction of houses and heavy grazing in the forests.

Highly toxic industries, which are costly to establish and maintain in developed countries because of stringent EP Laws, are being established or relocated here. This will have long-term impact on land (untreated toxic waste disposal), water (underground aquifers) and air and on the health of all lifeforms.

Water

Demand for water is directly correlated with farming methods, industrialization and urbanization. While water demand is going up, water availability has been steadily going down. As a result, energy-intensive solutions are being proposed and implemented. In the mad scramble for extending farmlands, many farmers filled up ponds (700,000 ponds in Indian Punjab alone were filled up), destroying the precious traditional rainwater-harvesting structure. As a consequence, the water table is going down and the energy cost of pumping water is going up. Industries require water but despite provisions for treating effluents, a majority is simply discharging its effluents in the commons. Similarly, urban centers dumping untreated solid and liquid waste have turned our rivers into sewers. Our rivers are dying and because of that not only aquatic life is being destroyed but also irrigation and community drinking water sources. So is the case with our marine waters.

Bottled water is a luxury in South Asia. People are used to drawing untreated water from wells, rivers, streams and canals for drinking, cooking and other domestic uses. The fact is that the quality of water has deteriorated as a result of pollution from various sources and the people are exposed to health risks associated with the use of contaminated water. Water-borne diseases are increasingly affecting the poorer segments of the society in the region. Climate change associated with global warming has greatly affected the hydrological cycle, thereby changing the rainfall pattern and intensity at various places in South Asia.

Atmosphere

Atmosphere consists of gases that form air, including moisture and ionosphere. It gives us rain, wind and helps us to communicate. Because of release of GHG, SPM and ozone-depleting substances, our atmosphere is now heavily polluted. The immediate effect is global warming, global dimming (because the SPM is reducing the amount of sunlight reaching us) and unprecedented change in the hydrological cycle. The biosphere protects life on earth by absorbing ultraviolet solar radiation and reducing temperature extremes between day and night. The damage to the atmosphere has also been caused by uncontrolled disposal of satellite debris in the outer atmosphere; militarization of space and lower atmosphere will affect life on the earth. Damage to the health of all living forms by uncontrolled growth of microwave, radio waves and air pollution is going on. These activities have increased the disease burden on South Asia.

Current Policies

As stated earlier, all South Asian governments are following policies that are based on the flawed economics of large industries, energy-intensive infrastructure, industrial farming, rapid urbanization, extensive mining operations, large irrigation projects, etc., ignoring the state and cost of availability of resources. In the densely populated South Asia, these policies have displaced a large number of people leading to pauperization of the masses. This inhuman trend of privatization of natural resources stems from primacy given to state and corporate rights at the expense of community rights. That anomaly is the direct result of following the Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and it works against the rights of access and benefit-sharing of the local communities. Whilst these policies are benefiting a few, the masses are getting marginalized because they lack education and training to meaningfully participate in the increasingly knowledge-intensive activities.

On the other hand, basic services like education, healthcare, adequate nutrition, sanitation, and training and capacity-building are simply not available to the masses. Even if available, the quality of these services leaves a lot to be desired. The trend of privatization of some of these services has actually denied access to many.

Responses

Our governments are unfortunately working on the theory of development through industrialization, faster resource conversion into tradable goods, energy-intensive food production and distribution systems and infrastructure. In order to speed up investment, restrictive provisions dealing with social and environmental concerns are being dismantled. Multinational firms are being offered all sorts of sops to set up operational base with a view to creating local jobs. The multinational firms are attracted by cheap labour, lax regulatory regime and availability of a variety of cheap raw materials. In agriculture, contract farming, growing of cash crops and introduction of genetically engineered food, feed and fibre crops are being imposed by means fair and foul. Despite overwhelming evidence that industrially grown foods are nutrition-deficient and genetically engineered crops will cause biological pollution, governments have turned a blind eye. These responses are unlikely to remove poverty or preserve our environment; rather, these actions are destroying the natural resource base. When globalization self-destructs and relocalization becomes the only way to survive, we shall need our farmers and their wisdom and intelligence.

The responses of the civil society have been fragmented and unfocused not only because genuine community-based NGOs are few but also the existing ones are sectorally organized, each with its own respective ‘spheres of influence’. There is little coordination that would enable them to see the big picture and then concentrate on activities in which they have core competency. Because of this sectoral approach, convergence and synergy at community level is missing. Frequently, there is an attempt to accommodate the agendas of funding agencies, essentially because few are truly community-based, which defeats their very raison d’être. None has succeeded in translating people’s expectations into realistic operational possibilities and scale up sustainable solutions.

The communities, the only permanent political entity, are at the receiving end in these ‘resource wars’ for resources as they are actually battling for resources to survive. So communities are fighting their own local ‘wars’. Nandigram and Singur in Leftistruled West Bengal are classic examples of how an elected government can become fascistic and the civil society reduced to mere spectators, leaving poor, hapless people to fight to conserve their assets and resources.

The essential feature of an industrialized society is that cheap oil made it possible to move food from far-off places, people could live far away from place of work, and could buy things produced by firms thousands of miles away. As oil supplies dwindle, the ‘globalized transactions’ would gradually shrink and be replaced by predominantly ‘localized transactions’, and that would force a fundamental change in the way we have done things in the past. This event would restructure society, its power relationships, ethical values and legal structure. It would force us to respect natural resources the way we used to do in the past.

South Asia has no option but to formulate an alternative developmental strategy rooted in sustainable natural resource management (NRM) regime that mitigates impact of fossil fuel shortage and resource constraints. Whilst the region as a whole must seek assured access to oil so long as it is available, it is critical that the timelag between now and the end of oil era (optimistically about 20 years) is effectively utilized to manage the transition to low-energy economy. The core of that strategy is ‘back to basics’ with full understanding of the science behind NRM. Energy sources such as solar, wind and bio-fuel offer limited solutions at a cost beyond the affordability of the poor people.

The best lands will be required to produce highly nutritious food through fossilfuel-free management of farms and gardens and to stave-off hunger and malnutrition. Our farmers will have to learn to save seeds, maintain soil health to peak levels, ensure that adequate water is available at the least or no energy cost, and that the farm produce is consumed or exchanged locally. Urban areas will have to be fed from farms and gardens as close to the cities as possible for which experts are using the term ‘foodshed’. The way our best lands are being used for urban expansion and industrialization will have to stop. After this, the second thing necessary is to produce drinking water close to home to minimize transportation costs. Bottled or processed water will progressively become luxury and thereafter impossible to produce. Clean drinking and irrigation water will have to be obtained from ecosystems: from wells, rivers and ponds close to human habitations. This further implies that each ‘watershed’, defined by its natural hydrology, will have to be nursed up to peak health. Third, in order to keep lands at peak production level, ecosystems will have to be maintained at highest level of efficiency, which implies (a) protection of biodiversity and, (b) sustainable use of natural resources like land, water, air, energy and mineral resources with least wastefulness. Fourth, all basic services like schools, hospitals, shops, crèches for toddlers, post offices, centres for higher learning, sanitation services and waste disposal, expected in a civilized society, will have to be located at convenient distance from human habitations for easy accessibility and reduced dependence on any form of energy required for travel. Fifth, homes and civil structures (for offices, provision of basic services, security, etc.) will have to be retro-fitted or redesigned to minimize energy used for cooking, lighting, heating and cooling. Building materials will have to be produced with least energy inputs. At present, most of our electrical energy comes from fossil fuel or hydropower. Even hydropower has enormous environmental cost as well as limited life. We will have to move to non-conventional and sustainable energy sources such as solar, wind, wave and innovative community-based power generation to minimize dependence on wasteful systems. In other words, we shall have to curb our dependence on any energy source, which implies sacrifice of some comforts as well.

Conclusion

Sustainable development can only be ushered in if the people are apprised of the emerging contingencies and all the available options. Forcing them to live in a make-believe world is utterly criminal. Under conditions of dwindling natural resources, options cannot be selected by a small group of elite and thrust upon the people. There is an urgent need for a serious debate on issues of survival and available options. Only the most sustainable option will have to be selected.

Today South Asia stands at a crossroad in terms of natural resource management. Continuing with imposed primitive acquisitive capitalistic system of resource exploitation, now packaged as inevitable globalization, is unlikely to resolve the crisis. In fact, denying the reality will only exacerbate it. We require appropriate responses including, if necessary, a change in the existing power structure to facilitate transition to relocalized sustainable resource management regime with empowered local communities. While we weigh our options, we must also acknowledge the pervasive globalization of lack of accountability of elected leaders and co-opted despots alike.

Imagine a New South Asia that has successfully transited to a sustainable NRM regime. We, the underdeveloped South Asians, are the only people who can easily achieve this so long as our farmers re-skill themselves to cope with the speed and magnitude of events already unraveling. Resource constraints will not allow us to achieve the so-called dubious status of being ‘developed’. If development means empowering the people, it can still, and must, take place with due considerations for limits imposed by nature. But if development means control over resources that nature has given us, and if it means amassing wealth by a few at the expense of the many, that is immoral and unsustainable.

The ability of our farmers to produce nutritious food for all with least amount of energy itself will place South Asians in far stronger position as compared to the developed nations because they don’t have sufficient number of farmers with requisite skills. However, the productivity of our farmers will depend upon healthy natural systems coupled with local wisdom. Therefore, we have no option but to reverse the processes we have mindlessly adopted, change course, and tread on the path of sustainable living within the constraints imposed by natural resources.