Researcher(s):
Taylor Grandchamp
ENVS course(s): 400 Initiated: September 2011 Completed: May 2012 Go to project site
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As our population continues to rise from seven billion, the amount of arable land on the planet remains constant. Though land is still available to bring into production, its supply is dwindling and increasingly coming into conflict with environmental or social interests. With a dwindling supply of land, preservation of land currently employed in agriculture is beginning to mean more and more in peoples everyday lives. In sub-Saharan Africa in particular loss of productive land through land degradation threatens the food security of individuals who subsist via farming their land or earning a wage working on a farm. These farmers are responding to the incentives provided to them by both markets and governments, and the current state of affairs indicates that these incentives are not adequate enough to warrant farmers’ investment in conservation. This research is focused at identifying whether the economic environment created by government policy significantly affect the incentives farmers have to employ conservation techniques by looking examine relationships between degradation severity and food exports/imports, food aid, and structural adjustment programs. The results of the research show that the standard deviations of exports have a significant relationship to land degradation severity, implying that change in land practices may contribute significantly to process of land degradation. While the results are promising the process of unearthing these results reveals multiple difficulties in equating socioeconomic conditions to environmental phenomena. However only by addressing these difficulties can governments effectively take hold of their domestic agricultural regimes and pursue a process of development.