Rwanda: The links between poverty, war and environmental degradation.
Rwanda is a small country of eight million people in central Africa, with a long history of violent conflict dating back to 1959, and culminating in the 1994 genocide. Historically, land pressure has been a severe problem in Rwanda, where over 90% of the population practises agriculture. Land pressure has resulted in declining overall agricultural production, but increasing production for individuals and groups with favourable land and resource access.
On first impression, the genocide in Rwanda presented a perfect illustration of the violent consequences of environmental stress. Rwanda had too many people relying for their existence on too little land. Deforestation, erosion and over-cultivation had caused an agricultural crisis in a country almost completely reliant on agriculture.
Food and water shortages, and the attendant migration, strained social relations between groups. For analysts perceiving African societies as anarchic worlds, it seemed inevitable that simmering tribal hostilities - in this case between the Hutu and the Tutsi - would erupt.
Some analysts also have attributed the violence in Liberia, Senegal, and other West African states to environmental degradation and population growth, and predicted the spread of violence across Africa into other developing countries.
The Rwandan civil war was military, political and personal in its execution; but these activities are playing out in a particular context: a merciless struggle for land in a peasant society whose birth rates have put an unsustainable pressure on it. Somehow, the environmental degradation in Rwanda - soil, water, scarce natural resources - become the spoils that cause neighbours to kill neighbours."
Environmental scarcity -the scarcity of renewable resources like agricultural land, forests, water and fish is caused by resource degradation, population growth and inequitable resource distribution. Scarcity, in turn, produces four principal social effects: decreased agricultural potential; regional economic decline; population displacement; and the disruption of legitimized and authoritative institutions and social relations.
These social effects can produce and exacerbate conflict between groups. When clear social cleavages, such as ethnicity or religion, are also at plat the probability of civil violence is even higher.
Even so, Rwanda was densely populated. In 1992, its population density of roughly 290 inhabitants per square kilometre was among the highest in Africa. The population's rapid growth exceeded the productivity growth of the country's renewable resources. Soil fertility fell sharply, mainly because of overcultivation. Erosion, deforestation, and water scarcity became serious problems, compounded, especially in the southern regions of the country, by several droughts in the 1980's and early 1990's.
Environmental scarcities began to affect Rwandan society. Agricultural production suffered. In terms of per capita food production, Rwanda was transformed from one of sub-Saharan Africa's top three performers in the early 1980's to one of its worst in the late 1980's. Food shortages struck the southern and western parts of the country. In 1989, 300,000
people, predominantly southerners, needed food aid due to crop failure.
Environmental scarcity was unquestionably a factor in the conflict in
Rwanda. But it wasn't necessarily the cause. To determine that we must analyse all factors contributing to the conflict and the interaction of environmental scarcity with these factors.
Population pressures, decreased food production and the general lack of land and opportunity caused frustration. There were reports on increase rivalry and conflict among neighbours over land. This was significant threat in a land-scarce country.
Rwandan ethnic relations had long been used for political advantage until now, and the scarcity of environmental resources, combined with other factors, created in a context within which ethnic affiliations
mattered.
The Rwanda case tells us important things about the complexity of links between environmental scarcity and conflict. Scarcity did play a role in the recent violence in Rwanda, but that role was, in the end, surprisingly limited - and not what one would expect from a superficial analysis of the case.
