Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases
Author(s): Thomas F. Homer-Dixon
Source: International Security , Summer, 1994, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer, 1994), pp. 5-40
Published by: The MIT Press
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Environmental Thomas F.
Scarcities and Homer-Dixon
Violent Conflict
Evidence from Cases
W'Vithin the next fifty
years, the planet's human population will probably pass nine billion, and
global economic output may quintuple. Largely as a result, scarcities of
renewable resources will increase sharply. The total area of high-quality
agricultural land will drop, as will the extent of forests and the number of
species they sustain. Coming generations will also see the widespread depletion
and degradation of aquifers, rivers, and other water resources; the
decline of many fisheries; and perhaps significant climate change.
If such "environmental scarcities" become severe, could they precipitate
violent civil or international conflict? I have previously surveyed the issues
and evidence surrounding this question and proposed an agenda for further
research. 1 Here I report the results of an international research project guided
by this agenda.2 Following a brief review of my original hypotheses and the
project's research design, I present several general findings of this research
that led me to revise the original hypotheses. The article continues with an
account of empirical evidence for and against the revised hypotheses, and it
concludes with an assessment of the implications of environmentally induced
conflict for international security.
Thomas F. Homer-Dixon is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Peace and Conflict
Studies Program at the University of Toronto. From 1990 to 1993, he was co-director and lead researcher
of the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict.
Portions of this article have been drawn from Thomas Homer-Dixon, Jeffrey Boutwell, and
George Rathjens, "Environmental Scarcity and Violent Conflict," Scientific American, February
1993; and from Homer-Dixon, "Environmental Scarcity and Global Security" Headline Series (New
York: Foreign Policy Association, 1993). The author thanks the participants in the Project on
Environmental Change and Acute Conflict, especially project co-directors Jeffrey Boutwell and
George Rathjens. The Donner Canadian Foundation funded the article's preparation.
1. Thomas Homer-Dixon, "On the Threshold: Environmental Changes As Causes of Acute
Conflict," International Security, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall 1991), pp. 76-116.
2. The three-year Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict brought together a team
of thirty researchers from ten countries. It was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences and the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto.
International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 5-40
? 1994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
5
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International Security 19:1 | 6
In brief, our research showed that environmental scarcities are already
contributing to violent conflicts in many parts of the developing world. These
conflicts are probably the early signs of an upsurge of violence in the coming
decades that will be induced or aggravated by scarcity. The violence will
usually be sub-national, persistent, and diffuse. Poor societies will be particularly
affected since they are less able to buffer themselves from environmental
scarcities and the social crises they cause. These societies are, in fact,
already suffering acute hardship from shortages of water, forests, and especially
fertile land.
Social conflict is not always a bad thing: mass mobilization and civil strife
can produce opportunities for beneficial change in the distribution of land
and wealth and in processes of governance. But fast-moving, unpredictable,
and complex environmental problems can overwhelm efforts at constructive
social reform. Moreover, scarcity can sharply increase demands on key institutions,
such as the state, while it simultaneously reduces their capacity
to meet those demands. These pressures increase the chance that the state
will either fragment or become more authoritarian. The negative effects of
severe environmental scarcity are therefore likely to outweigh the positive.
General Findings
Our research was intended to provide a foundation for further work. We
therefore focused on two key preliminary questions: does environmental
scarcity cause violent conflict? And, if it does, how does it operate?
The research was structured as I proposed in my previous article. Six types
of environmental change were identified as plausible causes of violent intergroup
conflict:
* greenhouse-induced climate change;
* stratospheric ozone depletion;
* degradation and loss of good agricultural land;
* degradation and removal of forests;
* depletion and pollution of fresh water supplies; and
* depletion of fisheries.
We used three hypotheses to link these changes with violent conflict. First,
we suggested that decreasing supplies of physically controllable environmental
resources, such as clean water and good agricultural land, would
provoke interstate "simple-scarcity" conflicts or resource wars. Second, we
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict | 7
hypothesized that large population movements caused by environmental
stress would induce "group-identity" conflicts, especially ethnic clashes. And
third, we suggested that severe environmental scarcity would simultaneously
increase economic deprivation and disrupt key social institutions, which in
turn would cause "deprivation" conflicts such as civil strife and insurgency.
Two detailed case studies were completed for each of the three research
hypotheses.3 By selecting cases that appeared, prima facie, to show a link
between environmental change and conflict, we sought to falsify the null
hypothesis that environmental scarcity does not cause violent conflict. By
carefully tracing the causal processes in each case, we also sought to identify
how environmental scarcity operates, if and when it is a cause of conflict.
The completed case studies were reviewed at a series of workshops of leading
experts; in light of these findings, I revised the original hypotheses, identified
common variables and processes across the cases, and examined the revised
hypotheses in light of the case-study evidence. The project's conclusions
were reviewed by a core team of experts. The following are four general
findings of this research effort.
RESOURCE DEPLETION AND DEGRADATION
Of the major environmental changes facing humankind, degradation and
depletion of agricultural land, forests, water, and fish will contribute more
to social turmoil in coming decades than will climate change or ozone deple-
tion.
When analysts and policymakers in developed countries consider the social
impacts of large-scale environmental change, they focus undue attention on
climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion.4 But vast populations in
the developing world are already suffering from shortages of good land,
water, forests, and fish; in contrast, the social effects of climate change and
ozone depletion will probably not be seen till well into the next century. If
3. On simple-scarcity conflicts, we examined water in the Jordan and Nile River basins and the
Southern African region; on environmentally induced group-identity conflicts, we focused on
Bangladesh-Assam and the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua; and on economic decline and civil
strife, we studied the Philippines and China. Researchers in the project also investigated the
1989 conflict in the Senegal River basin, the 1969 Soccer War between El Salvador and Honduras,
the rise of the Sendero Luminoso in Peru, migration and civil strife in Haiti, and migration from
black homelands in South Africa.
4. For example, see David Wirth, "Climate Chaos," Foreign Policy, No. 74 (Spring 1989), pp. 3-
22; and Neville Brown, "Climate, Ecology and International Security," Survival, Vol. 31, No. 6
(November/December 1989), pp. 519-532.
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International Security 19:1 | 8
these atmospheric problems do eventually have an impact, they will most
likely operate not as individual environmental stresses, but in interaction
with other, long-present resource, demographic, and economic pressures
that have gradually eroded the buffering capacity of some societies.
Mexico, for example, is vulnerable to such interactions. People are already
leaving the state of Oaxaca because of drought and soil erosion. Researchers
estimate that future global warming could decrease Mexican rainfed maize
production up to forty percent. This change could in turn interact with
ongoing land degradation, free trade (because Mexico's comparative advantage
is in water-intensive fruits and vegetables), and the privatization of
communal peasant lands to cause grave internal conflict.5
ENVIRONMENTAL SCARCITY
Environmental change is only one of three main sources of scarcity of renewable
resources; the others are population growth and unequal social distribution
of resources. The concept "environmental scarcity" encompasses all
three sources.
Analysts often usefully characterize environmental problems as resource
scarcities. Resources can be roughly divided into two groups: non-renewables,
like oil and iron ore, and renewables, like fresh water, forests, fertile
soils, and the earth's ozone layer. The latter category includes renewable
"goods" such as fisheries and timber, and renewable "services" such as
regional hydrological cycles and a benign climate.
The commonly used term "environmental change" refers to a humaninduced
decline in the quantity or quality of a renewable resource that occurs
faster than it is renewed by natural processes. But this concept limits the
scope of environment-conflict research. Environmental change is only one of
three main sources of renewable-resource scarcity. The second, population
growth, reduces a resource's per-capita availability by dividing it among more
and more people.6 The third, unequal resource distribution, concentrates a
5. Diana Liverman, "The Impacts of Global Warming in Mexico: Uncertainty, Vulnerability and
Response," in Jurgen Schmandt and Judith Clarkson, eds., The Regions and Global Warming:
Impacts and Response Strategies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 44-68; and Diana
Liverman and Karen O'Brien, "Global Warming and Climate Change in Mexico," Global Environmental
Change, Vol. 1, No. 4 (December 1991), pp. 351-364.
6. Peter Gleick provides a potent illustration of the effect of population growth on water scarcity
in Table 3 of "Water and Conflict: Fresh Water Resources and International Security," International
Security, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Summer 1993), p. 101.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict I 9
resource in the hands of a few people and subjects the rest to greater scarcity.7
The property rights that govern resource distribution often change as a result
of large-scale development projects or new technologies that alter the relative
values of resources.
In other words, reduction in the quantity or quality of a resource shrinks
the resource pie, while population growth divides the pie into smaller slices
for each individual, and unequal resource distribution means that some
groups get disproportionately large slices.8 Unfortunately, analysts often
study resource depletion and population growth in isolation from the political
economy of resource distribution.9 The term "environmental scarcity," however,
allows these three distinct sources of scarcity to be incorporated into
one analysis. Empirical evidence suggests, in fact, that the first two sources
are most pernicious when they interact with unequal resource distribution.
We must also recognize that resource scarcity is, in part, subjective; it is
determined not just by absolute physical limits, but also by preferences,
beliefs, and norms. This is illustrated by a debate about the role of population
growth and resource scarcity as causes of the conflict between the Sandinista
government and the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua.10 Bernard Nietschmann
argues that the Nicaraguan state's need for resources to sustain the country's
economic and agricultural development caused environmental degradation
to spread from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast of the country. As this
happened, indigenous Miskitos in the east came into conflict with the central
government. Sergio Diaz-Briquets responds that the Sandinistas expropriated
Miskito lands because of ideology, not scarcity. The Atlantic coastal region
was largely ignored by the Nicaraguan state under Somoza. Following the
revolution, the Sandinistas had ample newly expropriated land to distribute
to their followers; but the new government-guided by Marxism-saw the
Miskitos as a backward people with a competing worldview and a precapitalist
mode of production, whose land rightfully belonged to a state that was
removing impediments to the historical progress of the working class.
7. The second and third types of scarcity arise only with resources that can be physically
controlled and possessed, like fish, fertile land, trees, and water, rather than resources like the
climate or the ozone layer.
8. Since population growth is often a main cause of a decline in the quality and quantity of
renewable resources, it actually has a dual impact on resource scarcity, a fact rarely noted by
analysts.
9. James Boyce, "The Bomb Is a Dud," The Progressive, September 1990, pp. 24-25.
10. Bernard Nietschmann, "Environmental Conflicts and Indigenous Nations in Central America,"
paper prepared for the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict (May 1991);
and Sergio Diaz-Briquets, "Comments on Nietschmann's Paper," ibid.
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International Security 19:1 | 10
Figure 1. Resource Capture and Ecological Marginalization.
Decrease in quality
and quantity of
renewable resources
Increased
Population growth environmental
scarcity
Unequal resource
access
Resource Capture: Resource depletion and population growth cause unequal
resource access.
The gap between the two views can be bridged by noting that scarcity is
partly subjective. Marxist ideology encouraged the Sandinistas to adopt a
strategy of state-directed industrialization and resource-use; this led them to
perceive resources as more scarce than had the Somoza regime.
INTERACTION OF SOURCES OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCARCITY
The three sources of environmental scarcity often interact, and two patterns
of interaction are particularly common: "resource capture" and "ecological
marginalization" (see Figure 1).
A fall in the quality and quantity of renewable resources can combine with
population growth to encourage powerful groups within a society to shift
resource distribution in their favor. This can produce dire environmental
scarcity for poorer and weaker groups whose claims to resources are opposed
by these powerful elites. I call this type of interaction "resource capture."
Unequal resource access can combine with population growth to cause migrations
to regions that are ecologically fragile, such as steep upland slopes,
areas at risk of desertification, and tropical rain forests. High population
densities in these areas, combined with a lack of knowledge and capital to
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict I 11
Decrease in quality
and quantity of
renewable resources
t a Increased
Population growth environmental
scarcity
Unequal resource
access
Ecological Marginalization: Unequal resource access and population growth
cause resource degradation and depletion.
protect local resources, causes severe environmental damage and chronic
poverty. This process is often called "ecological marginalization."1l
RESOURCE CAPTURE. Events in the Senegal River valley in 1989 illustrate
resource capture. The valley demarcates the border between Senegal and
Mauritania in West Africa. Senegal has fairly abundant agricultural land, but
much of it suffers from high to severe wind and water erosion, loss of
nutrients, salinization because of overirrigation, and soil compaction caused
by intensification of agriculture.12 The country has an overall population
density of 38 people per square kilometer and a population growth rate of
2.8 percent; in 25 years the population will double.13 In contrast, except for
the Senegal Valley along its southern border and a few oases, Mauritania is
11. Jeffrey Leonard, "Overview," Environment anid the Poor: Development Strategies for a Common
Agenda (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989), p. 7. For a careful analysis of the interaction
of population and land distribution in El Salvador, see chap. 2 in William Durham, Scarcity and
Survival in Central America: The Ecological Origins of the Soccer War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1979), pp. 21-62.
12. Global Assessment of Soil Degradation, World Map on Status of Humlan-Iniduiced Soil Degrada
tion, Sheet 2, Europe, Africa, and Western Asia (Wageningen, the Netherlands: United Nations
Environment Programme [UNEP], International Soil Reference Centre, 1990).
13. Nafis Sadik, The State of the World Population 1991 (New York: United Nations Population
Fund, 1991), p. 24; World Resources Institute [WRI], World Resources 1992-93 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), pp. 246 and 262.
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International Security 19:1 1 12
largely arid desert and semiarid grassland.14 Its population density is very
low at about 2 people per square kilometer, but the growth rate is 2.9 percent.
This combination of factors led the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
and two other organizations in a 1982 study to include both Mauritania and
Senegal in their list of "critical" countries whose croplands cannot support
their current and projected populations without a large increase in agricultural
inputs, such as fertilizer and irrigation.15
Normally, the broad floodplains fringing the Senegal River support productive
farming, herding, and fishing based on the river's annual floods.
During the 1970s, however, the prospect of chronic food shortages and a
serious drought encouraged the region's governments to seek international
financing for the Manantali Dam on the Bafing River tributary in Mali, and
the Diama salt-intrusion barrage near the mouth of the Senegal River between
Senegal and Mauritania. These dams were designed to regulate the river's
flow to produce hydropower, expand irrigated agriculture, and provide river
transport from the Atlantic Ocean to landlocked Mali, which lies to the east
of Senegal and Mauritania.
But the plan had unfortunate and unforeseen consequences. Anticipation
of the new dams sharply increased land values along the river in areas where
high-intensity agriculture would become feasible. The elite in Mauritania,
which consists mainly of white Moors, then rewrote legislation governing
land ownership, effectively abrogating the rights of black Africans to continue
farming, herding, and fishing along the Mauritanian riverbank.16
14. Despite popular perception and the past claims of the United Nations Environment Programme,
many experts now believe that the African Sahel (which includes southern Mauritania)
is a robust ecosystem that does not exhibit extensive human-induced desertification. There is
no clear southward march of the Sahara desert, and ecosystem recovery can be rapid if there is
adequate rainfall and a reduction in grazing pressures. See "The Ebb and Flow of the Sahara,"
New York Times, July 23, 1991, p. B9. Overgrazing across the western Sahel, and the consequent
migration of people from the region, appear to arise from the expansion of sedentary farming
and population growth that together concentrate pastoralists on smaller areas of land (an
example of ecological marginalization). In general, pastoralists are weak in the face of modern
African states; state development since decolonization has often changed property rights at their
expense. See Olivia Bennett, ed., Greenwar: Environment and Conflict (London: Panos, 1991),
chap. 3, pp. 33-53.
15. G.M. Higgins, et al., Potential Population Supporting Capacities of Lands in the Developing World,
Technical Report of Project INT/75/P13, "Land Resources of the Future," undertaken by the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in collaboration with the International Institute for
Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the UN Fund for Population Activities (Rome, 1982),
Table 3.5, p. 137.
16. Michael Horowitz, "Victims of Development," Development Anthropology Network, Bulletin of
the Institute for Development Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 1989), pp. 1-8; and Horowitz,
"Victims Upstream and Down," Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1991), pp. 164-181.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict 1 13
There has been a long history of racism by white Moors in Mauritania
towards their non-Arab, black compatriots. In the spring of 1989, the killing
of Senegalese farmers by Mauritanians in the river basin triggered explosions
of ethnic violence in the two countries. In Senegal, almost all of the 17,000
shops owned by Moors were destroyed, and their owners were deported to
Mauritania. In both countries several hundred people were killed and the
two nations nearly came to war. 17 The Mauritanian regime used this occasion
to activate the new land legislation, declaring the Mauritanians who lived
alongside the river to be "Senegalese," thereby stripping them of their citizenship;
their property was seized. Some 70,000 of the black Mauritanians
were forcibly expelled to Senegal, from where some launched raids to retrieve
expropriated cattle. Diplomatic relations between the two countries have now
been restored, but neither has agreed to allow the expelled population to
return or to compensate them for their losses.
We see here the interaction of two sources of human-induced environmental
scarcity: degradation of the land resource and population pressures
helped precipitate agricultural shortfalls, which in turn encouraged a large
development scheme. These factors together raised land values in one of the
few areas in either country that offered the potential for a rapid move to
high-intensity agriculture. A powerful elite then changed property rights and
resource distribution in its own favor, which produced a sudden increase in
resource scarcity for an ethnic minority, expulsion of the minority, and ethnic
violence.
The water shortage on the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River offers
a similar example of how population growth and excessive resource consumption
can promote resource capture. While figures vary, Israel's average
annual supply of renewable fresh water is about 1,950 million cubic meters
(MCM).18 Current Israeli demand, including that of settlements in the occu
pied territories and Golan Heights, exceeds this supply by about ten percent.
The deficit is covered by overpumping aquifers. As a result, water tables in
some parts of Israel and the West Bank have dropped. This can cause the
17. Jacques Belotteau, "Senegal-Mauritanie: les graves evenements du printemps 1989," Afrique
Contemporaine, No. 152 (April 1989), pp. 41-42.
18. Miriam Lowi, "West Bank Water Resources and the Resolution of Conflict in the Middle
East," Occasional Paper No. 1, Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict (September
1992); see also Lowi, "Bridging the Divide: Transboundary Resource Disputes and the Case of
West Bank Water," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Summer 1993), pp. 113-138; and Natasha
Beschorner, "Water and Instability in the Middle East," Adelphi Paper No. 273 (London: International
Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS], Winter 1992/93).
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International Security 19:1 1 14
exhaustion of wells and the infiltration of sea water from the Mediterranean. 19
Israel's population growth in the next thirty years, even without major immigration
from the former Soviet Union, will probably cause the country's
water demand to outstrip supply by at least forty percent.20
Over half of Israel's water comes from aquifers, and the rest from river
flow, floodwater, and waste-water recycling. Two of the three main aquifers
on which Israel depends lie principally underneath the West Bank, although
their waters drain into Israel. About forty percent of the groundwater Israel
uses (and therefore about a quarter of its sustainable supply) originates in
occupied territory. To protect this important source, the Israeli government
strictly limits water use by Jewish settlers and Arabs on the West Bank. But
there is a stark differential in water access between the groups: on a per
capita basis, settlers consume about four times as much as Arabs. Israel
restricts the number of wells Arabs can drill in the territory, the amount of
water Arabs are allowed to pump, and the times at which they can draw
irrigation water. Since 1967, Arabs have not been permitted to drill new wells
for agricultural purposes, although the Mekorot (the Israeli water company)
has drilled more than thirty wells for settlers' irrigation.
Arab agriculture in the region has also suffered because some Arab wells
have become dry or saline as a result of deeper Israeli wells drilled nearby.
These Israeli water policies, combined with the confiscation of agricultural
land for settlers as well as other Israeli restrictions on Palestinian agriculture,
have encouraged many West Bank Arabs to abandon farming and move to
towns.21 Those who have done so have mostly become either unemployed
or day laborers within Israel. The links between these processes and the
recent unrest in the occupied territories are unclear; many political, economic,
and ideological factors operate. But it seems reasonable to conclude that
water scarcity and its consequent economic effects contributed to the grievances
behind the intifada both on the West Bank and in Gaza.
19. There appears to be an impending crisis, for example, from salinization of aquifers beneath
the Gaza Strip, where the pressure on water resources is "rapidly becoming intolerable"; Beschorner,
"Water and Instability," pp. 14-15. The Gaza aquifers are connected to the coastal
aquifer that is vital to Israel. Salinization can cause irreversible physical changes in aquifers;
even if replenished with fresh water, their capacity is reduced. See Fred Pearce, "Wells of
Conflict on the West Bank," New Scientist, June 1, 1991, pp. 37-38.
20. Lowi, "West Bank Water Resources," p. 34.
21. Since 1967, the irrigated area on the West Bank has dropped from 27 percent of the total
cultivated area to 3.5-6 percent. Beschorner, "Water and Instability," pp. 14 and 78.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict 1 15
ECOLOGICAL MARGINALIZATION. The Philippines offers a good illustration
of ecological marginalization. There, inequalities in access to rich agricultural
lowlands combine with population growth to cause migration to easily degraded
upland areas; erosion and deforestation contribute to economic hardship
that spurs insurgency and rebellion.
Spanish and American colonial policies in the Philippines left behind a
grossly unfair distribution of good cropland in lowland regions, an imbalance
perpetuated since independence by a powerful landowning elite. 22 Since
World War II, green-revolution technologies have greatly increased lowland
production of grain for domestic consumption, and of cash crops such as
sugar, coconut, pineapple, and bananas that help pay the country's massive
external debt. This has raised demand for agricultural labor on large farms,
but not enough to compensate for a population growth rate of 2.5 to 3.0
percent per annum. Together, therefore, inequalities in land access and
growth in population have produced a surge in agricultural unemployment.
With insufficient rural or urban industrialization to employ this excess
labor, there has been unrelenting downward pressure on wages.23 Economically
desperate, millions of poor agricultural laborers and landless peasants
have migrated to shantytowns in already overburdened cities, such as Manila.
Millions of others have moved to the least productive-and often most
ecologically vulnerable-territories, such as steep hillsides.24 In these uplands,
settlers use fire to clear forested or previously logged land. They bring
with them little knowledge or money to protect their fragile ecosystems, and
their small-scale logging, production of charcoal for the cities, and slash-andburn
farming often cause horrendous environmental damage, particularly
water erosion, landslides, and changes in the hydrological cycle.25 This has
set in motion a cycle of falling food production, the clearing of new plots,
22. The best cropland lies, for the most part, in the coastal plains of the archipelago's islands.
Landowning and manufacturing elites are closely linked, and their relative economic power has
actually grown since independence: the top 10 percent of the country's families controlled 37
percent of the nation's total income in 1985, up from 27 percent in 1956. See Richard Kessler,
Rebellion and Repression in the Philippines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 18.
23. Using a standardized figure of 100 for 1972, average real wages dropped from 150 in the
early 1950s to about 100 in 1980. Kessler, Rebellion and Repression, p. 26.
24. A full account can be found in Maria Concepci6n Cruz, et al., Population Growth, Poverty,
and Environmental Stress: Frontier Migration in the Philippines and Costa Rica (Washington, D.C.:
WRI, 1992).
25. World Bank, Philippines: Environment and Natural Resource Management Study (Washington,
D.C.: World Bank, 1989). Erosion rates can exceed 300 tons per hectare per year, ten to twenty
times the sustainable rate.
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International Security 19:1 1 16
and further land degradation. There are few new areas in the country that
can be opened up for agricultural production, so even marginally fertile land
is becoming hard to find in many places, and economic conditions are often
desperate for the peasants.26
The situation in the Philippines is not unique. Ecological marginalization
occurs with striking regularity around the planet, affecting hundreds of
millions of people in places as diverse as the Himalayas, Indonesia, Costa
Rica, Brazil, and the Sahel.
SOCIAL AND TECHNICAL INGENUITY
Societies are more able to avoid turmoil if they can adapt to environmental
scarcity so that it does not cause great suffering. Strategies for adaptation
fall into two categories, and both depend on adequate social and technical
ingenuity. First, societies can continue to rely on their indigenous resources
but use them more sensibly and provide alternative employment to people
who have limited resource access. For example, economic incentives like
increases in resource prices and taxes can reduce degradation and depletion
by encouraging conservation, technological innovation, and resource substitution.
Family planning and literacy campaigns can ease population-growth
induced scarcity. Land redistribution and labor-intensive rural industries can
relieve the effects of unequal access to good cropland.
Second, the country might "decouple" itself from dependence on its own
depleted environmental resources by producing goods and services that do
not rely heavily on those resources; the country could then trade the products
on the international market for the resources it no longer has at home. Such
decoupling might, in fact, be achieved by rapidly exploiting the country's
environmental resources and reinvesting the profits in capital, industrial
equipment, and skills to permit a shift to other forms of wealth creation. For
instance, Malaysia could use the income from over-logging its forests to fund
a modern university system that trains electrical engineers and computer
specialists for a high-technology industrial sector.
If either strategy is to succeed, a society must be able to supply enough
ingenuity at the right places and times. Two kinds are key. Technical ingenuity
is needed to develop, for example, new agricultural and forestry technologies
that compensate for environmental loss. Social ingenuity is needed
26. Gareth Porter and Delfin Ganapin, Jr., Resources, Population, and the Philippines' Future: A
Case Study, WRI Paper No. 4 (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, 1988).
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict 1 17
to create institutions and organizations that buffer people from the effects of
scarcity and provide the right incentives for technological entrepreneurs.
Social ingenuity is therefore often a precursor to technical ingenuity. The
development and distribution of new grains adapted for dry climates and
eroded soils, of alternative cooking technologies to compensate for the loss
of firewood, and of water conservation technologies depend on an intricate
and stable system of markets, legal regimes, financial agencies, and educational
and research institutions.
In the next decades, the need for both technical and social ingenuity to
deal with environmental scarcities will rise sharply. Population growth, rising
average resource consumption, and persistent inequalities in access to resources
ensure that scarcities will affect many environmentally sensitive
regions with a severity, speed, and scale unprecedented in history. Resourcesubstitution
and conservation tasks will be more urgent, complex, and unpredictable,
driving up the need for technical ingenuity. Moreover, solving
these problems through market and other institutional innovations (such as
changes in property rights and resource distribution) will require great social
ingenuity.
At the same time that environmental scarcity is boosting the demand for
ingenuity, however, it may interfere with supply. Poor countries start at a
disadvantage: they are underendowed with the social institutions-including
the productive research centers, efficient markets, and capable states-that
are necessary for an ample supply of both social and technical solutions to
scarcity. Moreover, their ability to create and maintain these institutions may
be diminished by the very environmental stress they need to address, because
scarcity can weaken states, as we shall see, and it can engender intense
rivalries between interest groups and elite factions.27
Evidence Bearing on the Hypotheses
The findings described above led me to revise the original three hypotheses
by redefining the independent variable, "environmental scarcity." I narrowed
the range of environmental problems that were hypothesized to cause conflict,
so as to deemphasize atmospheric problems and focus instead on for-
27. For a full elaboration of the argument in this section, see Homer-Dixon, "The Ingenuity
Gap: Can Developing Countries Adapt to Environmental Scarcity?" paper prepared for the
Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict (March 1994).
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International Security 19:1 1 18
ests, water, fisheries, and especially cropland. I expanded the scope of the
independent variable to include scarcity caused by population growth and
resource maldistribution as well as that caused by degradation and depletion.
And I also incorporated into the variable the role of interactions among these
three sources of scarcity.
Our research project produced the following empirical evidence bearing
on the three hypotheses thus revised.
HYPOTHESIS 1: SIMPLE-SCARCITY CONFLICTS BETWEEN STATES
There is little empirical support for the first hypothesis that environmental
scarcity causes simple-scarcity conflicts between states. Scarcities of renewable
resources such as forests and croplands do not often cause resource
wars between states. This finding is intriguing because resource wars have
been common since the beginning of the state system. For instance, during
World War II, Japan sought to secure oil, minerals, and other resources in
China and Southeast Asia, and the 1991 Gulf War was at least partly motivated
by the desire for oil.
However, we must distinguish between non-renewable resources such as
oil, and renewable resources. Arthur Westing has compiled a list of twelve
conflicts in the twentieth century involving resources, beginning with World
War I and concluding with the Falklands/Malvinas War.28 Access to oil or
minerals was at issue in ten of these conflicts. Just five conflicts involved
renewable resources, and only two of these-the 1969 Soccer War between
El Salvador and Honduras, and the Anglo-Icelandic Cod War of 1972-73concerned
neither oil nor minerals (cropland was a factor in the former case,
and fish in the latter). However, the Soccer War was not a simple-scarcity
conflict between states; rather it arose from the ecological marginalization of
Salvadorean peasants and their consequent migration into Honduras.29 It is
evidence in support, therefore, of our second and third hypotheses (below),
but not for the first. And, since the Cod War, despite its name, involved very
little violence, it hardly qualifies as a resource war.
States have fought more over non-renewable than renewable resources for
two reasons, I believe. First, petroleum and mineral resources can be more
28. Arthur Westing, "Appendix 2. Wars and Skirmishes Involving Natural Resources: A Selection
from the Twentieth Century," in Arthur Westing, ed., Global Resources and International
Conflict: Environmental Factors in Strategic Policy and Action (Oxford: New York, 1986), pp. 204-
210.
29. See Durham, Scarcity and Survival.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict 19
directly converted into state power than can agricultural land, fish, and
forests. Oil and coal fuel factories and armies, and ores are vital for tanks
and naval ships. In contrast, although captured forests and cropland may
eventually generate wealth that can be harnessed by the state for its own
ends, this outcome is more remote in time and less certain. Second, the very
countries that are most dependent on renewable resources, and which are
therefore most motivated to seize resources from their neighbors, also tend
to be poor, which lessens their capability for aggression.
Our research suggests that the renewable resource most likely to stimulate
interstate resource war is river water.30 Water is a critical resource for personal
and national survival; furthermore, since river water flows from one area to
another, one country's access can be affected by another's actions. Conflict
is most probable when a downstream riparian is highly dependent on river
water and is strong in comparison to upstream riparians. Downstream riparians
often fear that their upstream neighbors will use water as a means
of coercion. This situation is particularly dangerous if the downstream country
also believes it has the military power to rectify the situation. The relationships
between South Africa and Lesotho and between Egypt and Ethiopia
have this character.31
The Lesotho case is interesting. Facing critical water shortages, South
Africa negotiated in vain with Lesotho for thirty years to divert water from
Lesotho's mountains to the arid South African province of Transvaal. In 1986
South Africa gave decisive support to a successful military coup against
Lesotho's tribal government. South Africa declared that it helped the coup
because Lesotho had been providing sanctuary to guerrillas of the African
National Congress. This was undoubtedly a key motivation, but within
months the two governments reached agreement to construct the huge Highlands
Water Project to meet South Africa's needs. It seems likely, therefore,
that the desire for water was an ulterior motive behind South African support
for the coup.32
30. Peter Gleick, "Water and Conflict," Occasional Paper No. 1, Project on Environmental
Change and Acute Conflict (September 1992); and Gleick, "Water and Conflict: Fresh Water
Resources and International Security," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Summer 1993), pp.
79-112.
31. In 1980, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat said, "If Ethiopia takes any action to block our
right to the Nile waters, there will be no alternative for us but to use force"; quoted in Norman
Myers, "Environment and Security," Foreign Policy, No. 74 (Spring 1989), p. 32. See also chap.
6, "The Nile River," in Thomas Naff and Ruth Matson, eds., Water in the Middle East: Conflict or
Cooperation? (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984), pp. 125-155.
32. "Pretoria Has Its Way in Lesotho," Africa Report (March-April, 1986), pp. 50-51; Patrick
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International Security 19:1 | 20
However, our review of the historical and contemporary evidence shows
that conflict and turmoil related to river water are more often internal than
international. The huge dams that are often built to deal with general water
scarcity are especially disruptive. Relocating large numbers of upstream people
generates turmoil among the relocatees and clashes with local groups in
areas where the relocatees are resettled. The people affected are often members
of ethnic or minority groups outside the power hierarchy of their society,
and the result is frequently rebellion by these groups and repression by the
state. Water developments can also induce conflict over water and irrigable
land among a country's downstream users, as we saw in the Senegal River
basin.33
HYPOTHESIS 2: POPULATION MOVEMENT AND GROUP-IDENTITY CONFLICTS
There is substantial evidence to support the hypothesis that environmental
scarcity causes large population movement, which in turn causes groupidentity
conflicts. But we must be sensitive to contextual factors unique to
each socio-ecological system. These are the system's particular physical, political,
economic, and cultural features that affect the strength of the linkages
between scarcity, population movement, and conflict.
For example, experts emphasize the importance of both "push" and "pull"
factors in decisions of potential migrants.34 These factors help distinguish
migrants from refugees: while migrants are motivated by a combination of
push and pull, refugees are motivated mainly by push. Environmental scarcity
is more likely to produce migrants than refugees, because it usually
develops gradually, which means that the push effect is not sharp and
sudden and that pull factors can therefore clearly enter into potential migrants'
calculations.
Migrants are often people who have been weak and marginal in their home
society and, depending on context, they may remain weak in the receiving
society. This limits their ability to organize and to make demands. States play
Laurence, "A 'New Lesotho'?" Africa Report (January-February 1987), pp. 61-64; "Lesotho Water
Project Gets Under Way," Africa Report (May-June 1988), p. 10. See also Charles Okidi, "Environmental
Stress and Conflicts in Africa: Case Studies of African International Drainage Basins,"
paper prepared for the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict (May 1992).
33. See Thayer Scudder, "River Basin Projects in Africa," Environment, Vol. 31, No. 2 (March
1989), pp. 4-32; and Scudder, "Victims of Development Revisited: The Political Costs of River
Basin Development," Development Anthropology Network, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 1-5.
34. Astri Suhrke, "Pressure Points: Environmental Degradation, Migration, and Conflict," Occasional
Paper No. 3, Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict (March 1993).
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict | 21
a critical role here: migrants often need the backing of a state (either of the
receiving society or an external one) before they have sufficient power to
cause conflict, and this backing depends on the region's politics. Without it,
migration is less likely to produce violence than silent misery and death,
which rarely destabilizes states.35 We must remember too that migration does
not always produce bad results. It can act as a safety valve by reducing
conflict in the sending area. Depending on the economic context, it can ease
labor shortages in the receiving society, as it sometimes has, for instance, in
Malaysia. Countries as different as Canada, Thailand, and Malawi show the
astonishing capacity of some societies to absorb migrants without conflict.
Even accounting for such contextual factors, events in Bangladesh and
Northeast India provide strong evidence in support of the second hypothesis.
In recent decades, huge numbers of people have moved from Bangladesh to
India, producing group-identity conflicts in the adjacent Indian states. Only
one of the three sources of environmental scarcity-population growthseems
to be a main force behind this migration. Even though Bangladesh's
cropland is heavily used, in general it is not badly degraded, because the
annual flooding of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers deposits nutrients
that help maintain the fertility of the country's floodplains.36 And while land
distribution remains highly unequal, this distribution has changed little since
an initial attempt at land reform immediately following East Pakistan's independence
from the British.37
But the United Nations predicts that Bangladesh's current population of
120 million will nearly double, to 235 million, by the year 2025.38 Cropland,
at about 0.08 hectares per capita, is already desperately scarce. Population
density is over 900 people per square kilometer (in comparison, population
density in neigboring Assam is under 300 per square kilometer). Since virtually
all of the country's good agricultural land has been exploited, population
growth will cut in half the amount of cropland available per capita by
2025. Land scarcity and the brutal poverty and social turmoil it engenders
have been made worse by flooding (perhaps aggravated by deforestation in
35. Ibid.
36. The relationship between flooding and soil fertility is ill-understood. See James Boyce, "Birth
of a Megaproject: Political Economy of Flood Control in Bangladesh," Environmental Management,
Vol. 14, No. 4 (July/August 1990), pp. 419-428, especially p. 424.
37. James Boyce, Agrarian Impasse in Bengal: Institutional Constraints to Technological Change (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 9.
38. Sadik, The State of the World Population 1991, p. 43.
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International Security 19:1 j 22
the Himalayan watersheds of the region's major rivers); by the susceptibility
of the country to cyclones; and by the construction by India of the Farakka
Barrage, a dam upstream on the Ganges River.39
People have been moving around this part of South Asia in large numbers
for centuries. But the movements are increasing in size. Over the last forty
years, millions have migrated from East Pakistan or Bangladesh to the Indian
states of Assam, Tripura, and West Bengal. Detailed data are scarce, since
both India and Bangladesh manipulate their census data for political reasons,
and the Bangladeshi government avoids admitting there is large out-migration,
because the question causes friction with India. But by piecing together
demographic information and experts' estimates, we concluded that migrants
from Bangladesh have expanded the population of neighboring areas of India
by 12 to 17 million, of which only 1 or 2 million can be attributed to migration
induced by the 1971 war between India and Pakistan that created Bangladesh.
We further estimate that the population of the state of Assam has been
boosted by at least 7 million people, to its current total of 22 million.40
This enormous flux has produced pervasive social changes in the receiving
regions. It has altered land distribution, economic relations, and the balance
of political power between religious and ethnic groups, and it has triggered
serious intergroup conflict. Members of the Lalung tribe in Assam, for instance,
have long resented Bengali Muslim migrants: they accuse them of
stealing the area's richest farmland. In early 1983, during a bitterly contested
election for federal offices in the state, violence erupted. In the village of
Nellie, Lalung people massacred nearly 1,700 Bengalis in one five-hour ram-
page.41
39. Controversy surrounds the question of whether Himalayan deforestation contributes to
flooding; see Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Floods, Flood Plains, and Environmental
Myths (New Delhi: CSE, 1991), especially pp. 68-69. On the Farakka Barrage, Ashok Swain
writes: "It has disrupted fishing and navigation [in Bangladesh], brought unwanted salt deposits
into rich farming soil, affected agricultural and industrial production, changed the hydraulic
character of the rivers and caused changes in the ecology of the Delta." See Swain, "Environmental
Destruction and Acute Social Conflict: A Case Study of the Ganges Water Dispute,"
Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University (November 1992), p. 24.
40. Sanjoy Hazarika, "Bangladesh and Assam: Land Pressures, Migration, and Ethnic Conflict,"
Occasional Paper No. 3, Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict (March 1993),
p. 52-54.
41. "A State Ravaged," India Today, March 15, 1983, pp. 16-21; "Spillover Tension," India Today,
March 15, 1983, pp. 22-23. The 1991 Indian Census showed that Assam's population growth
rate has declined; the conflicts in Assam in the early 1980s appear to have encouraged many
migrants from Bangladesh to go to West Bengal instead.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict 1 23
In Tripura, the original Buddhist and Christian inhabitants now make up
less than 30 percent of the state's population. The rest are Hindu migrants
from either East Pakistan or Bangladesh. This shift in the ethnic balance
precipitated a violent insurgency between 1980 and 1988 that diminished
only after the government agreed to return land to dispossessed Tripuris and
to stop the influx of Bangladeshis. But, as the migration has continued, this
agreement is in jeopardy.42
There are important features unique to this case. Within Bangladesh, key
"push" factors include inheritance practices that divide cropland into smaller
plots with each generation, and national and community water-control institutions
that sharply limit agricultural output and keep peasants from gaining
full benefit from some of the most fertile land in the world.43 On the
"pull" side, the standard of living in India is markedly better, and Indian
politicians have often encouraged Bangladeshi migration to garner their
votes. Furthermore, in the Ganges-Brahmaputra region, the concept of nation-state
is often not part of the local culture. Many people think of the
region as "greater Bengal," and state borders do not figure heavily in the
calculations of some migrants, especially when there are receptive family,
linguistic, and religious groups across the frontier. Finally, during the colonial
period, the British used Hindus from Calcutta to administer Assam, and
Bengali became the official language. As a result, the Assamese are particularly
sensitive to their loss of political and cultural control in the state.
While such contextual factors are important, they cannot obscure the fact
that land scarcity in Bangladesh, arising largely from population growth, has
been a powerful force behind migration to neighboring regions and communal
conflict there.44
HYPOTHESIS 3: ECONOMIC DEPRIVATION, INSTITUTIONAL DISRUPTION,
AND CIVIL STRIFE
Empirical evidence partially supports the third hypothesis that environmental
scarcity simultaneously increases economic deprivation and disrupts key
42. Hazarika, "Bangladesh and Assam," pp. 60-61.
43. Boyce, Agrarian Impasse.
44. See Shaukat Hassan, "Environmental Issues and Security in South Asia," Adelphi Paper
No. 262 (London: IISS, Autumn 1991), pp. 42-43; P.C. Goswami, "Foreign Immigration into
Assam," in B.L. Abbi, ed., Northeast Region: Problems and Prospects of Development (Chandigarh,
India: Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development), pp. 35-59; and Susanta Dass,
Spotlight on Assam (Chanderpur, India: Premier Book Service, 1989).
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International Security 19:1 j 24
social institutions, which in turn causes "deprivation" conflicts such as civil
strife and insurgency. Environmental scarcity does produce economic deprivation,
and this deprivation does cause civil strife. But more research is
needed on the effects of scarcity on social institutions.
Resource degradation and depletion often affect economic productivity in
poor countries and thereby contribute to deprivation. For example, erosion
in upland Indonesia annually costs the country's agricultural economy nearly
half a billion dollars in discounted future income.45 The Magat watershed on
the northern Filipino island of Luzon-a watershed representative of many
in the Philippines-suffers gross erosion rates averaging 219 tons per hectare
per year; if the lost nutrients were replaced by fertilizer, the annual cost
would be over $100 per hectare.46 Dryland degradation in Burkina Faso
reduces the country's annual gross domestic product by nearly nine percent
annually because of fuelwood loss and lower yields of millet, sorghum, and
livestock.47
Vaclav Smil has estimated the combined effect of environmental problems
on China's economic productivity.48 The main burdens he identifies are reductions
in crop yields caused by pollution of water, soil, and air; higher
human morbidity from air pollution; farmland loss because of construction
and erosion; nutrient loss and flooding due to erosion and deforestation; and
timber loss arising from poor harvesting practices. Smil calculates the current
cost to be at least 15 percent of China's gross national product, and he is
convinced that the toll will rise steeply in the next decades.49 Although
China's economy is booming, much of the new wealth is concentrated in the
45. Robert Repetto, "Balance-Sheet Erosion-How to Account for the Loss of Natural Resources,"
International Environmental Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1989), pp. 103-137.
46. This estimate does not include the economic costs of lost rooting depth and increased
vulnerability to drought, which may be even larger. See Wilfrido Cruz, Herminia Francisco, and
Zenaida Conway, "The On-Site and Downstream Costs of Soil Erosion in the Magat and
Pantabangan Watersheds," Journal of Philippine Development, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1988), p. 88.
47. Ed Barbier, "Environmental Degradation in the Third World," in David Pearce, ed., Blueprint
2: Greening the World Economy (London: Earthscan, 1991), Box 6.8, p. 90.
48. Vaclav Smil, "Environmental Change as a Source of Conflict and Economic Losses in China,"
Occasional Paper No. 2, Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict (December 1992).
49. It is hard to judge gross economic activity in China and convert these figures into dollars.
Perhaps because of this, the World Bank has not increased its estimates of per capita annual
GNP in line with the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy. Smil suggests that the Bank's
current annual figure of $370/capita may be too low by a factor of four. This judgment is
supported by recent re-evaluations of China's GNP by the International Monetary Fund. See
World Bank, World Development Report, 1992 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 218;
and Steven Greenhouse, "New Tally of World's Economies Catapults China into Third Place,"
New York Times, May 20, 1993, p. Al.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict j 25
coastal provinces, especially around Hong Kong; many other parts of the
country remain terribly poor.
I originally hypothesized that scarcity would undermine a variety of social
institutions. Our research suggests, however, that one institution in particular-the
state-is most important. Although more study is needed, the
multiple effects of environmental scarcity, including large population movements
and economic decline, appear likely to weaken sharply the capacity
and legitimacy of the state in some poor countries.
First, environmental scarcity increases financial and political demands on
governments. For example, to mitigate the social effects of loss of water, soil,
and forest, governments must spend huge sums on industry and infrastructure
such as new dams, irrigation systems, fertilizer plants, and reforestation
programs. Furthermore, this resource loss can reduce the incomes of elites
directly dependent on resource extraction; these elites usually turn to the
state for compensation. Scarcity also expands marginal groups that need help
from government by producing rural poverty and by displacing people into
cities where they demand food, shelter, transport, energy, and employment.
In response to swelling urban populations, governments introduce subsidies
that drain revenues, distort prices, and cause misallocations of capital, which
in turn hinders economic productivity. Such large-scale state intervention in
the marketplace can concentrate political and economic power in the hands
of a small number of cronies and monopolistic interests, at the expense of
other elite segments and rural agricultural populations.
Simultaneously, if resource scarcity affects the economy's general productivity,
revenues to local and national governments will decline. This hurts
elites that benefit from state largesse and reduces the state's capacity to meet
the increased demands arising from environmental scarcity. A widening gap
between state capacity and demands on the state, along with the misguided
economic interventions such a gap often provokes, aggravates popular and
elite grievances, increases rivalry between elite factions, and erodes the
state's legitimacy.
Key contextual factors affect whether lower economic productivity and
state weakening lead to deprivation conflicts. Civil strife is a function of both
the level of grievance motivating challenger groups and the opportunities
available to these groups to act on their grievances. The likelihood of civil
strife is greatest when multiple pressures at different levels in society interact
to increase grievance and opportunity simultaneously. Our third hypothesis
says that environmental scarcity will change both variables, by contributing
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International Security 19:1 | 26
to economic crisis and by weakening institutions such as the state. But
numerous other factors also influence grievance and opportunity.
Contrary to common belief, there is no clear correlation between poverty
(or economic inequality) and social conflict.50 Whether or not people become
aggrieved and violent when they find themselves increasingly poor depends,
in part, upon their notion of economic justice. For example, people belonging
to a culture that inculcates fatalism about deprivation-as with lower castes
in India-will not be as prone to violence as people believing they have a
right to economic wellbeing. Theorists have addressed this problem by introducing
the variable "relative deprivation."'51 But there is little correlation
between measures of relative deprivation and civil conflict.52
Part of the problem is that analysts have commonly used aggregate data
(such as GNP/capita and average educational levels) to measure individual
deprivation.53 In addition, more recent research has shown that, to cause
civil strife, economic crisis must be severe, persistent, and pervasive enough
to erode the legitimacy or moral authority of the dominant social order and
system of governance. System legitimacy is therefore a critical intervening
variable between rising poverty and civil conflict. It is influenced by the
aggrieved actors' subjective "blame system," which consists of their beliefs
about who or what is responsible for their plight.54
Serious civil strife is not likely to occur unless the structure of political
opportunities facing challenger groups keeps them from effectively expressing
their grievances peacefully, but offers them openings for violence against
authority.55 The balance of coercive power among social actors affects the
50. Some of the best studies of this question have focused on the relationship between poverty
and urban violence in the United States. See William Ford and John Moore, "Additional Evidence
on the Social Characteristics of Riot Cities," Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 2 (September
1970), pp. 339-348; and Robert Jiobu, "City Characteristics and Racial Violence," Social Science
Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (June 1974), pp. 52-64.
51. People are said to be relatively deprived when they perceive a widening gap between the
level of satisfaction they have achieved (usually defined in economic terms) and the level they
believe they deserve. Deprivation is said to be relative to some subjective standard of equity or
fairness; the size of the perceived gap depends upon the beliefs about economic justice held by
the individual. See Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
52. Steven Finkel and James Rule, "Relative Deprivation and Related Theories of Civil Violence:
A Critical Review," in Kurt and Gladys Lang, eds. Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and
Change (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI, 1986), pp. 47-69.
53. Ibid.
54. These beliefs are grounded in historical and economic experience. See, for example, James
Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 1-11.
55. Homer-Dixon, "On the Threshold," pp. 105-106 and 109-111.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict | 27
probability of success and, therefore, the expected costs and benefits of
different actions by the state, its supporters, and challenger groups. A state
debilitated by corruption, by falling revenues and rising demand for services,
or by factional conflicts within elites will be more vulnerable to violent
challenges by political and military opponents; also vital to state strength is
the cohesiveness of the armed forces and its loyalty to civil leadership.56
Challengers will have greater relative power if their grievances are articulated
and actions coordinated through well-organized, well-financed and
autonomous opposition groups. Since grievances felt at the individual level
are not automatically expressed at the group level, the probability of civil
violence is higher if groups are already organized around clear social cleavages,
such as ethnicity, religion, or class. These groups can provide a clear
sense of identity and act as nuclei around which highly mobilized and angry
elements of the population, such as unemployed and urbanized young men,
will coalesce. Conversely, if economic crisis weakens challenger groups more
than the state, or affects mainly disorganized people, it will not lead to
violence.
Factors that can influence both grievance and opportunity include the
leadership and ideology of challenger groups, and international shocks and
pressures such as changes in trade and debt relations and in costs of imported
factors of production such as energy.57 The rapid growth of urban areas in
poor countries may have a similar dual effect: people concentrated in slums
can communicate more easily than those in scattered rural villages; this may
reinforce grievances and, by reducing problems of coordination, also increase
the power of challenger groups. Research shows, however, surprisingly little
historical correlation between rapid urbanization and civil strife;58 and the
exploding cities of the developing world have been remarkably quiescent in
recent decades. This may be changing: India has lately witnessed ferocious
urban violence, often in the poorest slums, and sometimes directed at new
56. See Farrokh Moshiri, "Revolutionary Conflict Theory in an Evolutionary Perspective," in
Jack Goldstone, Ted Gurr, and Farrokh Moshiri, eds., Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), pp. 4-36; and Goldstone, "An Analytical Framework," ibid.,
pp. 37-51.
57. For a review of some of these factors, see Jack Goldstone, "Theories of Revolution: The
Third Generation," World Politics, Vol. 32, No. 3 (April 1980), pp. 425-453.
58. Wayne Cornelius, Jr., "Urbanization As an Agent in Latin American Political Instability: The
Case of Mexico," American Political Science Review, Vol. 63, No. 3 (September 1969), pp. 833-357;
and Abdul Lodhi and Charles Tilly, "Urbanization, Crime, and Collective Violence in 19thCentury
France," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 2 (September 1973), pp. 296-318.
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International Security 19:1 j 28
migrants from the countryside.59 In Egypt, fundamentalist opposition to the
government is located in some of the most desperate sectors of Cairo and
other cities such as Asyut.
The Philippines provides evidence of the links between environmental
scarcity, economic deprivation, and civil strife. The country has suffered from
serious strife for many decades, usually motivated by economic stress.60
Today, cropland and forest degradation in the uplands sharply exacerbates
this economic crisis. The current upland insurgency-including guerrilla attacks
and assaults on military stations-is motivated by the poverty of landless
agricultural laborers and farmers displaced into the remote hills, where
the central government is weak.61 During the 1970s and 1980s, the communist
New People's Army and the National Democratic Front found upland peasants
receptive to revolutionary ideology, especially where coercive landlords
and local governments left them little choice between rebellion and starvation.
The insurgency has waned somewhat since President Marcos left, not
because economic conditions have improved much in the countryside, but
because the democratically elected central government is more legitimate and
the insurgent leadership is ideologically rigid.
Contextual factors are key to a full understanding of this case. Property
rights governing upland areas are, for the most part, either nonexistent or
very unclear. Legally these areas are a public resource, and their "open
access" character encourages in-migration. Yet many upland peasants find
themselves under the authority of concessionaires and absentee landlords
who have claimed the land. Neither peasants, nor concessionaires, nor landlords,
however, have secure enough title to have incentive to protect the
land from environmental degradation. Increasing external debt encouraged
the Marcos government, under pressure from international financial agencies,
to adopt draconian stabilization and structural adjustment policies.
These caused an economic crisis in the first half of the 1980s, which boosted
59. Sanjoy Hazarika, "Week of Rioting Leaves Streets of Bombay Empty," New York Times,
January 12, 1993, p. A3.
60. The Huk rebellion in the late 1940s and early 1950s provides some of the best evidence for
the link between economic conditions (especially unequal land distribution) and civil strife in
the Philippines. See Benedict Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the
Philippines (Quezon City, Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1979); and E.J. Mitchell, "Some
Econometrics of the Huk Rebellion," American Political Science Review, Vol. 63, No. 4 (December
1969), pp. 1159-1171.
61. Celso Roque and Maria Garcia, "Economic Inequality, Environmental Degradation and Civil
Strife in the Philippines," paper prepared for the Project on Environmental Change and Acute
Conflict (1993).
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict j 29
agricultural unemployment, reduced opportunities for alternative employment
in urban and rural industries, and gave a further push to migration
into the uplands.62
Finally, the insurgents gained adherents because they built on indigenous
beliefs and social structures to help the peasants define their situation and
focus their discontent. The most successful rebellions in Filipino history have
drawn on peasants' millenarian vision-rooted in their Catholicism-of "an
idealized pre-Spanish condition of wholeness."63 The current insurgency has
been particularly potent because it mingles "the spiritual search for liberation
and the political search for independence, into the overarching quest for
Filipino identity."64 This has provided peasants with an alternative moral
system to the traditional patron-client relationship between peasants and
landowners. The feudal norms imposed obligations on landowners, which
gave peasants rudimentary economic security, but disintegrated with the
commercialization of agriculture and the urbanization of elites in the early
and mid-twentieth century.65
Causal processes like those in the Philippines can be seen around the
planet: population growth and unequal access to good land force huge numbers
of rural people into cities or onto marginal lands. In the latter case, they
cause environmental damage and become chronically poor. Eventually these
people may be the source of persistent upheaval, or they may migrate yet
again, stimulating ethnic conflicts or urban unrest elsewhere.
The rise of the Sendero Luminoso rebellion in Peru can be attributed to a
subsistence crisis caused, in part, by such a process of ecological marginalization.66
The country's mountainous southern highlands are not suitable for
farming. The hills are steep, and the soil is thin and dry. Nonetheless, during
62. Maria Concepci6n Cruz and Robert Repetto, The Environmental Effects of Stabilization and
Structural Adjustment Programs: The Philippines Case (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute
1992). See also Francisco Lara, Jr., "Structural Adjustments and Trade Liberalization: Eating
Away Our Food Security," PPI Research Papers (Quezon City: Philippine Peasant Institute [PPI],
1991); and Robin Broad, Unequal Alliance, 1979-1986: The World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund, and the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988).
63. Kessler, Rebellion and Repression, pp. 24-25.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid, pp. 16-19. See also Reynaldo Clemena Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements
in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).
66. Cynthia McClintock, "Why Peasants Rebel: The Case of Peru's Sendero Luminoso," World
Politics, Vol. 37, No. 1 (October 1984), pp. 48-84; and McClintock, "Peru's Sendero Luminoso
Rebellion: Origins and Trajectory," in Susan Eckstein, ed., Power and Popular Protest: Latin
American Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 61-101.
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International Security 19:1 | 30
the colonial period, Indian peoples in the region were displaced onto hillsides
when Spanish settlers seized richer valley lands. In the 1970s, the Velasco
government undertook a sweeping land-redistribution program. But people
in the highlands benefited little, because the government was reluctant to
break up large agricultural enterprises that generated much of the country's
export earnings.
Natural population growth and a lack of good land or jobs elsewhere
boosted population densities in the southern highlands. The department of
Ayacucho saw density increase from 8.1 people per square kilometer in 1940
to 12.1 in 1980. Cropland availability dropped below .2 hectare per capita.67
These densities exceed sustainable limits, given the inherent fragility of the
region's land and prevailing agricultural practices. Cropland has therefore
been badly degraded by erosion and nutrient depletion.
Cynthia McClintock notes that, "if population increases while the soil
deteriorates, food production per-capita can be expected to decline. "68 Wealth
in the region is almost entirely derived from subsistence agriculture. Family
incomes-already among the lowest in Peru-dropped sharply in real terms
in the 1970s and 1980s; in 1980, per-capita income in the Peruvian highlands
was 82 percent of the 1972 level. This poverty resulted in declining caloric
intake; in 1980 people in the southern highlands had less than 70 percent of
the daily requirement set by the FAO. In 1983, a drought made the subsistence
crisis even worse, and production of the staple crop of potatoes fell by
40-50 percent.
While government policies were partly responsible for the long-term income
decline in the Peruvian highlands, the particularly harsh drop in the
southern region was a result of population pressures, poor land, and the
lack of alternative sources of income. The peasants' sense of deprivation was
increased by the land reform in the 1970s, which raised their expectations in
vain. There is thus a strong correlation between areas suffering severe poverty
and areas of Sendero Luminoso strongholds: "the sine-qua-non element"
of these strongholds is "the subsistence crisis in the country's southern
highlands during the early 1980s."69
In terms of contextual factors, Ayacucho offered special opportunities to
insurgents. It is physically remote, which reduced the government's control,
67. McClintock, "Why Peasants Rebel," pp. 61 and 63.
68. Ibid., p. 63.
69. Ibid., p. 82.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict | 31
and it has a major university that served as an organizational base for radicals
that became the core of Sendero. The university's remoteness also meant
that students were disproportionately from the peasantry, and could therefore
return to their communities with ease; moreover, they were less likely
to find professional jobs on graduation. The relative power of the government
was also weakened, ironically, by the land reform, which caused large landowners
to leave the region. The Velasco regime did not fill the vacuum with
new political and security institutions, in part because an economic downturn
later in the decade reduced the government's resources for the task.
McClintock believes that the poverty of these regions condemns the country
to chronic, long-term turmoil. The government may be civilian, but is
unlikely to be very democratic, and will confront "virtually constant revolutionary
and criminal violence."
A COMBINED MODEL
There are important links between the processes identified in the second and
third hypotheses. For example, although population movement is sometimes
caused directly by scarcity, more often it arises from the greater poverty
caused by this scarcity. Similarly, the weakening of the state increases the
likelihood not only of deprivation conflicts, but of group-identity conflicts.
It is useful, therefore, to bring the hypotheses together into one model of
environment-conflict linkages (Figure 2). Decreases in the quality and quanFigure
2. Some Sources and Consequences of Environmental Scarcity.
Sources of environ- Social Effects
mental scarcity
Decrease in quality
and quanfity of Mirto,X_______
rendeuantity resous expulsion Ethnic conflictsrenewable resources\
Increased /
Population growth - environmental Weakened states - Coups d'6tat
scarcity /
Unequal resource Decreased l ervfo ofit
access economic Deprivation conficts
productivity
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International Security 19:1 | 32
Figure 3. Environmental Scarcity in the Philippines.
Sources of environmental
scarcity Social Effects
Soil erosion of up to Migration to
300-400t/ha/yr on urban areas
/ ~~~cleared steep slopes
Potential for urban
Lower per capita unrest, financial
Migration to Natural population availability of weakening of state
uplands growth of 2 percent 31 productive agniper
year in uplands cultural land in Increased peasant
upland areas receptivity to rural
Limited absorption of insurgency
labor in rich lowlands, liermseruplan
lowland population Furpoer upland
growth impovershment
NOTE: The variables and linkages in Figure 3 map onto Figure 2, with the source of scarcity
on the left and the forms of conflict on the right.
tity of renewable resources, population growth, and unequal resource access
act singly or in various combinations to increase the scarcity, for certain
population groups, of cropland, water, forests, and fish. This can reduce
economic productivity, both for the local groups experiencing the scarcity
and for the larger regional and national economies. The affected people may
migrate or be expelled to new lands. Migrating groups often trigger ethnic
conflicts when they move to new areas, while decreases in wealth can cause
deprivation conflicts such as insurgency and rural rebellion. In developing
countries, the migrations and productivity losses may eventually weaken the
state which in turn decreases central control over ethnic rivalries and increases
opportunities for insurgents and elites challenging state authority.
Figure 3 shows how these linkages work in the Filipino case.
South Africa and Haiti illustrate this combined model. In South Africa,
apartheid concentrated millions of blacks in some of the country's least
productive and most ecologically sensitive territories, where population densities
were worsened by high natural birth rates. In 1980, rural areas of the
Ciskei homeland had 82 people per square kilometer, whereas the surroundThis
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict | 33
ing Cape Province had a rural density of 2. Homeland residents had little
capital and few resource-management skills and were subject to corrupt and
abusive local governments. Sustainable development in such a situation was
impossible, and wide areas were completely stripped of trees for fuelwood,
grazed down to bare dirt, and eroded of top soil. A 1980 report concluded
that nearly 50 percent of Ciskei's land was moderately or severely eroded,
and nearly 40 percent of its pasturage was overgrazed.70
This loss of resources, combined with a lack of alternative employment
and the social trauma caused by apartheid, created a subsistence crisis in the
homelands. Thousands of people have migrated to South African cities,
which are as yet incapable of adequately integrating and employing these
migrants. The result is the rapid growth of squatter settlements and illegal
townships that are rife with discord and that threaten the country's move to
democratic stability.71
In Haiti, the irreversible loss of forests and soil in rural areas deepens an
economic crisis that spawns social strife, internal migration, and an exodus
of "boat people." When first colonized by the Spanish in the late fifteenth
century and the French in the seventeenth century, Haiti was treasured for
its abundant forests. Since then, Haiti has become one of the world's most
dramatic examples of environmental despoliation. Less than two percent of
the country remains forested, and the last timber is being felled at four
percent per year.72 As trees disappear, erosion follows, worsened by the
steepness of the land and by harsh storms. The United Nations estimates
that at least 50 percent of the country is affected by topsoil loss that leaves
the land "unreclaimable at the farm level."73 So much soil washes off the
slopes that the streets of Port-au-Prince have to be cleared with bulldozers
in the rainy season.
Unequal land distribution was not a main cause of this catastrophe. Haiti
gained independence in 1804 following a revolt of slaves and ex-slaves against
70. Francis Wilson and Mamphela Ramphele, Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge (New
York: Norton, 1989); George Quail, et al., Report of the Ciskei Commission (Pretoria: Conference
Associates, 1980), p. 73.
71. See Mamphela Ramphele and Chris McDowell, eds., Restoring the Land: Environment and
Change in Post-Apartheid South Africa (London: Panos, 1991); and Chris Eaton, "Rural Environmental
Degradation and Urban Conflict in South Africa," Occasional Paper of the Peace and
Conflict Studies Program, University of Toronto, June 1992.
72. WRI, World Resources, 1992-93, p. 286.
73. Global Assessment of Soil Degradation, World Map on Status of Human-Induced Soil Degradation,
Sheet 1, North and South America.
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International Security 19:1 | 34
the French colonial regime. Over a period of decades, the old plantation
system associated with slavery was dismantled, and land was widely distributed
in small parcels.74 As a result, Haiti's agricultural structure, unique to
Latin America, has 73 percent of cropland in private farms of less than 4
hectares.75
But inheritance customs and population growth have combined to produce
scarcity, as in Bangladesh. Land has been subdivided into smaller portions
with each generation. Eventually the plots cannot properly support their
cultivators, fallow periods are neglected, and greater poverty prevents investment
in soil conservation. The poorest people leave for steeper hillsides,
where they clear the forest and begin farming anew, only to exhaust the land
in a few years.76 Many peasants try to supplement their falling incomes by
scavenging wood for charcoal production, which contributes to further de-
forestation.
These processes might have been prevented had a stable central government
invested in agriculture, industrial development, and reforestation. Instead,
since independence Haiti has endured a ceaseless struggle for power
between black and mulatto classes, and the ruling regimes have been solely
interested in expropriating any surplus wealth the economy generated. Today,
over 60 percent of the population is still engaged in agriculture, yet
capital is unavailable for agricultural improvement, and the terms of exchange
for crop production favor urban regions.77 The population growth rate has
actually increased, from 1.7 percent in the mid-1970s to over 2 percent today:
the UN estimates that the current population of 6.75 million will grow to
over 13 million by 2025.78 As the land erodes and the population grows,
incomes shrink: agricultural output per capita has decreased ten percent in
the last decade.79
Analysts agree that rising rural poverty has caused ever-increasing ruralrural
and rural-urban migration. In search of work, agricultural workers move
74. Thomas Weil, et al., Haiti: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army,
1982), pp. 28-33.
75. Anthony Catanese, "Haiti's Refugees: Political, Economic, Environmental," Field Staff Reports,
No. 17 (Sausalito, Calif.: Universities Field Staff International, Natural Heritage Institute,
1990-91), p. 5.
76. Elizabeth Abbott, "Where Waters Run Brown," Equinox, Vol. 10, No. 59 (September/October
1991), p. 43.
77. Marko Ehrlich, et al., Haiti: Country Environmental Profile, A Field Study (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Agency for International Development, 1986), pp. 89-92.
78. WRI, World Resources, 1992-93, p. 246.
79. Ibid., p. 272.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict | 35
from subsistence hillside farms to rice farms in the valleys. From there, they
go to cities, especially to Port-au-Prince, which now has a population of over
a million. Wealthier farmers and traders, and even those with slimmer resources,
try to flee by boat.
These economic and migration stresses are undoubtedly contributing to
civil strife. In the aftermath of the collapse of "Baby Doc" Duvalier's regime
in 1986, the poor unleashed their vengeance on those associated with the
regime, in particular on Duvalier's gangs of enforcers, the tontons macoutes.
During his election campaign and his short tenure as president, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide reportedly encouraged poor slum-dwellers to attack Haiti's elite.
Fearful of uprisings, the current military regime has ferociously oppressed
the country's poor and peasantry. Even if the present political stalemate is
resolved, Aristide is returned to power, and international sanctions are lifted,
Haiti will be forever bear the burden of its irreversibly ravaged environment,
which may make it impossible to build a prosperous, just, and peaceful
society.
THE CAUSAL ROLE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCARCITY
Environmental scarcity often acts as a powerful long-term social stressor, but
does it have any independent role as a cause of conflict? Many analysts
assume that it is no more than a fully endogenous intervening variable linking
political, economic, and social factors to conflict. By this view, environmental
scarcity may be an important indicator that political and economic development
has gone awry, but it does not merit, in and of itself, intensive research
and policy attention at the expense of more fundamental political and economic
factors.
But the cases reviewed here highlight three reasons why this view is
wrong. First, as we saw in the Senegal and Jordan basins, environmental
scarcity can itself be an important force behind changes in the politics and
economics governing resource use. In both cases, scarcity caused powerful
actors to increase in their own favor the inequities in the distribution of
resources. Second, ecosystem vulnerability is often an important variable
contributing to environmental scarcity, and this vulnerability is, at least in
part, an independent physical factor: the depth of soils in the Filipino uplands
and the vulnerability of Israel's aquifers to salt intrusion are not functions of
human social institutions or behavior. Third, in many parts of the worldincluding
regions of the Philippines, Haiti, Peru, and South Africa-environmental
degradation has crossed a threshold of irreversibility. Even if enlightThis
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International Security 19:1 | 36
ened social change removes the original political, economic, and cultural
causes of the degradation, it will be a continuing burden on society. Once
irreversible, in other words, environmental degradation becomes an exogenous
variable.
Implications for International Security
Environmental scarcity has insidious and cumulative social impacts, such as
population movement, economic decline, and the weakening of states. These
can contribute to diffuse and persistent sub-national violence. The rate and
extent of such conflicts will increase as scarcities worsen.
This sub-national violence will not be as conspicuous or dramatic as interstate
resource wars, but it will have serious repercussions for the security
interests of both the developed and the developing worlds. Countries under
such stress may fragment as their states become enfeebled and peripheral
regions are seized by renegade authorities and warlords. Governments of
countries as different as the Philippines and Peru have lost control over outer
territories; although both these cases are complicated, it is nonetheless clear
that environmental stress has contributed to their fragmentation. Fragmentation
of any sizeable country will produce large outflows of refugees; it will
also hinder the country from effectively negotiating and implementing international
agreements on collective security, global environmental protection,
and other matters.
Alternatively, a state might keep scarcity-induced civil strife from causing
its progressive enfeeblement and fragmentation by becoming a "hard" regime
that is authoritarian, intolerant of opposition, and militarized. Such regimes
are more prone to launch military attacks against neighboring countries to
divert attention from internal grievances. If a number of developing countries
evolve in this direction, they could eventually threaten the military and
economic interests of rich countries.
A state's ability to become a hard regime in response to environmentally
induced turmoil depends, I believe, on two factors. First, the state must have
sufficient remaining capacity-despite the debilitating effects of scarcity-to
mobilize or seize resources for its own ends; this is a function of the internal
organizational coherence of the state and its autonomy from outside pressures.
Second, there must remain enough surplus wealth in the country's
ecological-economic system to allow the state, once it seizes this wealth, to
pursue its authoritarian course. Consequently, the countries with the highest
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict | 37
probability of becoming "hard" regimes, and potential threats to their neighbors,
are large, relatively wealthy developing countries that are dependent
on a declining environmental base and that have a history of state strength.
Candidates include Indonesia and, perhaps, Nigeria.
Our research suggests that environmental pressures in China may cause
the country's fragmentation.80 This is not the received wisdom: most experts
have been distracted by the phenomenal economic expansion in China's
coastal areas; they have tended to project these trends onto the rest of the
country and to neglect the dangers posed by resource scarcities.81 The costs
of misreading of the Chinese situation could be very high. China has over
one-fifth of the world's population, a huge military with growing powerprojection
capability, and unsettled relations with some of its neighbors. The
effects of Chinese civil unrest, mass violence, and state disintegration could
spread far beyond its borders.
Chinese fertility rates peaked at the height of the cultural revolution between
1969 and 1972. Population growth will peak at about 17 million per
year in the mid-1990s, as the babies born during the cultural revolution reach
their reproductive years. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, specialists tempered
their optimism about Chinese ability to bring population growth down
to replacement rate.82 Market liberalization in the countryside undermined
the one-child policy. In rural areas state coercion seemed less effective, and
peasants enriched by market reforms could more easily pay fines. In some
provinces, therefore, it became common for families to have two or three
children. The most recent evidence, however, suggests that Chinese authorities
have renewed their commitment to controlling population growth. In
response to often extremely coercive measures by low-level officials, fertility
rates have fallen below two children per woman for the first time.83 But
80. Smil, "Environmental Change as a Source of Conflict and Economic Losses in China"; Jack
Goldstone, "Imminent Political Conflict Arising from China's Environmental Crises," Occasional
Paper No. 2, Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict (December 1992).
81. See, for example, Barber Conable and David Lampton, "China: The Coming Power," Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 5 (Winter 1992/93), pp. 133-149. In their assessment of the pressures on
contemporary China, the authors devote only half a sentence to demographic and environmental
stresses.
82. Griffith Feeney, et al., "Recent Fertility Dynamics in China: Results from the 1987 One
Percent Population Survey," Population and Development Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (June 1989),
pp. 297-321; Shanti Conly and Sharon Camp, "China's Family Planning Program: Challenging
the Myths," Country Study Series, No. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Population Crisis Committee, 1992).
83. Nicholas Kristof, "China's Crackdown on Births: A Stunning, and Harsh, Success," New
York Times, April 25, 1993, p. Al.
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International Security 19:1 | 38
experts are not sure that this accomplishment can be sustained for long, and
even if it is, China's population will continue to grow well into the next
century.
Only two poor populous countries in the world have less arable land per
capita than China: Egypt and Bangladesh. In fact, 300 million people in
China's interior have even less arable land than the Bangladeshis. China has
little scope to expand irrigated and arable land, although it might be able to
increase the intensity of irrigation in some places. Consequently, continued
population growth and loss of cropland mean that China will have 25 percent
less arable land per capita by 2010. Moreover, the remaining land will often
be of declining quality: every year the country loses as much nitrogen and
phosphorous from soil erosion as it applies in inorganic fertilizer. Vaclav Smil
notes that many experts and senior authorities in China are frightened by
the environmental situation, believing the country has already crossed key
thresholds of unsustainability. Grain is a constant preoccupation of the leadership,
and imports even into rich areas may soon be necessary. Already,
tens of millions of Chinese are trying to migrate from the country's interior
and northern regions, where water and fuelwood are desperately scarce and
the land is often badly damaged, to the booming coastal cities. Smil expects
bitter disputes among these regions over migration and water sharing.
Jack Goldstone has estimated the consequences of these stresses for social
stability. He notes that population and resource pressures led to widespread
civil violence in China during the Ming and Qing dynasties. 84 The current
regime recognizes that such pressures will cause mounting grievances in the
worst-affected regions. "The rapidly growing population of the north and
west cannot be fed and employed within those regions," Goldstone writes.
"There is not sufficient land, nor sufficient water, to provide for the additional
hundreds of millions that will be born in the next decades."85 If large-scale
migration out of the region is blocked, deprivation conflicts in the northwest
are likely. Coupled with merchant and worker resistance in the major cities,
they would probably lead to the fall of the central government. If the migration
is diverted into China's southern countryside, deprivation and groupidentity
conflicts are likely to result there.
The only realistic policy is to permit movement to the wealthy coastal
cities. Coastal areas must therefore be allowed to continue their rapid eco-
84. For a full analysis, see Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
85. Goldstone, "Imminent Political Conflicts Arising from China's Environmental Crises," p. 52.
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Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict | 39
nomic growth to absorb surplus labor. But, Goldstone argues, the Beijing
government will have great difficulty maintaining economic and political
control over this process. Economic liberalization helps to mobilize the population
by dissolving long-standing social relations, and this weakens the
Communist Party's ability to micro-manage Chinese society. Moreover, the
Party is divided from the very non-Party elites that are rapidly expanding
because of economic growth, including student, business, and professional
groups. Further growth will depend on private domestic investment, which
will encourage these elites, and also workers in private industry, to demand
democratization and responsiveness of the regime. The Party has also been
weakened by deep internal disagreements over the rate and degree of economic
and political liberalization; suspicions about the reliability of the Army;
and worker discontent that remains high throughout the country.
Divisions within the regime and among elites, combined with an increasingly
mobilized population, create greater opportunities for challenges to
central authority. But resource and population pressures force the regime to
pursue policies, such as further economic liberalization, that only weaken it
more. Goldstone believes that long-term stability would be more likely if
China were to begin serious democratization soon, but he is not sanguine.
Central authorities will probably refuse to recognize their loosening grip on
the society, and this will eventually prompt secessionist movements in Moslem
lands to the west and Tibet in the South. Sichuan may also seek independence.
"Once the glue of unified communist rule dissolves, China may
once again, as it has so often in its history following the fall of unifying
dynasties, experience a decade or even century-long interregnum of warring
among regional states."86
Conclusions
Our research shows that environmental scarcity causes violent conflict. This
conflict tends to be persistent, diffuse, and sub-national. Its frequency will
probably jump sharply in the next decades as scarcities rapidly worsen in
many parts of the world. Of immediate concern are scarcities of cropland,
water, forests, and fish, whereas atmospheric changes such as global warm-
86. Ibid., p. 54.
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International Security 19:1 | 40
ing will probably not have a major effect for several decades, and then mainly
by interacting with already existing scarcities.
The degradation and depletion of environmental resources is only one
source of environmental scarcity; two other important sources are population
growth and unequal resource distribution. Scarcity often has its harshest
social impact when these factors interact. As environmental scarcity becomes
more severe, some societies will have a progressively lower capacity to adapt.
Of particular concern is the decreasing capacity of the state to create markets
and other institutions that promote adaptation. The impact of environmental
scarcity on state capacity deserves further research.
Countries experiencing chronic internal conflict because of environmental
stress will probably either fragment or become more authoritarian. Fragmenting
countries will be the source of large out-migrations, and they will
be unable to effectively negotiate or implement international agreements on
security, trade and environmental protection. Authoritarian regimes may be
inclined to launch attacks against other countries to divert popular attention
from internal stresses. Any of these outcomes could seriously disrupt international
security. The social impacts of environmental scarcity therefore deserve
concerted attention from security scholars.
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