Re: Ecology

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nestor:
>I can speak of the Argentinian dams on the Paraná, Uruguay and Limay
>rivers, and of the Brazilian dams in the Paraná and Uruguay basins.
>The dams are necessary in themselves: we need to obtain as much hydro
>energy as possible (or it is only the USA who can have a Hoover
>Dam?), and we also need to enhance the navigability of our inner
>rivers.

Nestor, when you dam a river, there are environmental consequences. The
desire to have a "Hoover Dam" is understandable if your only criterion is
cheap electricity. Unfortunately, such large-scale projects have led to
intractable environmental problems in the American southwest, including
desertification, destruction of aquatic life such as the salmon,
counterproductive irrigation practices, etc. In trying to get Marxists to
think ecologically, it is necessary to see the entire realm of nature and
society. Granted that electrical power is useful to industry and is also a
hallmark of "civilized society", but so is food. What good is it to have
electricity, when hunger destroys your concentration so much that you can't
read a book at night. In many places where large-scale dams have been
deployed, the results have been increased hunger:

Patrick McCully, "Silenced Rivers: the Ecology and Politics of Large Dams":

Advocates of large dams commonly make the assumption that there is a direct
and proportionate link between increasing crop production and reducing
malnutrition. But the issue of hunger is more complicated than dam builders
assume. What enables people to eat is their ability to afford food, not
just food availability. Even in wealthy California, the major producer of
irrigated crops in the US, 5 million people ? one in six residents ? suffer
what University of California researchers describe as ?chronic hunger?.

While hundreds of millions go hungry every day in India, Pakistan and Sri
Lanka, these countries have been self-sufficient or in surplus in food
grains for numerous years. In mid-I 995, Indian government granaries were
filled to overflowing with more than 30 million tons of unsold grain. As
Robert Chambers says, hunger in South Asia is not today a problem of food
production, but ?is a problem of who produces the food and of who has power
to obtain it?. When irrigation schemes further marginalize the poor and are
used to grow expensive crops for sale to the better-off in cities or
abroad, they can end up increasing both crop production and hunger.

Wheat and rice were grown on two-thirds of the area newly irrigated in
India between 1960 and 1983, and oilseeds, cotton and sugarcane on another
fifth. Meanwhile the total amount of land under traditional cheap
subsistence food crops ? pulses and coarse cereals such as mullets and
sorghum ? fell over the same period. Although nutritionists believe that a
traditional diet of pulses, coarse grains and dairy products is superior to
a wheat-based diet, there has been little official support for traditional
Indian subsistence crops, compared to the hundreds of billions of rupees
spent on irrigation infrastructure and the promotion of wheat and rice
growing.

Before the Indira Gandhi Canal, 135,000 hectares of land in the Thar Desert
were planted to coarse grains, including the traditional grain for bread,
bajra, and 27,000 hectares to lentils. Much of this land Was watered with
centuries-old, communally managed water harvesting techniques. By 1990,
however, bajra growing had been almost eliminated and the desert, now under
perennial canal irrigation, was planted With 132,000 hectares of cotton and
123,000 hectares of wheat, as well as tens of thousands of hectares of
mustard and groundnut (grown for cooking oil), chickpeas, sugarcane and rice.

Seventy per cent of settlers near the Indira Gandhi Canal do not earn
enough to pay off agricultural loans and meet their basic food needs.
According to a government-sponsored health survey, the settlers? average
per capita consumption of calories and protein is below that expected of
Indians living on the poverty line. The survey also reported that
malnutrition is more common among children of canal settlers than among the
children of pastoralists in the poorest districts of Rajasthan not affected
by the canal ? children who eat a diet of dairy products and bajra.

Almost two-thirds of modern large-scale irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa is
in Sudan. The massive Gezira scheme covers some 840,000 hectares, half of
the irrigated area in Sudan. Watered from the Sennar and Roseires dams on
the Blue Nile, Gezira was first developed by the British in the I 920s,
replacing the traditional local sorghum crop and the nomadic herding of
livestock with cotton to be spun in English mills. Today, cotton for export
remains the major crop grown at Gezira, as it is at the country?s other
large schemes. Despite the huge area under irrigation in the country,
one-third of children in Sudan suffer from chronic malnutrition.

By increasing the area of perenially irrigated rice, Manantali, Diama and
Foum El-Gleita dams were supposedly intended to improve the diets of the
inhabitants of the Senegal Valley. Yet, a 1994 US Agency for International
Development-funded study found that the nutritional status of the people of
the valley appears to be worse than before. While rice consumption in one
village surveyed had more than doubled in the eight years since the dams
started storing water, consumption of nutritionally varied traditional
foods ? millet, sorghum, maize (corn) and black-eyed peas (cowpeas) ? had
fallen by between 30 and 90 per cent. Consumption of fish, meat and dairy
products also appear to have fallen among valley residents. Although
reliable data on nutrition before and after the dams are not available for
most of the valley, villagers interviewed for the USAID study in Mauritania
and Senegal

"... clearly state that their health has deteriorated in the past few years
because of the deterioration in their diet. They are convinced that before
the construction of the dams, when they produced traditional flood
recession crops...their diet was more varied and hence more healthy. They
insist that it is because of their present diet, made up primarily of rice,
that they are weaker and have more health problems than before."

Irrigation together with inputs such as modern seed varieties and
agrochemicals clearly can increase crop yields by significant amounts.
Government figures indicate that average per hectare yields of rice on
irrigated land in major Indian states in 1980?83 were between 27 and 369
per cent higher than in rainfed areas; yields of wheat were 7 to 391 per
cent higher. Critics of the green revolution, however, argue that these
figures mislead as to the impact of intensive irrigation. Many irrigated
areas are in fertile plains which were already more productive than other
areas. As modern irrigated fields grow only a single crop, official
statistics measure only the yield of this crop. In traditional peasant
agriculture, however, an astonishingly wide diversity of foods and other
products are obtained from fields, including fruits from trees and fish
from flooded rice paddies. Traditional agroforestry systems ? which combine
the growing of annual crops with trees ? commonly contain well over a
hundred plant species per field. In addition to providing a nutritious and
varied diet, traditional agro-ecosystems also produce construction
materials, medicines, fuel, fodder, green manures and natural pesticides.
Declining yields and degraded land in the green revolution areas also show
that higher monocrop yields have been bought at the expense of long-term
sustainability.


Louis Proyect
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