Apartheid

Apartheid as a cause of South Africa's scarcity of renewable resources

Studies have looked at environmental depletion and insufficiency of renewable resources and how this has    contributed to social instability in South Africa. The environmental issues have said to have been obscured by the negative social impacts of apartheid. The analysis focuses on how aspects of the apartheid era has     impacted agricultural productivity, soil erosion, and fuelwood availability within the former homelands and on migration rates to urban settings

British colonial rule gradually took land from Africans and in turn provided whites with 87 percent of the land, while blacks - almost 75 percent of the country's population - lived within the homelands, accounting for only 13 percent of the land. The black population in these areas sustained themselves through agriculture, local service industries, and as migrant labor in white-owned mines and industry.

The homelands became a dumping ground for the black South African population. From 1960 to 1980, the government forced 1.75 million people into the homelands to clear what it called "black spots" -squatter settlements in urban areas and rural villages consisting of blacks whose labor-tenant contracts on white farms had been canceled. The population density of the homelands increased dramatically as a result. Quasi-urban communities emerged on homeland borders as the labor force commuting to neighboring cities, mines, and industries grew rapidly in the 1970s. Other black workers lived in single-sex hostels near industries too far from the homelands for daily commuting. The remainder of the black population was restricted to legally defined "townships" lying outside white urban areas and was employed in industry and mines or as domestic laborers.  Rivers, steep valleys, and escarpments, or human-made barriers, such as industrial areas, commercial belts, and railways, separated racial groups. There was an over population on the lands that were assigned to the black South Africans. Poor land and the inadequacy of the infrastructure, such as sewage systems, water supplies, and energy sources, meant that the urban black population relied extensively for its day-to-day needs on the local environment - including small vegetable plots, local streams and trees. many of these communities are located in fragile environments close to hillsides and river valleys and the environment then quickly deteriorates.

Degradation and depletion of agricultural land, forests, water, and fish stocks threaten many societies around the world.

There are three  types of environmental scarcity:

(1)     Supply-induced scarcity is caused by the degradation and depletion of an environmental resource, for example, the erosion of cropland.

(2)     Demand-induced scarcity results from population growth within a region or increased per capita consumption of a resource, either of which increase the demand for the resource.

(3)     Structural scarcity arises from an unequal social distribution of a resource that concentrates it in the hands of relatively few people while the remaining population suffers from serious shortages.

According to the study, the depletion of agricultural resources results in civil violence and a troubled relation between state and society, resulting in falling agricultural production, migrations to urban areas, and economic decline in regions severely affected by resource depletion.

Our own personal example of violence affecting agriculture growth would be Zimbabwe. A country where farmers are forced to leave their lands, resulting in the lack of production and food supply.

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/pcs/eps/south/sa1.htm