The triple challenge of rapid population growth, declining agricultural productivity, and natural resource degradation are not isolated from one another; they are intimately related. However, strategic planning and development programming tend to focus on individual sectors such as the environment, agriculture, and population; they do not explicitly take into account the compatibilities and inconsistencies among them. Farm households and their livelihood strategies are at the core of the intersectoral linkages approach advocated in this chapter. Three key aspects of the population-environment-development debate are discussed: first, the finding that inconsistencies between public and individual household behavior regarding childbearing and family planning constitute a veritable "demographic tragedy of the commons;" second, the tendency to conceptualize population variables as "unmanageable," and exogenous to environmental and economic change; third, the importance of land markets and land tenure as critical population-sustainability policy issues. [author]
Authors and Publishers
D.C. Clay
T. Reardon
On September 30, 2002, USAID awarded the Food Security III Cooperative Agreement (under a Leader with Associates [LWA] Agreement mode) to the Department of Agriculture, Food and Resource Economics at Michigan State University. It was a potential 10-year project, with renewal after the first 5 years contingent on an evaluation.
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