Environment: Conflict’s common denominator

Recently, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi, organised the first ‘Anil Agrawal Dialogue on Mining, People and Environment’. Mining is fast emerging as a point of severe conflict between communities, the government and private companies. Interestingly, India’s mines are also forested areas, which are homes for the poor.

During the dialogue it emerged that there is a problem in understanding the meaning of development. On the one hand, the communities whose land and livelihood are affected due to mining protest the action since it does not benefit them in any way. On the other, government and companies insist that mining must be done to sustain the country’s economic growth. The result: numerous violent conflicts. The government often terms these conflicts as inspired or triggered without addressing the root causes. This complicates the situation further.

During the same period as the dialogue, the Centre convened a meeting of states affected by Naxalite violence.The states discussed and debated their respective development programmes.The meeting also discussed the issue of land acquisition for industrialisation and mining. Though such meetings never gets public access, state representatives raised questions about what were the ways to come out of this impasse. How were the people, whose lands had been acquired, supposed to be compensated? This question has a direct bearing to the extent of Naxalite influence in the state. Of late Naxalites have been using these issues to gain support. All mineral and forest rich districts are affected by Naxal violence. In fact the Union government has asked states to prepare rehabilitation and resettlement policies for local communities and to prevent Naxalites from exploiting such situations.

Therefore, poverty is increasingly caused by environmental scarcities -- both natural and artificial like restricting access to forests. A common denominator for causes of conflict is the loss of livelihoods. Policy attempts to break the vicious path to conflict need to address both poverty and environmental issues. This is built on the observation that the common denominator for many (if not most) of the internal wars and conflict, which plagued Africa, South Asia and Latin America during the last decade, is poverty as a result of loss of livelihood. The latter often caused or exacerbated by environmental degradation.

Reconstruction of exhausted environmental resources will have to work towards both these ends. While poverty may be a near-endemic condition in certain societies, loss of livelihoods marks a rapid transition from a previous stable condition of relative welfare to a condition of poverty or destitution. It is the rapid process of change resulting in a sudden fall into poverty, more than the endemic condition of poverty, which creates the potential for what here will be termed livelihood conflicts.

Failure to meet such challenges creates opportunities for violent movements (like the Naxalite), or in many cases, creates such groups as an extreme reaction to desperation. In India, Naxalites have managed to mobilise popular support at a rate they would have otherwise never been able to, if poverty, unemployment and environmental degradation had not spread at such a rapid rate during the decades preceding the open conflict.