Economic Development and Conservation of Natural Resources

Summary

Zafar Futehally’s lecture, delivered on 23rd July 1971 under the auspices of the Forum of Free Enterprise and published as a Forum booklet in February 1972, argues that India’s pursuit of economic development has proceeded without serious accounting for the natural-resource base on which civilisation rests. Distinguishing renewable resources (fresh water, clean air, soil, vegetation, animal life) from non-renewable ones (oil, coal, iron ore, minerals), he confines his attention to the renewable category and warns that even renewables collapse once their progenitor — nature itself — is destroyed. He marshals examples from the Sahara, the Rajasthan deserts, the silted hydrology of the Aswan Dam, the DDT load in the body fat of Delhi residents, and the deforestation-induced floods of South-East Asia to show that the over-exploitation of nature long predates synthetic chemicals and heavy machinery.

The central argument is that development plans must be grounded in the natural principles of land use, following the ecologist Edward Graham. Futehally presses the unfashionable conclusion that India’s 229 million cattle and 106 million sheep and goats are themselves a national waste, eroding the productivity of the 13 per cent of Indian land devoted to grazing and pasture; only by reducing those numbers, and by turning arid marginal land over to wildlife harvested on a sustained-yield basis, can the productivity of the land be raised. He cites the Bombay Natural History Society’s Gir Sanctuary studies, comparative data from Utah, and the work of Juan Spillett and Lee Talbot to back the claim that wildlife exploits habitat resources more efficiently than domestic cattle.

A secondary thread concerns watersheds, forests and wetlands. The 1952 National Forest Policy reserving 33 per cent of land for forest cover has remained a ‘paper dream’; illegal felling and the conversion of forest to agriculture have hollowed it out. Drawing on Lee Talbot’s Philippines watershed report and the testimony of nineteenth-century famine commissioners — Sir Richard Temple in 1877 and the Indian Famine Commission of 1880 — he treats today’s catastrophic floods and droughts as the predictable consequence of a denuded landscape. Wetlands and marshes, he insists, are economic assets in their own right: fish farming outyields reclamation for wheat, marshes regulate the hydrology of surrounding countryside, and they have educational and recreational value comparable to the angling and waterfowl economies of England and the United States.

The closing image is the Indonesian island of Krakatoa, which was sterilised by volcanic ash in 1883 and recolonised within fifty years into a mature forest. Futehally ends with a rhetorical question that crystallises the booklet’s argumentative frame: ‘Would it not be wiser for us to conserve nature rather than conquer it?‘

Key points

• Civilisation ultimately depends on natural resources, a proposition that economic and industrial development of the past century has effectively forgotten.

• Renewable resources (water, air, soil, vegetation, animal life) are reusable indefinitely only if their progenitor — nature itself — is not destroyed; soil takes about 600 years per inch to form.

• Over-exploitation of the environment is not a modern industrial phenomenon: bare hands plus goats, sheep and cattle reduced the Sahara and Rajasthan to deserts.

• Pollution is not a problem reserved for the developed West — DDT content in the body fat of Delhi residents is higher than anywhere else in the world, owing to liberal use in godowns and warehouses.

• Indian development plans must follow Edward Graham’s natural principles of land use; with 46 per cent of land already under cultivation, productivity must come from intensification rather than further extension.

• India’s 229 million cattle and 106 million sheep and goats are degrading the 13 per cent of land used for grazing; reducing these numbers and turning marginal land over to wildlife (harvested on a sustained-yield basis, as in Utah) would raise productivity.

• The 1952 National Forest Policy reserving 33 per cent of land for forest cover has remained a paper dream, and watershed degradation is implicated in the recurring cycle of floods and droughts described by Sir Richard Temple in 1877 and the 1880 Indian Famine Commission.

• Wetlands outperform reclaimed land in food yield, regulate the hydrology of surrounding regions, and have educational and recreational value — their drainage is a highly undesirable undertaking.