Is Poverty Relevant to Conservation?
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Fisheries are one of what
M.A. Sanjayan calls the “Six F’s” of ecosystem services, the crucial lifesustaining benefits provided by nature. The others are fuel wood, fresh water, fertility of soils, fodder for livestock and forest products.
© Carolyn Drake
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Listen as Andrés Ferrer, Country Director for The Nature Conservancy in the Dominican Republic, discusses how he's been leading efforts in his country to bridge the divide between poverty alleviation and environmental protection.
Have you ever wondered how the other half lives? That is, how do nearly 3 billion people scratch out a living on the equivalent of less than $2 a day?
A few months ago, I traveled to Sierra Leone, the West African nation with the miserable distinction of being dead last three years in a row on the U.N.’s Human Development Index. When I arrived, a friend who runs a wildlife sanctuary confided that his chimpanzees live longer than the average Sierra Leonean. I set off on foot through a spiderweb of forest paths to find out what the worst poverty in the world means for people and nature. I carried only a few food items in my backpack—some chocolate, tea, Tabasco sauce, a flask of scotch. My plan was to buy vegetables and meat along the way. After all, in my pockets I carried an ample supply of cash, protected from the penetrating damp by plastic bags.
I paid for this naiveté by losing a dozen pounds in about as many days.
As I stumbled into the village of Yifin on the forested slopes of Mount Loma, the only food I could find for sale was rice. With no means to store or transport food, the villagers can’t risk growing vegetables. So they grow staples like rice or yams, supplement their monotonous, nutrient-poor diet with fruit or plants collected from the forest, catch fish in the streams, and occasionally trap the odd cane rat or monkey. This supplemental diet gives each person about 50 grams—maybe three tablespoons—of meat protein per day. So they eat from the forest. I slowly starved.
In countless poor, rural communities such as this, people derive much of their daily needs directly from nature: cooking fuel from the forest, drinking water from the stream and other basic needs from their surroundings. These services from nature—“ecosystem services,” as scientists put it—are essentially free and keep rural communities afloat. For many people, just six basic ecosystem services provide up to 80 percent of life-sustaining needs. I call these the “Six F’s”—fuel wood, fisheries, fresh water, fertility of soils, fodder for livestock and forest products.
For many of the world’s poor, nature—not government—provides the most reliable social security check. Lose any one of these Six F’s, however, and most of these people will have no choice but to move somewhere else, pray for assistance or starve.
But the story is not all grim. Just as degrading ecosystem services can disrupt lives, stewarding and restoring these services can sustain people during their transition out of poverty. In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement has shown how reforesting denuded areas can improve lives by restoring water supplies, providing fuel wood and replenishing soil fertility. My Conservancy colleagues are working at the Meso-American Reef in Central America, around Komodo Island in Indonesia and elsewhere to sustainably manage fisheries, maintain biodiversity and sustain human needs.
In the past decade, we have seen international agencies, governments and individuals redouble their efforts to combat extreme poverty. Now is the right time for people who care about conservation to join these efforts by supporting win-win solutions that help alleviate poverty while strengthening ecosystems.
The work of those fighting poverty will no doubt be made easier and more lasting with our help. Similarly, it strikes me that as we work to halt the loss of Sierra Leone’s pygmy hippo and its forest habitat—a loss that would make all future generations poorer forever—our most important allies might be those in the poverty-alleviation business.
