Environment and Economics from the perspective of the South

JORGE RABINOVICH

Managing Human-Dominated Ecosystems

Missouri Botanical Garden Press

Lugar: St. Louis; Año: 2001; p. 328 - 370

During the colonialist European expansion of the last century a variety of agricultural and industrial practices, successful in their original countries, were carried to developing countries as technological packages, and transferred despite cultural and climatic differences. Later the Green Revolution, introducing high yield, genetically uniform cereals, as well as farm equipment, and other chemical adjuncts, even irrigation schemes, were transferred to developing countries, with a few outstanding successes but many more failures (Viglizzo, 1998). With a world-wide strong globalization and privatization scheme, knowledge intensive economic activities are characterized by relatively small investment, little natural resources utilization, generating moderate contamination, and still maintaining a dynamical effect on the economy. This supposedly diminishes pressure on land use, especially by reducing forests’ clearings, with benefits such as protection of springs and river sources (thus conserving water resources), reduction of erosion, conservation of the biodiversity, and reduction of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Similar effects would be felt on aquatic and terrestrial non-forested ecosystems. The Knowledge Revolution (Chichilnisky, 1997a) significantly relates to property rights aspects of physical and biological resources as well as to the intellectual property rights associated with knowledge intensive activities (Chichilnisky, 1997b). Can current economic, social and political conditions in the South assimilate this tendency or last century’s European expansion with technological packages will be repeated?