Income Benefits of Better Management

When rural farmers, forest users, and fishers adopt more sustainable practices, considerable income benefits can follow. A recent study of four low-income farming villages in arid western India illustrates the potential for higher agricultural income. All four villages had participated in government-supported projects from 1995 to 2001 to better manage their degraded watersheds—part of a nationwide program known as Watershed Development. They used a variety of water and soil conservation techniques, such as check dams and contour tilling, as well as tree planting to revegetate denuded slopes. The idea was to capture the occasional but intense monsoon rains, preserving them as soil moisture, rather than letting them run off and erode the soil (Reddy et al. 2004:303-306).

The success of these measures from an ecosystem standpoint showed clearly in the recovery of groundwater levels, with the water table in local wells rising an average of 25 percent in spite of several years of scant rainfall. From this increase in soil moisture flowed other benefits. The amount of land under irrigation increased. Grass forage increased as well in most villages, including forage on common property areas, which, prior to the watershed treatments, had been too degraded to produce useable fodder. Crop yields rose significantly, both on irrigated and nonirrigated land: rice yields up 15-44 percent; peanut yields up 16-81 percent. Village land became more valuable too, because it was in better condition and had more agricultural potential (Reddy et al. 2004:308-312, 318).

With higher productivity, household incomes grew. Income from all sources—agriculture, livestock, and wage employment—increased from 50 to over 100 percent from their levels before the watershed rehabilitation. These increases, in turn, are reflected in higher spending on education and medical care. The benefits from adopting more sustainable watershed practices also extended beyond income. The availability of drinking water went up in all the surveyed villages and the time spent fetching water decreased—as much as 80 percent in one village—a major benefit for women (Reddy et al. 2004:310, 313, 321). (See Figure 4.2.)

Likewise, indigenous communities in the Philippines’ mountainous Kalinga province have revived traditional irrigation and forest-management techniques that protect local watersheds. Using a combination of reforestation, agroforestry plantings, environment-friendly irrigation, and fish production within active rice paddies, Kalinga families were able to greatly increase agricultural production and raise incomes. They have repaired over 90 traditional irrigation systems to sustainably supply their rice terraces, while on the watershed slopes individual families maintain and protect their own agroforest plantings. Between 1990 and 1996, the combination of watershed protection and good irrigation management raised annual incomes for over 1,000 poor families in seven indigenous communities by an average of 27 percent, all while maintaining over 80 percent of the original high-biodiversity forest cover (Southey 2004:1-2; UN Housing Rights Programme 2005:154).

Similar stories of income gains can be told for communities that have improved their management of local forest ecosystems, fisheries, or grasslands. In the Himalayan village of Waiga, villagers banned grazing and burning on the grasslands above the community in 1995, and planted 1500 alders. Over the next few years grassland recovery raised fodder production sevenfold—enough for all local livestock plus a surplus for sale—while the returning tree cover provided leaf litter for agriculture and stopped gully erosion in the steeply sloped terrain (Munsiari 2003:5, 15-19).

In Fiji, over 100 coastal villages have designated local tabu zones in nearshore waters where fishing and shellfish collection is banned to promote recovery of the marine life that forms a central element in local livelihoods and culture. Robust recovery in these local protected zones has spilled over into adjacent fishing areas, increasing the village marine harvest. In three villages where economic evaluations have been conducted, income from marine resources—typically half of all household income—increased 35-43 percent from 1997, when the tabu zones were established, to 2003. (For details, see Chapter 5 case study, “Village by Village: Recovering Fiji’s Coastal Fisheries.”)

In each of these instances, villagers have pursued more ecosystem-friendly practices because they visibly supported their resource-based livelihoods, boosting both their direct use of ecosystem goods and their cash incomes. These examples and many others clearly make the case that better ecosystem management pays off at both a household and a village level.

This is good news for rural economies in general. But how effective is this increase in environmental income at reducing village-level poverty? Unfortunately, evidence shows that the benefits of ecosystem improvements are often skewed toward higher income brackets. With more land, trees, cattle, or capital to invest in the increased farming potential of their recovered lands, the rich tend to capture more of the income bonus that healthier ecosystems provide (Reddy et al. 2004:318).

But poor families certainly do benefit also, for example by greater availability of wage employment, and greater ability to meet their subsistence needs for firewood, fish, and the like. This provides a maintenance level of ecosystem support and greater income resilience for hard times. But it may not provide enough support to take a firm step out of poverty. For that, governance changes that free up access to ecosystems and promote information and market support to the poor are needed.