Who Gets More Environmental Income: Rich or Poor
Who Gets More Environmental Income: Rich or Poor?
Environmental income is not only important to the poor. Richer families also make extensive use of income from ecosystem goods and services. (“Rich” here does not necessarily imply high income by developed-world standards, but a greater relative level of wealth and opportunity compared to lowerincome households within the same community.) In fact, several recent studies have shown that the rich commonly derive more environmental income, in absolute terms, than the poor do (Cavendish 2000:1990-1991; Fisher 2004; Narain et al. 2005:10,14; Twine et al. 2003:472). This generally reflects the fact that they have greater ability to exploit what ecosystems can provide. For example, higher-income families may have more livestock and can therefore make better use of forage resources in common areas, whereas a poor family’s forage demand may be more limited due to their smaller herd size.
A study in the Jhabua district in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh showed wealthier families using more fodder resources to feed their larger herds (Narain et al. 2005:5). In addition, the rich frequently have greater access to hired labor, transportation, credit, arable land, or other factors needed to maximize harvest of natural products or agriculture and bring them to market. In the Jhabua study, these factors allowed rich families to earn nearly five times as much environmental income—from a combination of farming, livestock rearing, and collection of wild products—as the poorest families.
(See Box 2.1 Findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: How Do The Poor Fare?)
On the other hand, even if the rich capture greater environmental income, they tend not to be as dependent on such income as are the poor. Environmental dependency and poverty seem to go hand in hand. A 1999 study of 12 Himalayan villages found that the poor relied on natural resources for 23 percent of their income, compared to only 4 percent for the rich (Reddy and Chakravarty 1999:1145). In Botswana’s Chobe region, the difference was even greater, with the poor depending on wild products from nearby common property lands for half their total income, while the rich depended far more on employment income and remittances, deriving less than 20 percent of their income from the nearby commons. (See Figure 2.4 Dependence on Nature For Income In Botswana.) This was in spite of the fact that rich families in Chobe earned four times as much actual income as poor families from natural resources (Kerapeletswe and Lovett 2001:6-7).
The poor and the rich also tend to use natural resources differently to derive income. The poor tend to pursue a variety of different sources of environmental income, while the rich often concentrate on one or two that allow them to make use of their greater assets for agriculture or livestock rearing. In the Chobe example, three-fourths of the income that the rich derive from the commons comes from livestock rearing, while the poor diversify their efforts, spending time in at least five different activities, from collecting wild foods to making baskets and carvings from natural materials. (See Figure 2.5 Poor vs. Rich: Different Strategies For Environmental Income In Botswana.)
The continued dependence of the poor on ecosystems for their livelihoods stems from several factors, but these generally reduce to the fact that nature is their best—and often only— option. The poor often lack the education and social access to find consistent wage labor. Without wage income, households lack the cash to purchase fuel, food, and services like health care. To substitute, they use small-scale agriculture and other forms of nature-based income, often collected from common areas. When given options for other forms of employment, the poor often reduce their dependence on environmental income.
In any case, the clear implication of most detailed studies of environmental income is that increasing the productivity of ecosystems, and therefore the potential to derive more income, would benefit all income classes in rural areas, not just the poor. Both the poor and the rich stand to gain more income, and rural economies more stability, if ecosystems are managed for greater productivity.
