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English
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All of us in Africa are slowly waking up to the fact the African crisis is essentially an environmental problem that has precipitated such adverse symptoms as drought, famine, desertification, overpopulation, environmental refugees, political instability, widespread poverty, etc.
We are awaking to the fact that if Africa is dying it is because her environment has been plundered, overexploited, and neglected.
Many of us in Africa are also waking up to the realization that no Good Samaritans will cross the seas to come to save the African environment. Only we Africans can and should be sufficiently sensitive to the well-being of our environment.
Mrs. Rahab W. Mwatha
The Greenbelt Movement
WCED Public Hearing
Nairobi, 23 Sept 1986
rather than their own, a pattern that is reinforced by domestic restrictions on the amounts that can be cut in domestic forests.
IV. ECONOMIC VALUES AT STAKE
30. Species conservation is not only justified in economic terms. Aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and scientific considerations provide ample grounds for conservation. For those who demand an accounting, the economic values inherent in the genetic materials of species are alone enough to justify species preservation.
31. Today, industrialized nations record far Greater financial benefits from wild species than do developing countries, though unrecorded benefits to people living in the tropical countryside can be considerable. But the industrial countries have the scientific and industrial capacity to convert the wild material for industrial and medical use. And they also trade a higher proportion of their agricultural produce than do developing nations. Northern crop breeders are increasingly dependent on genetic materials from wild relatives of maize and wheat, two crops that play leading roles in the international grain trade. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that contributions from plant Genetic material lead to increases in productivity that average around 1 per cent annually, with a farm-gate value of well over $1 billion (1980 dollars).[1]
32. The U.S, maize crop suffered a severe setback in 1970, when a leaf fungus blighted croplands, causing losses to farmers worth more than $2 billion. Then fungus-resistant genetic material was found in genetic stocks that had originated in Mexico.[2] More recently, a primitive species of maize was discovered in a montane forest of south-central Mexico[3] This wild plant is
- ↑ Agricultural Research Service, Introduction, Classification, Maintenance, Evaluation,. and Documentation of Plant Germplasm (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1985).
- ↑ L.A. Tatum, 'The Southern Corn Leaf Blight Epidemic', Science, Vol. 171, pp.1113-16, 1971.
- ↑ H.H. Iltis et al., 'Zea diploperennis (Gramineae), a New Teosinte from Mexico', Science, 12 January 1979.
