Productivity and Sustainabllty
it is now important to explore the relationship between productivity and sustainability. Rapid growth in agricultural productivty reduces the amount of land needed to generate food and allows a regeneration of forests and pastures. For instance, in the western world land has reverted to forests due to the increased productivity of agriculture, and reduction in the population engaged in agriculture. Through effective public policy, Asian countries too have modernized their agriculture by the increased use of chemical fertilizers (the use of which increased tenfold from 1975 to 1985), irrigation and high-yielding varieties. Increase in food production eliminated widespread hunger and famine and relieved population pressure on the land, although more effective public policies would have enabled greater effect of the Green Revolution on reducing poverty, decelerating population growth and improving the environment in South Asia than occurred.
Productivity and income growth cause a demographic transition, i.e. it reduces human fertility rates via the positive effects on the health of women, and on infant and child survival. Without income increases, absence of a demographic transition further raises the danger of the ecological disaster which some ecologists fear (see Avery, P. Smith). To generate productivity increase, however, requires greater use of energy per capita, e.g., in the form of chemical fertilizers and transportation. It also means a shift from wood energy to fossil fuels.
Environmental concerns in the industrial world, however, undermine the popular support for increased energy use in the developing world, for example, the increased use of chemical fertilizers. Whereas aid could finance fertilizer imports in developing countries strapped for foreign exchange, resistance to such financing arises notwithstanding low
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