Ethiopia: Deforestation: Difference between revisions

The advent of cash cropping has also played a hand in deforestation. In some areas industrial-style agriculture was introduced to supply export markets for cash to fund modernisation projects, e.g. coffee, resulting in the clearing of large areas of forest and the introduction of intensive, often non-sustainable agricultural practices. Cash crops also reduce the amount of cultivated land available for subsistence farming and hence encourage migration into more marginal areas or the settling of evicted smallholder farmers in forest settlements which leads to further clear felling.<ref name="Dessie" />   

This goes hand-in-hand with the rise of cash cropping, as well-intentioned aid foreign programmes and World Bank-imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes have laid stress on modernising the Ethiopian economy and incorporating it into the global economy through the farming of monocultural crops for world markets, such as the aforementioned coffee, and cereal crops for export. This has exacerbated forest clearance for fresh fertile land that is in many cases quickly exhausted without the liberal application of chemical fertilisers. The same process also tends to de-emphasise customary agricultural and forestry practices through which some equilibrium between livelihood, environmental sustainability and resource exploitation was maintained in the past.