ABSTRACT
In the last few decades, there has been great concern over the issue of natural resource management in the global context. People are very much aware that the supply of various non-renewable natural resources on this planet is shrinking rapidly due to over-exhaustion and enhancement of resource appropriation. There has been rapid transformation of the world’s natural landscape to agriculture, and it is learned that such use of natural resources will soon exceed its carrying capacity by causing an irreversible damage to its natural ecosystem. While land use practices often vary greatly across the world, their ultimate purpose usually remains the same which is to extract the natural resources for instant social needs, knowing clearly the severe impact of it on the environment. In the meantime, the world population has increased from 3 billion in 1959 to 6 billion in 1999, which took only 40 years for it to double. The US Census Bureau of the
International Data Base also projected and mentioned that this number will be 9 billion in the year 2044, an increase of 50% within a span of 45 years (US Census Bureau, 2010). Accordingly, the demographers and environmentalists have posed a concern; the main challenge for the global environment is to determine our planet’s capacity to sustain such a huge number of growing populations. In this context, the carrying capacity (Note 1) of the planet may further be measured by calculating the per capita requirement of food and nutrition subsistence. To provide adequate food subsistence to the people living with diverse diet will require at least 0.5 hectare of arable land per person (Lal & Steward, 1990), and at this time, we have only 0.27 hectare per capita land available to us, which will drastically be reduced to 0.14 hectare per person within the next 40 years due to loss of land caused by population pressure (Pimentel, 1993; Pimentel et al., 1994; Pimentel et al., 1995; Pimentel, 1997). In his book titled ‘World Soil Erosion and Conservation’ published in the year 1993, David Pimentel mentioned that per capita shortage in the availability of land has remained the major reason for severe food shortage and malnutrition in many parts of the world. The environmental depression is further intensified due to soil erosion in agricultural areas where 75 billion of metric tons of soil are demolished from the fi elds through wind and water, mostly affecting the cultivatable land (Myers, 1993). Furthermore, it is documented that deforestation and desertifi cation have been occurring in the last two decades causing the human beings to be more vulnerable to shortages of land (Skole & Tucker, 1997). In the process of deforestation and desertifi cation, more forest areas are converted for required farming activities (Note 2).
