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 when exports were depressed, also helped to plunge many developing countries into debt crises. Austerity programmes laid down by the IMF as a prerequisite for extending credit to meet short-term balance-of-payments needs became particularly onerous after the debt crisis. Growth was cut back and many social objectives fell by the wayside, including those having to do with employment, health, education, environment, and human settlements.

10. This was a radical change from the 19606 and 1970s. Then it was rapid economic growth that was seen as an ecological threat. Now it is recession, austerity. and falling living standards. The decline of he 1980s has aggravated pressures on the environment in several ways:
 * Austerity measures and general recessionary conditions have brought sharp declines in per capita incomes and increased unemployment. This forces more people back into subsistence agriculture, where they draw heavily on the natural resource base and thus degrade it.
 * Austerity programmes inevitably include government cutbacks in both the staff and expenditure of fledgling, weak environmental agencies, undermining even the minimal effects being made to bring ecological consideration into development planning.
 * conservation always takes a back seat in times of economic stress. As economic conditions have worsened in developing countries and debt pressures have mounted, planners have tended to ignore environmental planning and conservation in both industrial and rural development projects

11. The critical situations in sub Saharan Africa and debt strapped countries of Latin America demonstrate, in an extreme way, the damaging impacts that unreformed international economic arrangements are having on both development and the environment.

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1. The African Continent
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12. Africa on the whole has been caught up in a series of downward spirals: /…