Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/169

Environmental Impact of the Oil Industry been a rapid increase in the number of people living in the area just as there has been in the rest of the country.

15.3.2 BACKGROUND ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS IN THE NIGER DELTA

In judging the significance of the impact of the oil industry upon the Niger Delta we must first appreciate the background environment. In other words what would environmental conditions be like in the Niger Delta without the oil industry? There are four issues here, all of which have been discussed in detail in earlier chapters. In summary they are as follows.

In the first place it is absolutely essential to understand the human ecological history of the area. That is the socio/economic history (the culture) of the area and how it evolved in relation to the environment, and how, in dynamic relationship, the environment has been shaped by the culture and by outside influences. Here, it is also important to have a sense of time and to cast off any pre-conceptions which our own culture, education and political views may have given us as environmental assessors. For instance it is easy for outsiders to assume that the cultured forests of the Niger Delta are in their natural state or that all cleared areas are of recent origin. Equally difficult, at times, for local people to accept that their own culture may be as flawed in some aspects as may be the culture of the outsider.

Nigeria as a whole has a high human population growth rate, probably in the region of 3% per annum giving a doubling rate of less than 25 years. This means that according to the 1991 census figures, Rivers, Delta and Bayelsa will have a combined population of about 13 million people by 2015, giving an overall density of 3-4 persons per hectare: very high given the limited areas of dry land.

High human populations and population growth both locally, nationally and globally puts pressure on all the natural resources of the Niger Delta in addition to its oil. Local people need clean water, farmland, fish and forest resources but so do people outside the region. Effectively the demand for the natural resources of the Niger Delta are infinite: for instance every bit of timber that could be felled would find a market. In the near future pressure will intensify for developing the agricultural potential of the Niger Delta, for oil palm and for rice for export. These agricultural activities could have an even more profound influence on the local ecosystems than does oil industry.

Already, as a result of the pressure for food and other agricultural products, most of the forest in the Lowland Equatorial Monsoon ecozone has been cleared and the degradation of agricultural land is a real problem faced by most farmers. All the same, the oil industry has contributed directly to this degradation because the wealth generated by the industry has encouraged government to ignore the need to invest in the development of the national Renewable Natural Resource (RNR) sector of the economy, particularly agriculture. As a result, for instance, the maintenance of fertility by the use of fertilisers is practically unknown in the Niger Delta. 167