Who is responsible for the environmental destruction?
The rural poor are often blamed for being responsible for environmental degradation processes. According to this view, they overuse their limited resources as a short-time survival strategy. For example, small farmers work often on marginal lands like on slopes or in dry-areas. Production in these marginal areas is likely to lead to soil erosion or desertification. In other cases, landless peasants are seen as the main responsible for deforestation since they move deeper into the forests seeking for agricultural land. Preparatory documents to the World Summit on Sustainable Development WSSD have adopted implicitly or explicitly this view. Blaming the poor for ecodestruction adds insult to injury since they are not the main culprits but the main victims of it. They are certainly responsible for part of the environmental degradation, but they are acting out of desperation. Since the landless rural poor are deprived of suitable agricultural land they are victims of violations of the funda
