Abstract

A decade ago, David Pimentel and his associates (1998) reported to us that at least ten million hectares of arable land were being eroded and also abandoned throughout the world every year and consequently to compensate such a loss, a huge amount of replacement is claimed from forests and other sources for agriculture and human settlement. In the meantime, world population exceeded 6 billion in the year 1999, and the projected data indicate that it is going to be almost 9 billion within the next 40 years. For that reason, the demographers and environmentalists have highlighted that the main challenge for environmental management throughout the world today is to determine our planet’s capacity to sustain such a huge amount of burgeoning human population. The paper thus assesses specifically the impact of growing population on agricultural resources around the world, creating depressing pressure on sustainable environmental management. To exemplify such a trend of agricultural land use, the paper incorporates a detailed example from an ethnographic case study on indigenous land-use practices and the experiences associated with modern cultivation for adapting to adverse situations caused by severe impact of a growing population in the agricultural sector in rural Bangladesh.

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