To a large extent, these problems result from or are exacerbated by inadequate property rights, poverty, population pressure, inappropriate government policies, lack of access to markets and credit, and inappropriate technology for agricultural intensification. Faulty agricultural practices, which account for another 28 percent of soil degradation, may also be partly attributable to poverty. Poor people depend heavily on the natural resource base for their basic needs, such as food, energy, water, and housing. Their livelihood is closely tied to the well-being of their resource base. People use and overuse every resource available to them when their survival is at stake and they have run out of alternative mechanisms for survival.
Desperate hunger leads to desperate strategies for survival.
At that point, conservation of natural resources for their own future welfare or the welfare of their children is less important to them. Poor people often lack sufficient incomes or access to credit to purchase appropriate tools, materials, and technologies to practice environmentally sustainable agriculture, protect natural resources against degradation, or rehabilitate degraded resources. Other factors that trigger the poverty-degradation relationship are loss of entitlements by the poor or loss of the capacity to support themselves sustainably. Poor people may lose traditional access to resources if they are displaced by population pressure that reduces their access to land, by misappropriation of common resources by other claimants, and by activities such as construction of dams and creation of wildlife preserves that take land out of use by the poor. In response, the poor may be forced to migrate to marginal lands.