There are few countries in the world where the need to reconcile the requirements for conservation of natural resources with the exigencies of development is as acute as it is in Ethiopia. The country is affected by chronic food insecurity and is dependent on external food aid. It is one of the poorest countries in the world and ranks 171 (out of 174) on the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Index. The overwhelming majority of its population—85%—is engaged in low-yield agriculture, in which technology is said not to have changed much for thousands of years. This population is growing at an annual rate of 2.5%. Agricultural land is scarce, forests have largely disappeared, and water is limited in many places. How can resources be conserved and development strengthened? What is the outlook for the future in the badly eroded and overpopulated Ethiopian highlands?

These questions have no easy answers. Given the country's recent history of social upheavals, wars, and famines, economic resources are necessarily limited. There are no models that can be readily applied, although there is a growing body of field experience with promising approaches. Hard data for planning purposes are difficult to find. One way of trying to overcome these obstacles is to conduct carefully monitored case studies that can generate such hard data in a limited area and then extrapolate their findings.

One such case study is Reconciling Conservation With Sustainable Development: A Participatory Study Inside and Around the Simen Mountains National Park, Ethiopia, authored by Hans Hurni and Eva Ludi and published in 2000 by the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Berne, Switzerland. Both authors are eminent scholars of Ethiopian natural resources, having worked in the country for many years and trekked on foot over vast distances in the mountainous highlands.

The Simen Mountains National Park in the northern Ethiopian highlands was identified by UNESCO already in the 1960s as an area of international interest because of its unique flora and fauna. It is known for its topographic ruggedness, with steep escarpments and high mountains—the highest being over 4500 m—and for its rich natural biodiversity. There are species endemic to this area, such as the Walya ibex, a long-horned mountain goat. The park was gazetted in 1969. It was affected by the civil disturbances in Ethiopia during the 1980s, but today it is open and functioning as a natural park and a destination for tourists.

But the area in and around the park has been inhabited for over 2000 years. Demographic trends today show a doubling of the population every 25 years or so. The result is a scarcity of good farmland, heavy soil erosion, shortening of fallow periods, declining agricultural yields, and deforestation. The farming population is encroaching on the habitats of the rare animals, threatening their numbers. The future viability of the park is in serious danger.

Hans Hurni assembled a multidisciplinary team to carry out a comprehensive field survey in and around the park during 5 months in 1994. His team included Ethiopian and Swiss experts in fields such as wildlife, ecology, soils, land use, and socioeconomics. As the title of the study indicates, the team used participatory appraisal techniques to define the needs and priorities of the local population and then juxtaposed them against the views of the team. In this manner, the team arrived at a set of development priorities designed to reconcile conservation with sustainable development by protecting the habitats in the park while providing a lasting livelihood for the affected population. The study thus provides a blueprint to the Ethiopian government and foreign donors for safeguarding the park and its unique natural resources.

The technique used, called sustainable development appraisal (SDA), differs from the more widely known participatory rural appraisal (PRA) technique in terms of its integration of “external” views—that is, those of the study team—with those of the indigenous population. This methodological tool was specifically developed for this study and has subsequently been further refined. However, the study does not discuss the operational implications of this technique in sufficient detail to allow conclusions about its wider application in other contexts inside and outside Ethiopia. Obviously, development planners cannot always have at their disposal a large, multidisciplinary team able to spend several months in the field in a relatively limited area. It would be interesting if Hurni et al could devote some future work to examining the costs and other resource constraints of this technique. One suspects that for large rural development interventions, the more rough-and-ready traditional PRA techniques will be more affordable.

The study provides very precise local development profiles for 30 villages in and around the park area with a total population of some 30,000 people. These profiles yield information on socioeconomic characteristics, land use and farming systems, natural resource endowments, and village dynamics and trends. They also include development priorities that reconcile farmers' expressed needs with needs perceived by the study team, according to the SDA methodology. This information is the backbone of the study.

The authors are able to demonstrate in precise terms why the peasant agriculture being practiced in these villages is not sustainable. In this rugged terrain, steep slopes are being cultivated because of the shortage of arable land, as elsewhere in the Ethiopian highlands—a practice that accelerates soil erosion. The study estimates that 7 mm of soil, corresponding to 70 tons/ha, are lost to erosion every year. Replacing this loss would require fallow periods ranging from 6 years in the lowlands to 23 years in the highlands for every single year of cultivation. But the pressure on arable land means that fallow periods have in fact been reduced to 1 to 4 years “if existent at all.” This neatly illustrates the situation over most of the Ethiopian highlands. Given existing farming technology, the land simply cannot sustain the population living on it today, let alone increased numbers in the future. As a consequence, the authors correctly conclude that “there is an urgent need to induce other development activities in other sectors such as economic development outside the farming sector.”

But they are less specific on how this might be achieved. Perhaps it is unfair to ask them to supply ideas along these lines, as that would take them far beyond the original purpose of their study. Nevertheless, the search for sustainable solutions to the major development issues facing Ethiopia must certainly proceed in this direction. It is worth noting that in one sense, Ethiopia is facing the opposite problem of Zimbabwe, a country much in the news these days. There the government is opting, albeit seemingly illegally and sometimes with the use of violence, for the solution of allowing landless people to occupy large land holdings. In Ethiopia, the government is faced with the need to get people off the land, in a sense making them landless, with a view to allowing the land to recuperate, and also to allow consolidation of small farms into large and more rational farm units.

But if the country is to avoid another social upheaval, alternative employment opportunities will have to be provided. Therein lies the real difficulty, given Ethiopia's poverty, lack of resources, and lack of urban growth centers. Ethiopia has an urban population of only 16.7% (1998), far less than the 32.7% average for sub-Saharan Africa. Industry accounts for only 6.7% of the gross domestic product (1998), the lowest figure in the world, and thus cannot absorb significant numbers of landless people from the countryside. The solution must therefore be sought in diversification of the rural economy through stimulation of cottage industries, intensive rural projects, etc. No ready solution to this complex problem is available, and few viable ideas have been tested. Yet the issue must be tackled, lest famine become a permanent feature of life for the millions of people living in the Ethiopian highlands. The authors show that several of the villages in the study area already depend on external food aid.

The Simen Mountains National Park can provide some employment opportunities through tourism. The study has a short section on management of the park, with the involvement of the local population. This section could have been further elaborated—for example, through references to the Campfire Model developed in Zimbabwe, where some success has been achieved by making local populations responsible for the management of wildlife and other natural resources to promote tourism. Experience with the Campfire Model could be very valuable in the Simen Mountains and elsewhere in Ethiopia.

Land tenure is one of the major issues in domestic Ethiopian politics today. In the process leading up to the parliamentary elections in May 2000, the major calamities facing the nation in the north (war with Eritrea) and in the south (famine) were barely mentioned. But the system of land tenure was subject to lively debate, with the opposition arguing that land must be privatized and the government insisting that the present system of state ownership of all land remains viable. The current system is criticized, among other reasons, because it does not give land users security of tenure, since land is subject to redistribution caused by the population pressure. The lack of security of tenure leads to the low propensity of farmers to undertake permanent improvements of their holdings, such as terraces on sloping land and the planting of trees. As a result, insufficient action is taken to arrest soil erosion. The study mentions this problem, saying that “lack of land security, whether real or perceived, was often mentioned as a cause for not investing in the land.” However, it could arguably have gone even further, highlighting this as one of the major issues that the government needs to address to increase farm productivity.

The layout of the book is appealing, with useful boxes to highlight key statements. Hurni is a geographer, and this is reflected in the GIS work and excellent maps of the study area. It is therefore somewhat regrettable that the quality of the black and white photographs in the richly illustrated volume does not quite match that of the maps. Nevertheless, the study should be well suited for teaching students interested in the universal conflict between conservation and development. It would be hard to find a better case study to illustrate this conflict.

In April of this year, the UN approved USD $9 million to support a sustainable development project in the Simen Mountains regions. Hurni and Ludi originally formulated the project on the basis of their work in the area. It is not often that academic research results in investment for development. It must be a great satisfaction to the authors to see that there are now improved possibilities for addressing the issues that they raise in the study.