MALAWI POLICIES FOR NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Preamble: the policy spectrum In describing the nexus of environmental problems which beset modern Malawi it is tempting to make predictions by extrapolating current trends. It is possible, for instance, to predict that halfway through the next century the last tree will have been cut, that within three hundred years Lake Malawi will have been filled with soil washed from cultivated lands, and long before either the last antelope will have been shot and the last fish caught. Predictions of environmental catastrophe ignore the enormous capacity of human society to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, and forget the long learning process which accompanied population growth in the developed world. Malawi is undergoing a period of rapid change, in which new and more positive relationships between rural populations and the natural resources on which they depend are beginning to emerge. It would be foolish to underestimate the difficulties which lie ahead, but unhelpful to deny the real progress which is being made. The program of policy and legal reform in the natural resources sectors in which the Government is now engaged will play an important, perhaps a deciding role in that process. The people- the resource users- cannot bring about the necessary changes by themselves.