Population, territory and sustainable development

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Box XI.4 (concluded)
Some of the key measures have been audits, the dissemination of lists of municipalities where
deforestation has reached critical levels and a decree barring public-sector financial institutions from
lending to economic agents with activities in deforested areas. Added to this has been growing market
pressure to obtain guarantees concerning the legal provenance of products (such as meat) and action by
the private sector and civil society (such as a moratorium on buying soy produced in deforested areas).
The action plan has been re-evaluated and readjusted periodically in response to lessons learned and
changes in deforestation patterns and causal factors. Despite all these efforts, cumulative deforestation in
Brazilian Amazonia is substantial, at more than 17% of the original forest area.
Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Sustainable development in Latin America and
the Caribbean 20 years on from the Earth Summit: progress, gaps and strategic guidelines (preliminary version)
(LC/L.3346), 2011.
Policy recommendations for border areas, as discussed in chapter VI, are directly related to the
spaces examined. There are significant differences between these spaces, ranging from those where there
is a true cross-border space and migration and population mobility are a mechanism for regional
integration (between Ecuador and Colombia, for example) to those where the border marks off and
separates two nations between which the migrant exchange (typically, asymmetric) has national impacts
(as with Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Despite this diversity, though, there is a common set of
problems and deficits calling for targeted policies.
Policies concerning health (particularly, sexual and reproductive health) are crucial, because
health services in border areas fall so short of meeting demand, even of the native population. The main
policy recommendation here is to bring local governments into the effort to match supply to the real needs
of the border-area population, both local and migrant. And it is crucial to involve civil society
organizations; they can contribute a wealth of experience in migrant health services.
As for inequalities among regions, which are examined as inequalities among major administrative
divisions in chapter VII, the focus is on policies related to location and, above all, mobility and internal
migration. The main policy messages are set out in the review of the findings of chapters III and IV.
There is recognition of the right to migrate and the benefits that migration from poor areas to rich
ones yields for migrants, for the national economy and for growing regions. In its orthodox version, this
take on reality leads to laissez-faire policies because it is market forces that will guide choices at the
individual level and migrant flows at the economic system level. Besides, this approach sees migration as
an arbiter between regional inequalities and, thus, as a force that contributes to interregional convergence
over the long run.
And there is evidence that push factors prevail in areas of chronic poverty in Latin America,
making the decision to migrate a rational one. The same is true of premature population ageing and the
loss of young and relatively skilled human resources caused by net migration away from areas of chronic
poverty; migration thus creates poverty traps. Moreover, current data do not support the hypothesis that
socioeconomic convergence of subnational spaces is taking place in many of the countries of the region.