Minding history and world-scale dynamics in hazards research: the making of hazardous soils in The Gambia and Hungary

Hazards can result from combined social and environmental processes. However, it remains commonplace to treat the occurrence of hazards as if isolated from what happens in other, at times faraway places and as if history did not matter. To illustrate how world-scale interconnections and historical processes impinge on the appearance of current hazards, I discuss case studies of soil acidification from The Gambia and Hungary. In the former, pressures from international financial institutions to raise export-oriented cash-crop productivity resulted in the 1980s construction of large-scale dams for wet rice cultivation and other development projects. The result has been the progressive activation of acid sulphate soils that threaten lowland cultivation and freshwater sources. In Hungary, internal social turmoil and contradictions influenced by the US-USSR conflict led to rapid industrialisation of farming and the intensification of export-oriented agricultural production in the mid-1960s. The consequent increasing reliance on agrochemicals has spread the incidence of soil acidification. Both of these cases demonstrate that localised hazards, entailing long-term deleterious consequences, cannot be fully explained or confronted without addressing historical and multiple-scale social processes.