Most conflicts, particularly in Africa, can be traced, at least partly, to a mismanagement or shortage of local resources, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai said yesterday.

Speaking at the launch of the South African Faith Communities Environment Institute in Johannesburg, Maathai said that it was crucial that the link between the responsible management and equitable sharing of resources and the creation of a peaceful society be recognised.

She said that these two elements, combined with the establishment of an authentically democratic system, formed the 'three pillars' of any stable State.

Maathai commended South Africa for its attempts to remove foreign plant species, such as eucalyptus and pine, from its forests, particularly in watershed areas.

She said that, while these species have their uses to industry, their presence destroys all other plants in the vicinity, which can cause floods, damage the soil and facilitate corrosion.

In 2004 Maathai became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize, for her work in promoting ecologically-viable social, economic and cultural development in Kenya and in Africa, and particularly for her Green Belt Movement, through which, for nearly thirty years, she has mobilised poor women to plant 30-million trees.

Yesterday, commenting on the relationship between resource-management and the conflicts in Africa, she said that it is the capacity to see these linkages that will enable African states to draw up effective policies and ensure that the continent's resources are effectively managed and equitably shared.

Here Maathai echoes other African intellectuals, such as Professor Devan Pillay, who argues in the Centre for Policy Studies' recently-published 'Trajectories for South Africa' that all conflicts can be traced to a “scramble for resources” and that, in South Africa specifically, the issues to be redressed in achieving national unity are therefore not political, but economic.

Maathai also emphasised it is important that government and the private sector both work towards all three of the 'pillars' simultaneously, if stable countries are to be developed and sustained.

Further, in order for democracy to succeed, the rights of majority and minority groups must be emphasised, she concluded.