On the initiative of African countries at the Earth Summit in 1992, governments agreed to draw up a Convention to Combat Desertification. After five rounds of negotiations, the Convention was completed in June 1994.
LOSING GROUND
Of the world's 5.2 billion (5,200 million) hectares of useful dry land, 69%, an area that represents one quarter of the earth's land surface, has already suffered erosion and soil degradation. Africa, where two thirds of the land is dry land, has suffered most. Nearly half the continent has already been affected. Many areas of Asia and Latin America are also hard-hit, as well as parts of Southern Europe and North America. In addition to the enormous human and environmental costs of this problem, the word is losing $42 billion in yearly agricultural potential. Most of all, as fertile soil is degraded, millions of people who rely on the land lose their hopes for a better life.
To those who don't live in the drylands, the problem may seem far away. But its effects touch everyone:
* When poor farmers or herders can no longer produce enough food, their lives are in danger. Millions of dollars are diverted into emergency aid. Waves of environmental refugees are driven to the cities of developing and developed nations, undermining political and social stability.
* Wild species native to the drylands are being lost forever. Many of the world's staple grain crops were originally wild dry land species. When the natural dry land flora disappears, we lose the chance to discover new crops that can help to feed humanity.
* Even if we buy our food in supermarkets, we all live off the land and share in the bounty of the Earth. When the supply of fertile land is shrinking and the world population is growing by 90 million people every year, it is a problem for all of us.
Speaking to the negotiators who worked on the Convention, James Gustave Speth, Administrator of the UN Development Programme, said:
"If the world's people are to have a nutritionally adequate diet, world food output must at least triple in the next half century, given likely population increases. It will be difficult enough to achieve this expansion under favourable circumstances, an conditions may be far from favourable. For example, according to recent estimates by the world's leading soil scientists, an area of about 1.2 billion hectares, about the size of China and India combined, has experienced moderate to extreme soil deterioration since World War II as a result of human activities. Over three-fourths of that deterioration has occurred in the developing regions, most of it in arid and semi-arid regions. When combined with other environmental threats to the agriculture resource base, loss of water and genetic resources, loss of cultural resources, and climate change, both local and global, the situation is disturbing indeed.
The goal of achieving sustainable food security in the decades ahead emerges as one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced. Food output must be tripled, and people must have the income to buy it. The erosions of the resource base due to desertification and other factors must be halted and then reversed. Failure on any of these fronts will lead to unprecedented international tragedy."
The causes of desertification include overgrazing, overcropping, bad irrigation and the felling of trees, which combine with climatic variations to degrade the land.
Underlying these processes, other factors are at work. Among them:
POPULATION PRESSURES:
One factor contributing to pressure on the land is the growing number of people to be fed. When in many countries the population is doubling roughly every thirty years, it is clearly likely that more trees will be cut for firewood or hat land will be pushed beyond its productive capacity. A long-term programme to combat desertification must go hand in hand with increased investment in voluntary family planning services, primary health care, basic education, and credit and economic opportunities for women, which in turn will lead to reduced birthrights.
LAND TENURE:
Farmers cannot be expected to invest in soil conservation if they have no security of tenure on their land. In many areas the disruption of traditional land tenure systems has been a major factor contributing to desertification.
TRADE AND DEBT:
The international economic environment, and the policies of the major industrial powers, contribute indirectly to land degradation. Developing countries are under pressure to grow cash crops on the best land in order to earn foreign exchange to pay the interest on their debts. This forces peasant farmers onto marginal lands that soon become degraded. Dumping of subsidised beef by the European community on West African markets undermines the incomes of herders in the Sale region, forcing them in turn to undercut the ecological basis of their future welfare in their struggle to survive.
THE DESERTIFICATION CONVENTION
On the initiative of African countries at the Earth Summit in 1992, governments agreed to draw up a Convention to Combat Desertification. After five rounds of negotiations, the Convention was completed in June 1994.
The Convention has now been signed by over 100 nations, and will come into force once 50 countries have ratified it (which usually involves a vote in the national parliament.) It is important that governments ratify the Convention as quickly as possible, since a number of steps in its implementation P for example, systems for international scientific and technical co-operation P must wait until the Convention comes into force as a legally binding document.
Among the key commitments in the Convention:
• Affected countries will prepare comprehensive National Action Programmes on desertification.
• The Parties will "ensure that decisions on the design and implementation of programmes to combat desertification and / or mitigate the effects of drought are taken with the participation of populations and local communities."
• A Global Mechanism will be established "to promote actions leading to the mobilisation and channelling of substantial financial resources." The Global Mechanism will be housed in an existing agency.
• National desertification funds will be established to channel financial resources rapidly and efficiently to the local level.
• "Substantial financial resources" will be provided by developed countries and "adequate financial resources" by affected developing countries.
• The Parties will "promote, finance and/or facilitate the financing of the transfer, acquisition, adaptation and development of environmentally sound, economically viable and socially acceptable technologies relevant to combating desertification."
What matters now is what each national government, in South and North, does to turn these general commitments into real resources, real action and real involvement of local people in planning and implementing programmes to save their land.
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