ICARDA Caravan, Issue No. 23

Focus

Desertification:
Heading for Catastrophe?

Richard J. Thomas

The world's drylands are often associated with misery, starvation, and conflict. They are home to about 2 billion people who depend on agriculture and natural resources for their livelihood – and are the hardest hit by desertification, drought, and poverty.

Desertification is a growing threat worldwide. Two prerequisites for successful interventions: ensure the local community is fully involved, and combine modern technologies with local knowledge.

Dryland communities are often accused of causing desertification, by extracting resources without fully replacing them. But this is not necessarily true. Many dryland farmers have used traditional methods to conserve resources within their natural environment. Some of these methods are innovative and sustainable; but discriminatory policies at national and international levels have often undermined farmers' capability and intent to implement them. Policies that encourage artificially cheap imports, taxes on the agro-economy to support urban priorities, and neglect of rural infrastructure and institutions, all hamper conservation of natural resources.

Far from being a cause of misery, drylands actually yield higher returns to investments than other areas. A better understanding of desertification will enable us to develop more appropriate, effective solutions.

What is desertification?
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) defines desertification as 'land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, resulting from various factors, including climate variation and human activities'. Desertification is among the biggest environmental concerns today, globally and especially in drylands, which cover over 40% of the world's land area. Over 2 bilion people are afected; and the UNCCD has declared 2006 as the 'International Year of Deserts and Desertification'.

Desertification dates back to the beginning of agriculture 7000 years ago and was noted during the collapse of Mesopotamia and the Roman Empire. In the region of the 'hundred dead cities' near Aleppo, Syria, 1-2 meters of soil was washed away in the first century following the invasion of armies and disuse of conservation structures.

More recent manifestations include the dust bowls of the American mid-west in the 1930s, the shrinking of the Aral Sea from the 1960s onwards, and debilitating dust storms in China in the 1990s that continue today (costing the country US$ 2-3 billion every year). All these occurred during attempts to increase agricultural productivity!

What is land degradation?
Land degradation, like desertification, is hard to define. It is complex and involves biodiversity, soil health, water resources, landscape, and agricultural productivity dimensions. Definitions can be contradictory, but degradation generally refers to a temporary or permanent decline in productive capacity of the land.

Dryland environments are fragile, and vegetative cover is sparse. Grazing, excessive tillage, or wood harvesting exposes the soil to wind and water erosion. The soil surface becomes crusted or 'sealed'; water runs off instead of being absorbed into the soil. Runoff also leads to heavy loss of the limited stock of essential plant nutrients, and the land soon loses its productive potential.

Can we prevent desertification?
It is far cheaper to prevent desertification, through preservation and enhancement of soil cover and soil organic matter, than to rehabilitate degraded land. Sustainable solutions include better crop and soil management, increased use of mixed crop-tree-livestock systems, water harvesting and conservation, and judicious use of fertilizer and organic manure.

The Khanasser Valley in Syria, site of a long-term research project to improve resource management and fight desertification.

These and other methods have been tried for many years, but often failed. Why? Because they involved 'silver bullet' technological solutions implemented using a top-down approach. What is needed is a more holistic approach, combining technology, policy and institutional options with the participation of land users. We must involve communities more closely in development planning, and motivate them to adopt improved practices. Governments and institutions must work with them and not for them. They must provide opportunities and the enabling environment that encourage and reward wise stewardship of the land.

Dryland communities are diverse and complex; so interventions must be carefully designed. We need to build on the wealth of local knowledge, with a clear understanding of local priorities and constraints. Many development projects take little consideration of community views and local knowledge. For example, policies on building large reservoirs and water conveyancing often ignore the ways in which water is allocated at farm level. We need an integrated approach that links communities, governments, regions and the international community in order to overcome these limitations.

New consortium against desertification
To address these issues, ICARDA and ICRISAT have formed a new consortium, known as Oasis, comprising over 100 desertification experts worldwide.

Global problem, global ramifications. This massive dust cloud formed over the Sahara desert and traveled 1500 km over the Atlantic ocean (source: NASA).

The consortium framed two core questions: How can poverty in resource-poor desertification-prone areas be reduced? How can the poor achieve stable, secure livelihoods without undermining the ecosystem goods and services (natural resource base) that they depend on? To find the answers, the consortium will focus on six priority areas.

1-	Improving understanding of the nature, extent and severity of desertification and dryland degradation; combining new technology with local priorities and values through user participation and ground-truthing.
2-	Study of institutions and policies (formal and informal, local and larger-scale) that constrain or foster sustainable dryland development.
3-	Increased understanding of how dryland agricultural and natural ecosystems function, and the degree to which productivity can be enhanced by improving soil fertility and water management, integrated crop-tree- livestock systems, and other innovations.
4-	Participatory breeding: developing crop, tree and livestock varieties/breeds with improved adaptation, stress tolerance, product quality, and other traits.
5-	Building on dryland traditions of diversification to develop new income sources: new and domesticated indigenous crop/tree species, farming systems, products, markets, and supporting enterprises.
6-	Improving the exchange of information, expertise, tools, and solutions in ways that can engage the poor and address their needs.

In each of these six areas, cutting-edge science will be blended with field research, by scientists from multiple disciplines and multiple institutions working with local communities and government agencies. Details of this approach, called Integrated Natural Resources Management (INRM), are provided in another article in this issue.

Recent studies have challenged the common assumption that investments in drylands deliver lower payoffs than in favorable areas. On the contrary, the relative neglect of drylands in the past has probably left major gains unrealized, which are now ripe for picking.

The dryland poor have demonstrated their ability and eagerness to learn, adopt, and invest in new technologies and practices that will help them move out of poverty. The research and development community cannot afford to ignore these opportunities any longer.

	___________________________________________
	Dr Richard Thomas (r.thomas@cgiar.org) is Director of ICARDA’s Megaproject on Improving Land Management to Combat Desertification.

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