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However, there is another factor: the combination of rural poverty and the fragile environment in the dry areas could prove explosive.
In the poorer WANA countries where more than 30% of the population is engaged in agriculture, each hectare of arable land increases daily GDP per worker by US$2.1. However, if the land is irrigated, the figure is US$3.9. Given that farmers are on the margin--the average agricultural worker has access to only one hectare--there is an obvious incentive to irrigate. But several countries in WANA have less than 500 cubic meters of renewable freshwater per head annually. Many countries are now turning to unsustainable irrigation practices; pressure to produce leads to excessive year-on-year irrigation with serious consequences for salinity and soil fertility. Non-renewable ground water
is being mined.
There is also an alarming threat to another natural resource--the soil itself. Wind erosion in steppe areas has been aggravated by overgrazing and fuelwood collection; water erosion on sloping land, worsened by hard use of the soil, is carrying the earth away from areas where it can be used to areas where it can not, silting dams and watercourses in the process. There is also a severe threat to plant genetic resources as an impoverished rural population uses every last available square meter of land, wiping out wild plants.
There are answers. ICARDA and its partners in the national programs are working with farming communities to devise natural-resource conservation measures for farmers to use in the field; these include developing appropriate technologies for both rain-fed
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million a year, and lentil US$360 million, to Turkey. Wheat, on which ICARDA cooperates with another sister Center, CIMMYT, is worth over US $1868 million for Kazakstan and US $415 million for Morocco. ICARDA is also responsible for research into feed and grazing in the dry areas, and meat and milk are significant nearly everywhere. There is a crucial role for ICARDA in combatting environmental degradation, both directly--through devising control strategies--and indirectly by helping to raise farmers' incomes so that they are in a position to implement those strategies.
We must hurry. If we fail, interaction between poverty and environmental fragility will devastate the landscape. The rural poor will then be forced to migrate to cities to place further stresses on urban infrastructures already stretched to breaking-point. Or they may travel further, attempting to enter northern countries. There could be real consequences for social and political stability.
It has happened before. The uplands of northwest Syria are a moonscape of rocks, the result of a population that clawed too much from the land in the first millennium AD. They left behind the ruined architecture of a sophisticated culture, but the soil, and the people, have gone.
Will the rural poor of the dry areas be driven, in the future, to seek the gates of some new Byzantium?
Dr Abelardo Rodríguez is Agricultural Economist, and Mike Robbins is Science Writer/Editor, ICARDA.
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and irrigated agriculture. But these are useless if farmers cannot implement them. We must raise rural incomes to the point where rural communities are able to invest in environmental protection.
ICARDA's mandate crops are directly relevant to farming income in the dry areas. For example, in Ethiopia, barley is worth about US$114 million annually. (This will be an underestimate; as discussed earlier, on-farm consumption hides much of the output, especially where a crop is used--as barley is--for subsistence.) In Kazakstan it is worth nearly US$804 million. In fact it is a significant element in the farming income of most dry-area countries, especially the poorer ones. Faba bean is worth nearly US$10 million a year in Sudan, where it is crucial to the diet of the poor. And it is a massively important crop in China (although not, in general, in the dry areas of that country). Chickpea, for which ICARDA has a joint mandate with its sister Center, ICRISAT, is worth over US$574
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