Degraded soil
June 26, 2009
Some 70 percent of the world's arid regions face desertification, and in around 110 countries - most of them poor - desertification threatens an area roughly the size of Europe.
Twenty million tons of grain are lost annually due to desertification and, over the past 40 years, one third of the world's arable land has been abandoned.
Even though there is no doubt about the causes of desertification, and the strategies needed to combat it are known, no turnaround is yet in sight. Why is it that neither the UN Desertification Convention nor countless initiatives and programs have managed to halt the ongoing process of desertification?
Unsustainable land management
The principal factors behind desertification are unsustainable land management and climate change. As far as land management is concerned, incorrect farming practices also play a major role. These include the cultivation of annual crop species, coupled with management methods that intermittently leave soils uncovered and exposed to erosion.
Other aspects of "incorrect" farming practices include faulty irrigation and either a total lack of fertilization or lopsided use of mineral fertilisers. This often leads to soil mineralization, particularly in tropical regions, depriving soils of their capacity to store water. Carbon compounds, previously fixed in the soil in the form of organic matter, are released into the air in the course of the mineralization process. This reduces the soil's buffering capacity for drought and flooding, at the same time directly contributing to climate change.
A good number of resource problems are closely interlinked: Together, deforestation, species loss, climate change, growing scarcity of water resources, and the loss of organic matter in soils are responsible for desertification; they are both its cause and effect.
Does this mean that we have no choice but to capitulate? No. What it means is that by developing and using intelligent approaches we can achieve several goals at once. Soil conservation techniques, including erosion control walls, agro-forestry, and organic fertilization, are methods that are both effective and widely known - and these need to be applied on a larger scale.
The reason why the picture continues to be dominated by individual measures is not technical in nature, indeed this must be seen as a problem bound up with economic incentives and political interests.
Incentives to support farmers
Since agriculture is organized primarily along private lines, soil conservation measures need to be carried out mainly by the private sector. It is essential that incentives be set to ensure that investments in farmland yield returns, and the relatively high prices currently commanded by agricultural goods offer a good opportunity.
There is considerable evidence that farmers carry out soil protection measures on their own if they lack more profitable alternatives and if the know-how and cost viability are available. There is no lack of instructive examples, and German development cooperation offers a good number of them. It is high time to start providing farmers in desertification-prone regions with appropriate advisory services as well as with the funds they need to transport stones to build erosion control walls, etc., and to do so not intermittently but as a general rule.
However, both agro-industry and institutional conditions also need to be modernized. One correct and promising approach would be to encourage the agrochemical industry to gear production more to soil substrate additives.
Moreover, the agricultural policies of developing countries urgently need to be reoriented to reduce the fertilizer subsidies so widespread today and instead to increase the credit available in the agricultural sector. And land rights need to be modified in such a way as to ensure that farmers have incentives to undertake soil conservation measures.
No time to lose
Instead of continuing to generate vast amounts of greenhouse gases by producing and using mineral fertilizers incapable of achieving the hoped-for results on degraded soils, it would make far more sense to engage in organic agriculture keyed chiefly to on-farm resources. This could serve to enhance soil storage capacity and - in cases where the needed organic matter is unavailable - to regenerate it by using industrially produced soil substrates. Land management of this kind tends to raise yields per unit area to earlier levels, and to do so precisely in arid regions.
But is also essential to protect land at the supra-farm level, on state-owned land. This, though, calls for a huge supply of labor. In keeping with a proposal advanced by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), a "Global Green New Deal" could be used to realize the action plans adopted to implement the UN Desertification Convention, and in times of recession this would at the same time amount to an effective labor market policy.
This should also include large-scale projects - like the building of "green walls" in China and the Sahel Belt - and efforts to link them with the numerous individual participatory measures already in progress, in order to achieve synergy effects.
It would be important to implement measures geared at once to conservation and re-cultivation in order to come up with comprehensive measures that serve to reach several goals at the same time: protection of forests, water, climate, and soils. This is a realistic aim in that the different organizational phases involved basically tend to correlate positively with one another.
How much time do we have left? The good news is that in many cases desertification is reversible. The bad new is that this goes hand in hand with declining marginal utility, and when a certain stage of degradation has been reached, re-cultivation proves so labor-intensive that it is more attractive for the population to migrate to urban areas. In other words, we have no time to lose. This is not a question of "aid" but of global responsibility.
Author: Dr.Susanne Neubert/ (ara)
Editor: Kate Bowen
Dr. Susanne Neubert is a senior researcher at the German Development Institute (Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik - DIE), which is a multi-disciplinary think-tank for German and multilateral development policy. Based in Bonn, the institute draws together the knowledge of development research available worldwide, dedicating its work to key issues facing the future of development policy. It consults on the basis of independent research findings in Germany and the rest of the world and deals with current issues in cooperation between industrial and developing countries.