Earth's great deserts formed slowly, as lack of precipitation over areas with low vegetation resulted in vast swaths of arid land. Some of these dry places, like the Sahara, were once fertile grasslands and may become so again sometime in the far future. Deserts are major geographical features of this planet, a result of natural forces over time.
Desertification, however, resulting from harmful human activity like deforestation and overgrazing that-along with climate change-quickly degrades arid and semi-arid land, is anything but natural. Think the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl years, an environmental disaster that's still healing and serves as a good example of the need for soil conservation and dryland management in drought-prone regions.
When desertification occurs on a massive scale, it threatens biodiversity and limits the amount of land where humans can live or grow food. In short, fighting land degradation is key to protecting both biodiversity and the global food supply. This year's recent UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) focused on all three and on the possibility of using degraded land for biofuel production with its theme of combating land degradation for sustainable agriculture.
According to the statement from UNCCD Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja,
"The conversion of land in unsustainable uses can exacerbate the vicious circle of land degradation, loss of biodiversity and climate change. Land degradation weakens the soil's fertility, disrupts the balance of the water cycle and contributes to food insecurity, famine and poverty, as well as forced migration. Confronting this complex issue requires a global response to increase the productivity of land ecosystems and make sustainable agricultural production a priority through pro-poor policies in view of adaptation to climate change and biodiversity protection. - UNCCD
Gnacadja also emphasizes the need for a global fight against desertification using science and technology to help. While loss of fertile land and subsequent reductions in biodiversity affect the whole world, it's especially critical to increase sustainability for people who live in degraded areas and to respect and preserve local, traditional knowledge there, Gnacadja says.
The UN's agency for combating rural poverty in developing nations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), also notes the importance of policies in vulnerable areas that take poverty into account:
"Dryland ecosystems are very vulnerable to over-exploitation and inappropriate land use. Poverty, political instability, deforestation, overgrazing and poor irrigation practices can all contribute to desertification. Sub-Saharan Africa, where 66 per cent of the land is either desert or dryland, is particularly at risk. Around 1.2 billion people in more than 110 countries are threatened by the problem.
IFAD has made land degradation and its causes a central part of its work, and has an ongoing commitment to address the issue in rural areas. About 70 per cent of IFAD's rural poverty reduction programmes and projects are in ecologically fragile, marginal environments. All IFAD programmes and projects are screened for potential adverse effects on the environment, natural resources and local populations." - IFAD
Modifying agricultural practices on a global scale involves a massive amount of work, of course, and IFAD nottes that changes must occur in water and forest management, crop systems, and planting, particularly since climate change will threaten seeds with more droughts and floods.
What happens if we don't ensure responsible farming and land use in the world's dry areas?
According to John Feffer of the Institute for Policy Studies, consider North Korea. Back in the 1990's, he argues, the agricultural catastrophe and resulting famine happened in part because of desertification:
"Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of arable land - it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. (The comparable global figure for arable land is about 13%.) With heavy applications of fertilizer and pesticides, North Koreans coaxed a lot of food out of a little land. By the 1980s, however, the soil was exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy prices hit an economy already in crisis. Desperate to grow more food, the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation.
Big mistake. When heavy rains hit in 1995, this dragooning of marginal lands into agricultural production only amplified the national disaster. The resulting flooding damaged more than 40% of the country's rice paddy fields. Torrential rains washed away topsoil, while rocks and sand, dislodged from hillsides, ruined low-lying fields. The rigid economic structures in North Korea were unable to cope with the triple assault of bad weather, soaring energy, and declining food production. Nor did dictator Kim Jong Il's political decisions make things any better." - CommonDreams.org
Feffer doesn't just place the blame on North Korea's land degradation, either. In a truly frightening scenario, he places that country's devastating famine side-by-side with our current global food crisis and attributes them both to the same sources. If we don't pay attention to the North Korean "canary," he says, then we're stuck in the same coalmine.
"Back in the early 1990s, the North Korean leadership failed to grasp the correlation between rising oil prices, declining food stocks, and environmental stresses - and the political pundits and politicians of the planet conveniently wrote off the resulting catastrophe as uniquely the fault of the world's weirdest country. Instead of taking a timely hint, wealthier governments simply shrugged off the warnings of scientists, development professionals, and energy specialists about future crises." - CommonDreams.org
Today, the recent UN biodiversity and food crisis conferences, in addition to this one on desertification, represent a strong commitment to the broader Millennium Development Goals.
Whether the world addresses high energy costs, food supply problems, and environmental damage like land degradation as related, interdependent global challenges remains to be seen.
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