ENVIRONMENT-UN: Anti-Desertification Experts Meet in Brazil

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Nov 13 1999 (IPS) - Fresh impulses to promote world-wide efforts aimed at combating desertification – particularly in Africa – are expected to emerge from a two-week global conference beginning next Monday (Nov 15) in Recife, Brazil, a United Nations official said.

The conference will be joined by 159 member countries of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Its permanent secretariat is based in Bonn, developing into a Centre for International Cooperation after the German government moved to Berlin last July.

According to UNCDD’s Executive Secretary, Hama Arba Diallo, dryland degradation is a major threat to all continents, severely or moderately affecting 110 countries and some 70 percent of the world’s agricultural lands.

“Nowhere is the problem more serious, however, than in Africa,” says Diallo.

The Recife conference – officially known as the Third Session (COP 3) of the UNCCD – will therefore focus on the national reports that have been submitted by 41 African countries – representing over 75 percent of the African continent’s land area. The reports spell out their efforts to combat desertification.

The conference will also study reports submitted by four African sub-regional organisations, 11 developed country governments and 17 UN and other international organisations and review their efforts to battle desertification.

Underlining the importance of the Recife conference, Diallo said: “Drought and desertification seriously threaten the livelihoods of the millions of people in Africa who depend on the land for most of their needs.”

Before leaving for Recife, Diallo told IPS in Bonn, the permanent seat of the UNCCD secretariat, desertification was also linked to massive migration movements, conflicts and worsening poverty. In recent years, desertification had forced millions of migrants to abandon their land and search for a means of survival in nearby urban centres or in other countries.

“Fortunately, the national reports show that African countries have made important progress in launching National Action Programmes to combat dryland degradation, reforming their institutions and legislation, and transforming the Convention into an effective vehicle for the sustainable management of natural resources, ” said Diallo.

The National Action Programmes are in fact at the heart of the Convention and constitute the conceptual and legal framework for implementing it at the national and local levels. They also enable affected countries to inform their partners around the world about their efforts to combat land degradation and about their needs for international support.

The African governments recognise that poverty is both a cause and consequence of land degradation.

The policies and activities described in their national reports include agriculture and livestock development, water conservation, soil management, forestry, sustainable energy, improved land use, wildlife protection, population and health services, poverty alleviation, disaster management, education and sustainable tourism.

The national reports point out that African governments are also reforming and strengthening institutions in order to create an “enabling environment” for communities to implement the Convention. This includes promoting decentralisation, legislative reforms and land reforms.

The Convention indeed encompasses an entire gamut of social, economic and political aspects of life.

“From the development policy point of view, the Convention constitutes a new instrument, because this is the first time that important principles for development cooperation were agreed in a manner binding under international law,” says Uschi Eid, deputy minister of Economic Cooperation and Development.

The Convention – approved three years ago and ratified by 159 countries – entitles individual countries to hold other countries on to the principles agreed. The people of a country too can demand of their government that it comply with these principles. The Convention lays down the principles of participation, partnership and decentralisation.

The signatory states thus commit themselves to comprehensive participation by the affected sections of the population in the planning, implementation and evaluation of measures to combat desertification, and to partnership-based cooperation at all levels of government and between government and non-government players.

The importance the German government attaches to a successful implementation of the Convention was stressed by Eid in the run-up to the Recife conference.

Addressing a gathering of diplomats, NGOs and journalists in Bonn, Eid said the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) had been asked to provide all the necessary assistance.

The GTZ has in fact opened an office for an active liaison with the secretariat of the Convention. Besides, consultants employed by the government-owned agency in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, are working on several World Bank projects

GTZ is assisting in the implementation of projects aimed at combating desertification in the affected countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, says a new publication released well in time for the Recife conference.

GTZ describes the cooperation with CLISS – Permanent Inter- State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel – as an example of capacity building for combating desertification. It goes back to an agreement in August 1980 when the foundation for a long-term co-operation was laid.

The objective is to support the nine CLISS members – Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal – in ensuring food security, natural resource management and desertification control. In all, nearly 6 million dollars have been made available to date.