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ENVIRONMENT: Degraded Lands Need to Be Irrigated with Money

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Sep 3 2003 (IPS) - The lack of funds conspires against strategies for fighting desertification, warn participants in an international conference underway in the Cuban capital, amidst a flood of criticisms of the industrialised world for failing to comply with commitments aimed at curbing land degradation.

Burkina Faso’s environment minister, Djiri Dakar, said in an address before the Sixth Conference of Parties (COP6) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) that international institutions "must support us, once and for all, in putting into practice" the plans that have been drawn up.

Disappointment in the lack of commitment of the rich donor nations has been the common denominator of COP6, which began Aug. 25 and this week entered its decisive final phase, with a special meeting of 16 heads of state and government, mostly from Africa, the continent hardest hit by desertification and drought.

Desertification is a gradual process of "soil productivity loss and the thinning out of the vegetative cover because of human activities and climatic variations such as prolonged droughts and floods," according to the UNCCD.

Experts calculate that two-thirds of Africa is desert or arid land, as is a quarter of Latin American and Caribbean territory.

But the desertification process also affects wealthy nations: more than 30 percent of the United States is considered degraded land, and 31 percent of Spain’s territory suffers the same fate.

Many delegates at the Havana conference have interpreted the absence of high-level representatives from Europe, Japan and the United States as indifference, and point to the ongoing "ecological debt" that the North owes the developing South.

The lifestyles and consumption patterns of the industrialised countries have been the principal cause of environmental deterioration affecting our planet today, said the heads of state in a joint statement Tuesday.

The rich countries must assume their specific obligations, due to the "greater responsibility" they have in environmental degradation and their greater financial capacity for tackling today’s challenges, they said.

"The North should be here, because those countries are part of the problem," Raquel Peña-Montenegro, Latin America-Caribbean director of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), told IPS.

Some of the industrialised world’s investments in the developing South "can be very harmful," such as those destined at the mining industry, with their "disastrous impacts on our region and enormous short-term benefits for the mining companies," she said.

But the solutions do not just require resources from the North or the measures those countries implement to protect the environment, Peña-Montenegro said. "The qualitative leap needed is that those governments make the terms of the Convention a priority on their agendas."

IFAD, a specialised agency of the United Nations, designs and finances – through loans and donations – projects aimed at helping poor rural communities escape poverty.

Of the 1.2 billion people worldwide who live in extreme poverty, 900 million live in rural areas, according to IFAD estimates.

In Tuesday’s declaration, the heads of state agreed to accept the Global Environment Facility as the financial mechanism of the Convention to Combat Desertification. They also added the issue of land degradation to the UNCCD’s mandate.

Leonard Good, president of GEF, an agency of the World Bank, announced in a work session of ministers and experts that the facility would have an additional 500 million dollars available over the next three years for projects to curb land degradation.

The experts responded that level of funding is not enough. "But it is better than what we had before," Sergio Zelaya, the Convention’s coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean, told reporters.

In their declaration, the heads of state urge the GEF to draw up guidelines to facilitate access to financial resources for small island nations, where soil degradation and erosion have a greater impact relative to their economies.

The desertification of islands, such as those in the Caribbean, has an immediate and direct effect on estuaries and on coral reefs, taking a toll on fisheries, an important source of food for local populations, say experts.

"On these islands, it is all a chain. The impact is transferred to the marine environment and affects the entire region," Antonio Perera, an expert with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told IPS.

The Convention to Combat Desertification was approved in Paris on Jun. 17, 1994, and entered into force in 1996. It is the first and only international law related to the problem. To date, 190 countries have signed or ratified the Convention.

More than 250 million people directly suffer the effects of desertification, according to U.N. figures.

"Desertification is not the natural expansion of existing deserts but the degradation of land in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas," states the UNCCD web site.

Human actions that contribute to desertification include overcultivation, livestock overgrazing, deforestation, and poor irrigation practices. "Such overexploitation is generally caused by economic and social pressure, ignorance, war, and drought," says the UNCCD.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development, held last year in South Africa, cited the treaty as a crucial instrument for fighting poverty in arid rural regions.

Before they head home Friday, the delegates to the Havana conference must lay out the means for achieving sustainable development and the Millennium Development Goals related to food security and poverty eradication, as established by the U.N. General Assembly in 2000.