By Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Jun 16 2005 (IPS)

Growing desertification worldwide threatens to create millions of environmental refugees, while rising numbers of powerful dust storms affect the health of people even continents away.

Every spring, thick dust storms rise out of the Gobi Desert, affecting much of China, Korea and Japan and even reducing air quality over North America, according to “Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Desertification Synthesis.”

The report is based on information generated for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a 22-million-dollar, four-year global study by 1,300 experts from 95 countries released Jun. 16.

“Desertification is an immense global problem that directly affects two billion people living in drylands,” said Zafar Adeel, assistant director of the United Nations University water academy in Canada and co-author of the report.

Billons more are affected by dust storms, and by migrants forced to leave their degraded lands, Adeel told IPS.

Between 10 and 20 percent of the world’s drylands, which are often productive agricultural areas, are threatened by desertification due to rapid population growth, global warming and globalisation, he said. Drylands occupy more than 41 percent of the world’s land area and produce more than 40 percent of the world’s food.

The U.N. General Assembly has declared 2006 the International Year of Deserts and Desertification, with the goal of highlighting desertification as a major threat to humanity.

Desertification is one of the world’s biggest environmental challenges, the report warns, and one that governments have largely failed to address.

Nearly 30 years ago, representatives from 94 nations attended the first major United Nations Conference on Desertification in Nairobi, Kenya. An action plan was developed to prevent up to 30 million square kms of productive land from being degraded by 2000.

Since then, there have been many meetings and reports, along with the creation of the CCD in 1996, but very little concrete action has been taken to prevent desertification.

“It’s taken a long time to get a consensus on the issues and desertification is not seen as a global threat by developed countries,” said Karel Mayrand, research director at the Unisféra International Centre, a not-for-profit sustainable development group based in Montreal, Canada.

“It’s also been difficult to stress the urgency when there isn’t good information about how much land is being degraded,” said Mayrand, who is editing a book on the CCD.

A global effort to collect accurate data on the extent of desertification and the lands at highest risk is one of the urgent recommendations of the MA report.

“The global community must also commit resources and apply much more political will,” Adeel said.

Few of the more than 170 member countries of the CCD have developed national action plans to combat desertification and fewer still have tried to implement them. And the CCD has very little money or resources to help countries with the implementation, said co-author Uriel Safriel of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a visiting professor at the University of Maryland.

Meanwhile global trade liberalisation, in particular the agricultural subsidies totaling 300 billion dollars in 2002, is putting pressure on dryland agriculture, Safriel told IPS.

Subsidies in the North keep crop prices low, making it difficult for poor farmers in drylands to compete. They either abandon their farms, or are forced into destructive farming practices such as intensive monocropping using high levels of pesticides and fertilisers.

Opening up of world agriculture markets results in more poverty and degradation of drylands, agrees Unisféra’s Mayrand, who co-authored a recent report titled “From Boom to Dust?”

The report documents how trade liberalisation policies promoted by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have pushed small farmers in Brazil, Mexico and West Africa off their land, to be replaced by large export-orientated farms run by wealthy landowners or corporations.

“Small farmers are being forced onto marginal lands or clear-cut forests and that’s increasing global desertification,” he said.

Open markets as advocated by the WTO don’t work unless small farmers have equal access to credit, agriculture inputs and the infrastructure to bring their products to market at a fair price, he said.

Desertification is also dumping more than 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change, says Adeel. Increasing temperatures and the changes in precipitation patterns caused by global warming may be very bad news for drylands, he says.

For example, much of Southern Africa and the Horn of Africa will be drier over the next few decades, leading U.S. climatologists announced at an annual conference of the American Geophysical Union in May. Temperature changes in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans are bringing arid conditions, while the Sahel will be wetter, the scientists reported.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) believes climate change will reduce food productivity by 90 million hectares in Africa by 2008. Asia will also be hit hard. In total, 65 developing countries will lose about 280 million tonnes of potential cereal production, the FAO warned last May.

Spain and the western United States are also highly vulnerable, says Safriel, because they have large populations and limited water resources.

National and local policies that encourage water and soil conservation are of vital importance to combating desertification now and in the future. Drought-tolerant crops, drip irrigation and reuse of treated waste water will all be needed to mitigate the impacts.

“Major investments by donor countries will be needed to avert a future food security crisis,” Adeel said.

Global food productivity per person has already started to decline, cautions Mayrand, who thinks it is highly unlikely that improved seeds or other technologies will offset the continuing decline in agricultural lands and the overuse of water.

“We’re attacking the land and water base that we need to feed people,” he said.

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