ENVIRONMENT: New U.N. Agency To Fight Desertification

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Feb 16 1996 (IPS) - More than 110 countries have areas threatened by drought or the encroaching desert; the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that desertification costs the world some 42 billion dollars each year.

Africa, the poorest of all the continents, loses nine billion dollars annually. The world community approved the U.N. Convention on Desertification in 1994, but as of Jan. 31, 1996, only 25 countries had ratified it. Fifty states must ratify before it can take force.

The Swedish president of the convention’s international negotiating committee, Bo Kjellen, predicts that the ratification process will be finished by June 1997, when the convention’s secretariat will be ready to start work.

First obstacle however is not the slow pace of ratification, but the need to clarify who will have responsibility over the new agency and the substantial funds pledged to its works.

The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), based in New York, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), in Rome, have both offered to host the workings of this new ‘global mechanism’. Germany has offered to provide a home base for the convention secretariat HQ in Bonn.

A decision on a home for the secretariat of the desertification convention — which along with the framework convention on climate change and the convention on biodiversity, was born at the 1992 Rio ‘Earth Summit’ — will be made at the next session of the international negotiating committee next September in New York.

While the negotiation committee prepares the international framework of the Convention, the campaign against desertification is taking its first step.

The top objective of the Convention was the struggle against desertification in Africa, where more than one billion hectares, equivalent to 73 percent of its dry lands, are suffering moderate or serious degradation.

But throughout 1995 and into 1996 seminars on national awareness of the problem were held in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Mediterranean basin. All agreed that the first step had to be publicity to stress the seriousness of the situation.

Latin American and Caribbean states met in Buenos Aires last January and announce national campaigns in countries like Bolivia, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. In Asia China, India, Iran and Pakistan also organised awareness seminars. Consultations with the Central Asian Republics were held in Kazakhstan in June 1995.

As part of the Middle East peace process, the Secretariat of the Convention cosponsored a joint study by Israel, Jordan and the Palestine National Authority on ways to restore the ecological equilibrium of the Rift Valley. A follow-up meeting is planned in July 1996.

The Provisional Secretariat of the Convention has reported that desertification presently affects 30 percent of the surface of the planet’s dry lands. Around 70 percent of the 5.2 billion hectares of dry lands still used for agriculture has been affected.

Although the most acute degradation is taking place in Africa, another 1.4 billion hectares are also affected in Asia.

The Secretariat observed that the problem was not limited to the developing countries, since the region with the highest proportion (74 percent) of seriously or moderately desertified dry lands was, surprisingly enough, North America.

Five countries of the European Union are also suffering from the phenomenon, and a large part of the most affected Asian areas used to be part of the former Soviet Union.

Desertification has a high human cost. The Secretariat said that it threatens means of subsistence for more than one billion persons, almost one fifth of the world’s population.

More than 135 million persons may find themselves forced to migrate, but it is impossible to determine how many have already had to abandon their lands, now turned to dust, but the figure is estimated to be in the millions.

In Mali and Burkina Faso alone, one sixth of the population has been impoverished by the advance of the desert.

Kjellen says the phenomenon of desertification is closely linked to the problem of world food security and poverty. This is why the subject will be high up the agenda of this November’s World Food Summit in Rome.