Healthy soils are critical for global food production and provide a range of environmental services. Photo: FAO/Olivier Asselin

By Busani Bafana
NTUNGAMO DISTRICT, Uganda, Jan 13 2015 (IPS)

A report published last month by the Montpellier Panel – an eminent group of agriculture, ecology and trade experts from Africa and Europe – says about 65 percent of Africa’s arable land is too damaged to sustain viable food production.

The report, “No Ordinary Matter: conserving, restoring and enhancing Africa’s soil“, notes that Africa suffers from the triple threat of land degradation, poor yields and a growing population."Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root. In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil." -- Rattan Lal

The Montpellier Panel has recommended, among others, that African governments and donors invest in land and soil management, and create incentives particularly on secure land rights to encourage the care and adequate management of farm land. In addition, the report recommends increasing financial support for investment on sustainable land management.

The publication of the report comes with the U.N. declaration of 2015 as the International Year of Soils, a declaration the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) director general, Jose Graziano da Silva, said was important for “paving the road towards a real sustainable development for all and by all.”

According to the FAO, human pressure on the resource has left a third of all soils on which food production depends degraded worldwide.

Without new approaches to better managing soil health, the amount of arable and productive land available per person in 2050 will be a fourth of the level it was in 1960 as the FAO says it can take up to 1,000 years to form a centimetre of soil.

Soil expert and professor of agriculture at the Makerere University, Moses Tenywa tells IPS that African governments should do more to promote soil and water conservation, which is costly for farmers in terms of resources, labour, finances and inputs.

“Smallholder farmers usually lack the resources to effectively do soil and water conservation yet it is very important. Therefore, for small holder farmers to do it they must be motivated or incentivized and this can come through linkages to markets that bring in income or credit that enables them access inputs,” Tenywa says.

“Practicing climate smart agriculture in climate watersheds promotes soil health. This includes conservation agriculture, agro-forestry, diversification, mulching, and use of fertilizers in combination with rainwater harvesting.”

Before farmers received training on soil management methods, they applied fertilisers, for instance, without having their soils tested. Tenywa said now many smallholder farmers have been trained to diagnose their soils using a soil test kit and also to take their soils to laboratories for testing.

According to the Montpellier Panel report, an estimated 180 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are affected by land degradation, which costs about 68 billion dollars in economic losses as a result of damaged soils that prevent crop yields.

“The burdens caused by Africa’s damaged soils are disproportionately carried by the continent’s resource-poor farmers,” says the chair of the Montpellier Panel, Professor Sir Gordon Conway.

“Problems such as fragile land security and limited access to financial resources prompt these farmers to forgo better land management practices that would lead to long-term gains for soil health on the continent, in favour of more affordable or less labour-intensive uses of resources which inevitably exacerbate the issue.”

Soil health is critical to enhancing the productivity of Africa’s agriculture, a major source of employment and a huge contributor to GDP, says development expert and acting divisional manager in charge of Visioning & Knowledge management at the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), Wole Fatunbi.

“The use of simple and appropriate tools that suits the smallholders system and pocket should be explored while there is need for policy interventions including strict regulation on land use for agricultural purposes to reduce the spate of land degradation,” Fatunbi told IPS

He explained that 15 years ago he developed a set of technologies using vegetative material as green manure to substitute for fertiliser use in the Savannah of West Africa. The technology did not last because of the laborious process of collecting the material and burying it to make compost.

“If technologies do not immediately lead to more income or more food, farmers do not want them because no one will eat good soil,” said Fatunbi. “Soil fertility measures need to be wrapped in a user friendly packet. Compost can be packed as pellets with fortified mineral fertilisers for easy application.”

Fatunbi cites the land terrace system to manage soil erosion in the highlands of Uganda and Rwanda as a success story that made an impact because the systems were backed legislation. Also, the use of organic manure in the Savannah region through an agriculture system integrating livestock and crops has become a model for farmers to protect and promote soil health.

Meanwhile, a new report by U.S. researchers cites global warming as another impact on soil with devastating consequences.

According to the report “Climate Change and Security in Africa”, the continent is expected to see a rise in average temperature that will be higher than the global average. Annual rainfall is projected to decrease throughout most of the region, with a possible exception of eastern Africa.

“Less rain will have serious implications for sub-Saharan agriculture, 75 percent of which is rain-fed… Average predicated production losses by 2050 for African crops are: maize 22 percent, sorghum 17 percent, millet 17 percent, groundnut 18 percent, and cassava 8 percent.

“Hence, in the absence of major interventions in capacity enhancements and adaption measures, warming by as little as 1.5C threatens food production in Africa significantly.”

A truly disturbing picture of the problems of soil was painted by the National Geographic magazine in a recent edition.

“By 1991, an area bigger than the United States and Canada combined was lost to soil erosion—and it shows no signs of stopping,” wrote agroecologist Jerry Glover in the article “Our Good Earth.” In fact, says Glover, “native forests and vegetation are being cleared and converted to agricultural land at a rate greater than any other period in history.

“We still continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace in soil,” he says. If a country is extracting oil, people worry about what will happen if the oil runs out. But they don’t seem to worry about what will happen if we run out of soil.

Adds Rattan Lal, soil scientist: “Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root. In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil.”

Edited by Lisa Vives

José Alberto Chacón weeds between bean plants on his small farm in Pacayas, on the slopes of the Irazú volcano, in Costa Rica. The terraces help control water run-off that would otherwise cause soil erosion. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
ALVARADO, Costa Rica, Mar 4 2014 (IPS)

José Alberto Chacón traverses the winding path across his small farm on the slopes of the Irazú volcano, in Costa Rica, which meanders because he has designed it to prevent rain from washing away nutrients from the soil.

His careful husbandry ensures his crops of beans, maize and carrots on his half-hectare parcel of land, which like that of many other farmers in the Pacayas area, is located on steep slopes that are prone to the loss of the land’s fertile layers.

Chacón told IPS that he is constantly applying techniques like designing a winding path, and building terraces or containment walls with harvest leftovers, and he feels like an acrobat leaping from one measure to another to keep his family farm alive.

“It hurts to see soil being washed into the river. I’m getting older and my piece of land will always be the same size, so I have to find ways of making it flat with terraces, so as to keep working it as long as God wills,” said the 51-year-old Chacón, who is married and has three children.

One of his children helps with the sale of excess produce. His 50-year-old wife, Irma Rosa Loaiza, shares the farm work. “We are a model of family agriculture. She comes out to the plot of land itself to help,” said her husband.

The community of Pacayas, one hour east of San José, is located on the eastern end of the fertile Costa Rican central valley, between the Irazú and Turrialba volcanos. The population density is higher than the national average and it receives 2,300 millimetres of rain a year, on slopes of up to 70 percent.

Now climate change is another factor, increasing rainfall and soil erosion. The Ministry of Environment and Energy estimates that erosion has reduced agricultural GDP by 7.7 percent between 1970 and 1989.

The 2014 agricultural census may show a worsening of the situation in this Central American country of 4.4 million people, where agriculture contributed 10.7 percent of GDP in 2000 but 8.67 percent in 2012, according to official figures.

Chacón, wearing black rubber boots and a white hat for protection against the sun, proceeds along the cultivated rows. His field has a 50 percent slope, and there is a height difference of up to 20 centimetres between one maize row and another, sufficient for rainwater not to pour straight down to the Pacayas river in the canyon below.

Farmers in Pacaya cultivate crops on a slant across the slope so that rains will not wash away their soil. In this micro-basin, 68 percent of the fields have a slope of more than 30 percent. Credit: Diego Argueda Ortiz/IPS

He is a subsistence farmer, like the rest of the farmers in the area, whose parcels are an average area of 2.5 hectares and who eke their living out of the mountainside. If their crops fail, they do not eat; if they overplant and the soil is washed away, they also fail to put food on the table.

“There has to be a balance between sustainability and food security. I can’t tell local people: this land is unfit for agriculture, you should plant forests, because it is all they have,” agricultural scientist Beatriz Solano, assigned to the area for the past 17 years by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, told IPS.

A study published in 2013 by the journal Environmental Science & Policy describes how “a combination of extreme precipitation, steep topography and questionable land use has led to heavy erosion and impairment of soil regulation services” in the area.

Even families with land on gentler slopes have had to apply new techniques. The certified organic farm Guisol is an example. Its owners, 68-year-old María Solano and 43-year-old Marta Guillén, work small parcels using live hedges to contain erosion, as they showed IPS.

Not all the area’s producers are aware of the importance of such actions. A survey carried out in 2010 by a researcher with the inter-American Tropical Agronomy Research and Training Centre (CATIE), based in this country, found that seven out of 10 farmers in Pacayas did not use soil protection techniques.

Moreover, the small size of the farms means that they do not benefit from payment for forest cover, the preferred system of erosion control in Costa Rica.

Experts say the latest soil conservation practices in family agriculture will be essential in Pacayas, because of the changes in rainfall patterns.

“There used to be steady rainfall from October to January or February, with thick mist. Now it’s more unstable, and without water potatoes do not grow, and it is farmers who lose out, because seeds and fertilisers are increasingly expensive,” 68-year-old farmer Guillermo Quirós, who had to rebuild the drainage channels on his farm two years ago, told IPS.

In 2011 researcher Carlos Hidalgo of the National Institute of Agricultural Innovation and Technology Transfer concluded a research study monitoring soil management in the area.

“It’s a process that has to include all the actors, including municipalities, producers and research centres,” Hidalgo told IPS in his office in San José.

The multi-disciplinary effort is making progress. Every two months, the soil management committee for the Birrís river basin, a group made up of different sectors, meets in Alvarado municipality to which Pacayas belongs. There they plan their work for the next period.

This month the modest town hall of Alvarado hosted the first meeting of 2014, presided over by local environment manager Gabriela Gómez, and seven out of the eight participants were women. In Pacayas, men carry out most of the agricultural work and women take on local planning and conservation.

“We’re gong to ask the TEC (Technological Institute of Costa Rica) to do a study of run-off, so we can improve the ditches, prevent flooding in the lowlands of the district and reduce erosion,” Gómez told IPS. She has led environmental initiatives that have achieved nationwide recognition.

Pacayas is located in the Birrís river basin, a hydrographical complex rising in the mountains above the town, which feeds the hydropower plants of the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE).

The Institute spends close to four million dollars a year removing sediment derived from soil erosion from its reservoirs.

Meanwhile, Chacón and other small farmers keep building terraces following the contours of their plots, to prevent the rains from stripping their topsoil.

The impact is clearly visible. On the other side of the river that borders his field, the earth is reddish and bare and there are only a few green patches lower down the slope. “That soil has already been eroded,” said agricultural scientist Solano.

Healthy soil looks dark, crumbly, and porous, and is home to worms and other organisms. It feels soft, moist, and friable, and allows plant roots to grow unimpeded. Credit: Colette Kessler, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service

By Stephen Leahy
REYKJAVÍK, Iceland, May 31 2013 (IPS)

Soil is becoming endangered.This reality needs to be part of our collective awareness in order to feed nine billion people by 2050, say experts meeting here in Reykjavík.

And a big part of reversing soil decline is carbon, the same element that is overheating the planet."Soils are like a bank account. You should only draw out what you put in." -- Rattan Lal of Ohio State University

“Keeping and putting carbon in its rightful place” needs to be the mantra for humanity if we want to continue to eat, drink and combat global warming, concluded 200 researchers from more than 30 countries.

“There is no life without soil,” said Anne Glover, chief scientific advisor to the European Commission.

“While soil is invisible to most people it provides an estimated 1.5 to 13 trillion dollars in ecosystem services annually,” Glover said at the Soil Carbon Sequestration conference that ended this week.

The dirt beneath our feet is a nearly magical world filled with tiny, wondrous creatures. A mere handful of soil might contain a half million different species including ants, earthworms, fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Soil provides nearly all of our food – only one percent of our calories come from the oceans, she said.

Soil also gives life to all of the world’s plants that supply us with much of our oxygen, another important ecosystem service. Soil cleans water, keeps contaminants out of streams and lakes, and prevents flooding. Soil can also absorb huge amounts of carbon, second only to the oceans.

“It takes half a millennia to build two centimetres of living soil and only seconds to destroy it,” Glover said.

Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown, are lost to land degradation. In the past 40 years, 30 percent of the planet’s arable (food-producing) land has become unproductive due to erosion. Unless this trend is reversed soon, feeding the world’s growing population will be impossible.

The world will likely need “60 percent more food calories in 2050 than in 2006”, according to a new paper released May 30 by the World Resources Institute. Reaching this goal while maintaining economic growth and environmental sustainability is one of the most important global challenges of our time, it concludes.

Urban development is a growing factor in loss of arable lands. One million city dwellers occupy 40,000 hectares of land on average, said Rattan Lal of Ohio State University.

Plowing, removal of crop residues after harvest, and overgrazing all leave soil naked and vulnerable to wind and rain, resulting in gradual, often unnoticed erosion of soil. This is like tire wear on your car – unless given the attention and respect it deserves, catastrophe is only a matter of time.

Erosion also puts carbon into the air where it contributes to climate change. But with good agricultural practices like using seed drills instead of plows, planting cover crops and leaving crop residues, soils can go from a carbon source to a carbon solution, he said.

“Soil can be a safe place where huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere could be sequestered,” Lal told IPS.

When a plant grows it takes CO2 out the atmosphere and releases oxygen. The more of a crop – maize, soy or vegetable – that remains after harvest, the more carbon is returned to the soil. This carbon is mainly found in humus – the rich organic material from decay of plant material. Soil needs to contain just 1.5 percent carbon to be healthy and resilient – more capable of withstanding drought and other harsh conditions.

“Healthy soils equals healthy crops, healthy livestock and healthy people,” Lal said.

However, most soils suffer from 30 to 60 percent loss in soil carbon. “Soils are like a bank account. You should only draw out what you put in. Soils are badly overdrawn in most places.”

Farmers and pastoralists (ranchers) could do “miracles” in keeping carbon in the soil and helping to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and feed the world if they were properly supported, Lal said.

The world’s 3.4 billion ha of rangeland and pastures has the potential to sequester or absorb up to 10 percent of the annual carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement production, estimates Ólafur Arnalds, a soil scientist at the Agricultural University of Iceland.

Eliminating overgrazing and using other pasture management techniques will reduce the number of animals on the land in the short term but it is better for the long term health of grazing lands. While these practises can help with climate change, there many other good reasons to adopt them, Arnalds told IPS.

That view is echoed by many here since determining exactly how much carbon a farm field or pasture can absorb from the atmosphere is highly variable and difficult to determine.

Proper land management can help with climate change but in no way does it reduce the need to make major reductions in fossil fuel use, said Guðmundur Halldórsson, a research co-ordinator at the Soil Conservation Service of Iceland, co-host of the conference.

And using farmland or pastures as a ‘carbon sponges’ will lead to all sorts of problems, Halldórsson told IPS.

“The real key is adopt practices that enhance soil health to improve food productivity,” he said.

That approach is much more likely to help in improve local livelihoods, protect water resources, improve biodiversity,  reduce erosion and help put carbon back into the ground where it belongs, he said.

“Iceland overexploited its lands, trying to squeeze more out of the land than it could handle. We call it ‘killing the milk cow’. We can no longer live off the land as we once did.”

Situated in the North Atlantic, the windy island was once mostly covered by forests, lush meadows and wetlands when the first settlers arrived nearly 1,000 years ago. By the late 1800s, 96 percent of the forest was gone and half the grasslands destroyed by overgrazing. Iceland became one the world’s poorest countries, its people starved and its landscape remains Europe’s largest desert.

Of necessity, Iceland pioneered techniques to halt land degradation and in restoration. And for more than 100 years the Soil Conservation Service has struggled but the gains are small and very slow in coming. Today at least half of the former forests and grasslands are mostly bare and subject to severe erosion by the strong winds.

“We’re still fighting overgrazing here,” Halldórsson said.

Iceland relies far less on agriculture now and the harsh lessons of poor land management of the past are irrelevant to the 90 percent of Icelanders who now live in urban areas.

“The public isn’t supporting land restoration. We’ve forgotten that land is the foundation of life,” Halldórsson said.

Small farmers are returning to organic fertilisers. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
HYDERABAD, India, Oct 23 2012 (IPS)

Worms and termites are not likely to win hearts and minds, but they, along with lichens and microbes, are vital to food security, say biodiversity specialists who attended this month’s United Nations conference on the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in this south Indian city.  

“Worms, termites, lichens and soil microbes may well be the heroes of food production as without these species land-based biodiversity would collapse and food production cease,” Julia Marton-Lefevre, director-general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, told IPS.

“In this day’s fierce competition for political attention and funds, (preventing) land degradation is a tough sell,” said Marton-Lefevre. “It may be one of the most serious threats to global food production and biodiversity over the next few decades, affecting an estimated 1.5 billion (poor) people.

“Soil biodiversity may not be the most glamorous of our biodiversity, but it is nevertheless highly important,” she added.

Safeguarding the underlying ecological foundations that support food production, including biodiversity, will be central to feeding seven billion inhabitants, climbing to over nine billion by 2050, says the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) study ‘Avoiding Future Famines: Strengthening the Ecological Basis of Food Security through Sustainable Food System’ released in Hyderabad.

“Soil is not an empty container, as is thought by modern agriculturists; land is a living organism and has to be valued as such,” emphasised internationally known Indian environmentalist and activist Vandana Shiva. 

Borrowing from Charles Darwin, Shiva said, earthworms create dams without concrete, increase air volume within soil by 30 percent and improve water retention capacity by 40 percent, increasing the life of soil. 

“Unfortunately, we are valuing inefficient systems like chemical intensive monoculture, forgetting that value and benefit lie in securing the soil that provides everything for humanity; discarding natural farming that simultaneously provides grains, firewood and also fodder for cattle,” Shiva told IPS.

Shiva hit out at Indian policy saying it gave “billions of dollars as subsidy for chemical fertilisers, completely ignoring the fact that the solution to hunger and poverty lay in biodiversity promotion – that is being destroyed by chemical farming.”

“Land degradation has been caused by misplaced investment; now we need to change the way we view land,” said Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, told IPS. 

At the Oct. 8- 19 CBD meet developed countries agreed to double funding by 2015 to support developing states meet the internationally agreed biodiversity targets set for 2020. Governments also agreed to increase country funding in support of action to cut the rate of biodiversity loss.

While key decisions taken at the conference mandate better investments in marine and coastal biodiversity, proponents of soil and agricultural biodiversity say more needs to be done on land, given that global food security is at risk.

“In the last century as much as 70 to 80 percent forests in many countries have been cleared for farming. We now need to reverse the trend, ensure that that we focus on revitalising agriculture in a way that it will give back the land its health,” said Gnacadja.

“The era of seemingly everlasting production based upon maximising inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, mining supplies of freshwater and fertile arable land and advancements linked to mechanisation are hitting their limits, if indeed they have not already hit them,” said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner.

“What the world needs is a green revolution with a capital G – one that better understands how food is actually grown and produced in terms of the nature-based inputs provided by forests, freshwaters and biodiversity,” said Steiner.

According to experts, the variety and variability of animals, plants and micro-organisms at the genetic, species and ecosystem levels are necessary to sustain key functions of the ecosystem. For example, a diverse range of soil organisms interacts with the roots of plants and trees and ensures nutrient cycling. 

“The environment has been more of an afterthought in the debate about food security,” said UNEP chief scientist Joseph Alcamo, adding that, “only now the scientific community is giving the complete picture of how the ecological basis for food system is not only shaky but being really undermined.”

“At the moment, 12 million hectares of land where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown disappear every year,” said Marton-Leferve. “It is no coincidence that all three critical planetary boundaries that are today exceeded by human activities – biodiversity loss, climate change and global nitrogen and phosphorous run-offs that create dead zones in once fertile areas – are directly related to our land use practices.”

“The endeavour to build a land-degradation neutral world is a paradigm shift. It means avoiding the degradation of new areas. But where this is inevitable, we have to offset land degradation by restoring at least an equal amount of land which is degraded, ideally in the same landscape, in the same community, in the same ecosystem,” said Gnacadja. 

“Mobilising and employing financial resources may not be so much about hard currency but about our learning – through policy and practice – to account for the natural capital called soil without commodifying it and without taking shortcuts for profit with nature.” Gnacadja said. “When support is forthcoming, in whichever form, developing countries must start walking the talk.”

Currently, 12 million hectares of land are lost annually due to land degradation and desertification. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Karina Boeckmann
Jun 4 2012

Land degradation poses a threat to all life on Earth including humanity. To stop the enormous loss of life-giving land, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is pushing for a sustainable development goal of Zero Net Land Degradation (ZNLD) to be adopted at the upcoming Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20, in Brazil.

“We should not dry up the future we want,” UNCCD General Secretary, Luc Gnacadja, told a press briefing in Berlin last week, referring to “The Future We Want” conference that will take place in Rio de Janeiro from Jun. 20-22, two decades after the first Earth Summit in the same Brazilian town.

According to Gnacadja, agreeing on a sustainable development goal on land-use at Rio+20 is a prerequisite for ensuring future water, food and energy security.

Addressing journalists in the German capital on May 23, Benin’s former minister of environment, housing and urban development presented an UNCCD policy brief, which called on Rio+20 to adopt a “stand-alone goal on sustainable land and water use for all and by all (in agriculture, forestry, energy and urbanisation) through commitment to a land- degradation neutral world.”

“We need to focus on two dimensions of land – in the degraded and non-degraded areas. In the non- degraded areas, we need to avoid land degradation. In the already degraded lands, soil fertility and land productivity should be restored. In other words, zero net land degradation (ZNLD) can be achieved when, over a given period of time, land degradation is either avoided or offset by land restoration,” the paper stated.

UNCCD also warned, “We must bring productive land to life. Land is our natural ally, but its patience is not eternal.”

Causes and consequences

“Human beings have multiple and growing demands on land,” Gnacadja observed. “There is a need for food, fodder and fuels. Land is requested for human settlements and infrastructure, for environmental services, carbon sequestration in soil and vegetation as well as for metals and minerals.”

But at present 12 million hectares of land are lost annually due to land degradation and desertification.

According to experts, food production is the single largest stress factor behind the loss of land; in fact, we might require three planet Earths to meet the demands of human consumption by 2050.
By 2030, nine billion people will need 120 million hectares more land to produce 50 percent more food, Gnacadja said. The demand on energy and on water in agriculture will increase by 40 and 30 percent respectively.

According to the brief, factors weakening the Earth’s land, water and nutrient-constrained systems include population growth, land degradation and desertification, climate change, water and nutrient depletion as well as increasing living standards, changing diets, urbanisation, supply chain waste and losses and globalised trade.

Every minute, the human population increases by 150 people, the paper stated. Twenty-five and 10 hectares respectively are lost to tropic deforestation and soil degradation, while urbanisation swallows up 5.5 hectares of land per minute.

Worldwide, 25 percent of land is already highly degraded, affecting 1.5 billion people.

Land degradation is contributing to food insecurity, hunger, migration, deforestation, political instability and civil strife; and it is conducive to the phenomenon of land grabbing – the disputed investment in foreign land for food and biofuel production, Gnacadja said.

“Asian countries will make up 60 percent of the world’s population in 2050. It is no surprise then that Indians and Chinese are investing in Africa’s land,” the UNCCD policy paper warned.

Sustainable development goals

The UNCCD head believes, “Time is ripe for the international community to commit itself to a land degradation neutral world.”

The world should aim for achieving zero net land degradation by 2030; zero net forest degradation by 2030; and implementing drought preparedness policies in all drought-prone countries by 2020.

“It’s possible to reach this goal, and we know how to do it,” Gnacadja, an architect by profession, explained. In fact, in many parts of the world, especially in drylands, local communities achieved land recovery by planting fertiliser trees, he added.

The UNCCD policy brief bolstered his optimistic view with hard figures: “More than two billion hectares of land worldwide are suitable for rehabilitation of which 1.5 billion hectares would be best suited to ‘mosaic restoration’, where forests and trees are combined with other land uses, including agroforestry and smallholder agriculture.”

According to UNCCD, achieving ZNLD by 2030 requires “the commitment, the support and the active investment of all public and private sector actors, and all parts of the supply and value chain related to land use, as well as local community stakeholders.”

Gnacadja also urged the establishment of an Intergovernmental Panel on Land and Soil as a global authority on scientific and technical knowledge on land and soil degradation and called for a comprehensive assessment of the economics of land degradation.

Holistic approach

Global efforts to combat land degradation will bear fruit in a number of sectors, Gnacadja said, pointing to a study conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). ‘Economics of Land Degradation’ analyses the costs of land degradation prevention methods versus the projected costs of inaction in several countries, including India, Kenya, Niger, and Peru.

Niger alone loses about eight percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) due to overgrazing, salinity in irrigated rice and soil nutrient depletion by sorghum and millet.

“The cost of preventing salinity in irrigated rice is only about 10 percent of the cost of not preventing it per hectare, and the cost of preventing overgrazing is just 20 percent of the cost of allowing overgrazing to continue”, according to the comprehensive study.

According to Project Catalyst, a San Francisco-based initiative of the ClimateWorks Foundation that focuses on policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improved management of the world’s land will represent one half of the climate solution in 2020. This includes both maintaining the carbon in forests, grasslands and peatlands, and restoring natural systems.

An ancient native American proverb tells us, “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”. It is with this truth in mind that the UNCCD is urging immediate action on land degradation.

(END)

Delegates to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification’s (UNCCD) meeting underway in this South Korean city are convinced that women, though affected most by desertification, hold the key to addressing hunger through land regeneration.

Korean women in traditional attire serving customary tea and sweetmeat at UNCCD. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

But, walking the talk is another matter. Drafts of the Changwon Initiative do not mention gender, but focus on the private sector, says Patrice Burger, director of the French civil society organisation (CSO) Centre d’ Actions et de Realisations Internationales.

The Changwon Initiative by the Republic of Korea, which is the president of 10th conference of the parties (COP 10) to the UNCCD is expected to incorporate decisions taken at the Oct. 10 -21 meeting and mobilise stakeholder participation and resources.

“Women are increasingly engaged in managing the family farm in the drylands, as men migrate out for work,” says Dennis Garrity, drylands ambassador-designate to the UNCCD and outgoing director-general of the World Agro-forestry Centre.

“Encouraging the involvement of more women to participate vigorously in all aspects of drylands development is absolutely critical to the success of all future actions to end hunger through land regeneration,” Garrity told IPS.

“Gender is at the core of the three Rio Conventions on Biodiversity, Climate Change, and Desertification,” notes UNCCD executive secretary Luc Gnacadja.

“Women are the ones who manage both farm and family when men in rural areas migrate due to underproductive farms and they are the last people to leave homes, when migration becomes inevitable.

“Ninety percent of those worst affected by desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD) are women and children,” Gnacadja said.

“Realising this huge impact of land degradation on women, and even though the Convention has been in place since 1997, no substantive gender-focused work can be seen on the ground,” Eva Marie Vicente of the Madrid-based Institute for Promoting and Support Development (IPADE Foundation), which works for women’s empowerment, told IPS.

Women, though affected most by desertification, hold the key to addressing hunger through land regeneration, UNCCD delegates think. Credit: Mauricio Ramos

“Till now, women are not involved in much decision making; capacity building to tackle land degradation related calamities is as bad,” said Vicente. “Where are the specific indicators that measure increase in women’s involvement and awareness in DLDD?”

“Women, especially in indigenous communities, have differentiated knowledge about resources that could make significant contributions to desertification combating policies and action,” Vincente urges. “These need be documented before they are lost forever.”

Vincente and Burger reflect the dissatisfaction of the 60 CSOs attending the COP 10 over progress made in implementing gender mainstreaming by UNCCD.

Maria Bivol, project coordinator of BIOS, a CSO based in the Republic of Moldova, told IPS that women could become better managers of DLDD if trained and given access to knowledge, training and funds.

Bivol cites a 2011 U.N. sponsored study on women in agriculture by the non-profits AGREX and BIOS which showed that bank loans by male managers of agricultural companies and farms are four times larger than those taken by female managers. However, profits gained by the men are only 1.3 times higher.

“This means that women are better agro-managers with smaller funds, but constitute only about 20 percent of farm owners in Moldova,” Bivol said.

“Socio-cultural factors that exclude women from decision-making reflect in one rural meeting in Tartaul de Salcie that I attended which had only five women in a total of 255 participants. Of 900 communities in Moldova, only 16 percent have women mayors. Gender mainstreaming in DLDD programmes means these cultural conditions must change,” Bivol points out.

While each country and even provinces require a contextualised framework, the situation is similar in most developing countries.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in its ‘State of Food and Agriculture, 2011’ report says that in every part of the world women face gender-specific constraints that reduce their productivity and limit their contribution to production, economic growth and the well-being of their families.

It quantifies the gap in agricultural yield between men and women averaging around 20 to 30 percent, mainly due to differences in resource use. Some 925 million people are currently undernourished. Closing the gender gap in agricultural yields could bring that number down by as much as 100-150 million people.

In the light of the importance of the role of women in efforts to combat desertification, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) gender office has teamed up with the secretariat of the UNCCD mid-2011 to develop a Gender Policy Framework (GPF) for the UNCCD and its secretariat.

The GPF substantiates the gender neglect critique by the CSOs of UNCCD at COP10. “Although the text of the Convention explicitly calls for recognising the importance of gender in efforts to combat desertification, to date this remains only marginally acknowledged,” the GPF says.

“Gender mainstreaming isn’t just paying lip service to equality between men and women by adding women’s participation to existing strategies and programmes,” says IUCN’s senior gender advisor Lorena Aguilar.

The GPF underscores rather strongly that gender concerns need to be integrated fully in secretariat work plans.

Among other recommendations, the GPF says, “it is crucial to establish a set of institutional procedures (guidelines) to allow effective gender screening of policies, projects, initiatives, training packages and communication materials produced under the Convention.”