Deserts are blooming—into larger deserts

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 14

Deserts are blooming—into larger deserts

From the “Economist,” London

“What, not another United Nations conference?” is the complaint hinted at or openly voiced in many of the world’s chanceries, bureaucracies and newspaper offices as well. “We have had Stockholm for the environment and Rome for food. Bucharest for population and Mexico City for women, Vancouver for habitat, Geneva for employment, and Mar del Plata for water, all within a five-year span. And now, heaven help us, a desertification conference in Nairobi. This s not education. It is suffocation.” But a number of points can be made about this litany of discontent. The 1970 s have been a decade of remarkable innovation within the United Nations system. Virtually every subject of substance in planetary existence has been brought into the open, discussed and publicised in a way unique in human history. (Which governments were conferring about world food production in 1914, or about workless men and the deterioration of cities in 1939?) The transnational impact of certain basic problems (for instance, the high interdependence of winds, seas and climates in the natural environment, or the similar interdependence of the world grain and fuel markets in man’s direct domain) has been recognised in the only way in which recognition could have been secured so speedily — by the participation of virtually all governments in open conference. The resolutions passed at the various encounters, have, no doubt, remained all too often in the twilight of pious hope. Yet their cumulative effect has yet to be measured, and there has been an element of mutual reinforcement — first of all in understanding, with possibly a later increase in the will to act. For instance, the variety and fragility of the world’s ecological systems, first “officially” recognised at the

Stockholm conference in 1972, had at least some influence on the agricultural discussions held later in Rome. The Roman debate increased the sense of need for fundamental enquiries into proper land use and the development of land use surveys to provide the needed data. By the time the discussion was taken up at Habitat (the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements), land use, the siting of the settlements. the urban-agricultural balance and regional planning for naturally unified trasnational systems — watersheds, flood plains — were becoming incorporated in formal resolutions. These relating to water — above all, clean water for human use — were elaborated at Mar del Plata. Now all of them have reappeared, with new contexts and emphases, in the admirable preparatory documents of the desertification conference. It is only when knowledge becomes general and selfreinforcing that it has any chance of overcoming traditional thinking. People may chafe about delays and inactivity. Perhaps they are overlooking the most”fundamental (and sometimes painful) of all activities — the acceptance of a new idea. The desertification conference could prove to be litmus paper to test this process of learning. It is highly specific. Its research has been thorough and inclusive. Its action plan, having been concentrated on a limited number of “priority” objectives, is clear and to the point. It does raise intractable problems of social change in certain areas. But a large part of the action that is needed is of the self-evident kind that makes it easier to turn conviction into strategy. In short, Nairobi could stage a conference that brings together deepening

insights into human condition and, on that basis, launches international action on a new level of urgency and determination. This possibility is especially important for three reasons. We can call the subject of “desertification” a specific one. But its implications are vast. There is a single world market for grain and serious crop failures in any area can have — as was seen in 1973 — drastic repercussions on food prices everywhere. Half the world’s cereals are grown in the drylands — the lands where rainfall is either uncertain, as in the monsoon belt, or tends to fluctuate round a low level — say, 200-600 mm a year. And it is precisely this" uncertainty and fluctuation that can unleash disaster, for in the “fat years” fields and herds expand, only to overload the soil in the “lean years” and push it towards permanent destruction.

Thus the risk of these regions literally “giving

ground” to their menacing desert neighbours could become a permanent disturbance in world food supplies. Above all, there are more than 600 M people living on the desert fringes, on the most vulnerable of all the planet’s lands. The advance of the deserts — desertification — can mean higher costs and lower food standards for everyone. But for a seventh of the human race.' it means quite simply famine and death. The real deserts are the results of movements in the world’s basic climate. The distribution of heat, wind and water freezes the extreme north and south and creates a vast waterless belt across the eastern hemisphere, with few intermissions, from the Sahara to the Gobi. Then there are patches of desert — the Chilean coast, the Kalahari — caused by local factors of desiccation. But the issue at Nairobi is not whether these areas will spread because of changes in world climate: the evidence

about that is uncertain. The issue is whether man will make things worse.

Three distinct main zones have to be considered. The first is the pastoral fringe, where the problem is to ensure that the raising of stock on dry rangelands does not produce irreversible erosion. In the second zone, that of dry-land farming, the task is to protect the land from over-cropping and deterioration. The third zone embraces the big irrigation systems which are. almost invariably, built in areas of low and uncertain rainfall precisely to offset the uncertainties of water supply. The recent tragedy of the Sahel is already a classic example of the first problem. This belt, which runs across four States — Senegal, Mali, Upper Volta and Chad — on the southern edge of the Sahara, has under normal conditions a traditional system of moving herds according to the capacities of local water systems — boreholes, irregularly rain-fed rivers, oases

— often with a careful matching of types of beast to fit the local pasturage. The process is called "nomadic,” but in modem usage this gives far too random an impression. The system is a form of stockraising based on careful rotation. and it often works in harmony with neighbouring cereal producers farther south, since cattle go south to eat up harvest wastes and leave manure behind there. The exchange also includes seasonal labour. But between 1973 and 1976. the annual rainfall dropped from 200 mm to less than 50 mm. Only the terrible drought of 1911 had exceeded this severity. The herds were stricken, between 100.000 and 250,000 people died and many thousands were driven into refugee camps and border cities. The eating of the last vestiges of food and fodder in the land they abandoned left it to encroachment and, worse still, to the risk that some of the encroachments would be irreversible.