  The reduced capacity for food production has brought a population of over 200 million people to the verge of calamity.
BY LILLIAN ALUANGA*
IDN-InDepthNews Service
BERLIN/NAIROBI (IDN) - Environmental experts are warning of an impending humanitarian disaster in Africa, emerging from creeping desertification. If unchecked, it would undo remarkable social and economic progress achieved over decades and wipe millions off the face of the continent.
Desertification is defined by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) as land degradation in arid, semi arid and humid areas arising from various factors such as climatic variations and human activities.
These include over-cultivation, overgrazing, deforestation, poor irrigation practices and other factors leading to inappropriate land use.
Because of those practices, the effects of desertification are already being felt across Africa, says Michael Bernard Kwesi Darkoh, a leading authority on desertification and professor of geography at Nairobi's Kenyatta University. At least 25 countries have faced serious food shortages in the past decade as a result of extended drought, says Darkoh in a paper titled 'Desertification: the scourge of Africa'.
"The reduced capacity for food production has brought a population of over 200 million people to the verge of calamity," says Darkoh. "Some have died of starvation, and among the survivors, especially the children and young people, many will suffer impaired health for the rest of their lives," he adds.
And this, on a continent already wracked by disease, civil strife and political upheaval, a continent grappling with the challenge of providing basic healthcare to its population.
Save for the Antarctica, desertification affects all continents. At least 23 per cent of Asia's total land area is severely or very severely affected by desertification, with 42 per cent of the continent's population living in drylands. The economic costs of desertification on the continent run into billions of dollars, with an estimated gross annual income loss of $20.9.
About 35 per cent of the Africa's total land area, and at least 65 per cent of the population is affected by desertification.
Even more unnerving is the fact that desertification is affecting large sections of an already impoverished population in Africa's drylands, with its effects ultimately felt on the local, national, regional and international level.
A new study points to many ongoing processes of globalisation as cause for amplification of desertification, through what it argues is a removal of regular barriers and an increasing interdependence among people and between nations.
Then there is also the school of thought that bases its arguments on studies which show that trade liberalisation, focus on microeconomic reforms and production for exports can lead to desertification.
According to Darkoh, the droughts and famines that have swept across Africa in the past, and which are likely to strike again, should not only be seen as sudden natural disasters nor a result of lack of rainfall. They are also what he terms the "end results of a long deterioration in the ability of Africa to feed itself, a decline caused largely by mistakes and mismanagement, both inside and outside the continent".
Although the international community often gives emergency aid both in form of food supplies and technical assistance to rehabilitate drought victims, Darkoh warns that the hazards in Africa can be expected to continue recurring at unpredictable intervals.
"It cannot be overcome by one time massive injection of emergency aid but requires a long range strategy which can be realised under given constraints of these impoverished regions through sustainable development of their fragile environment," he says.
Lloyd Timberlake in his book 'Africa in Crisis', aptly sums up the problem: Africa, he says, has "taken too much from its land. It has overdrawn its environmental accounts" and the result for much of the continent has been "environmental bankruptcy".
Nowhere in Africa are the effects of desertification felt as in the arid, semi arid and sub humid lands. These drylands lie mostly along the fringes of the two great deserts on the continent; the Sahara and Kalahari, where the ecology is largely based on crop and livestock farming activities.
Major causes of desertification in Africa are droughts that result in substantial food shortages and a rapidly increasing human and animal population.
The Sudano-Sahel region, for instance, has experienced unpredictable and severe droughts, the most recent of which lasted almost 20 years. At the same time, in Africa's arid and semi arid lands, the human population has doubled in the past three decades to nearly 400 million people and continues to expand at a rate of three per cent per year.
Another key problem identified on the continent is soil erosion. Ethiopia, for instance, loses about one billion tons of top soil each year, compared to four billion tons in the U.S., which has several times the Horn of Africa state's area of cropland.
Soil, the thin top layer on which human survival depends, needs about 1,000 years to form a top layer thick enough to support plant life. It however takes just a few decades to destroy this non renewable resource, which once eroded, is permanently lost.
The effects of desertification on the continent are reflected in a rapidly increasing number of environmental refugees, as people migrate from land which can no longer sustain them to other regions or urban slums. This in itself could have far reaching implications.
"This problem of environmental refugees and the widespread socio-political upheavals in many African countries today are a foretaste of what we can expect if we do not halt desertification," warns Darkoh.
Creating a culture of prevention to protect drylands from the onset of desertification or its continuation, a change of attitude, reversal and rehabilitation of already degraded land, educating the public and improved governance are considered key factors in the prevention of desertification.
But addressing desertification on the continent holds out a challenge. Efforts in the past have been met with limited success attributed not only to a lack of funds and an inequitable international economic order, but also lack of political will of governments.
Then there has also been the perception that some anti-desertification programmes are technical solutions to problems of environmental deterioration and not measures in the solution of problems of human welfare.
But, Darkoh bemoans, even when the right approach is followed and adequate plans effected, there is often no follow up observation of the impact of such measures. (IDN-InDepthNews /13.08.09)
Copyright © 2009 IDN-InDepthNews Service
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*Lillian Aluanga wrote this article during her stay in Berlin to attend a course on Environmental Reporting organized by the International Institute for Journalism (IIJ) of InWEnt - Capacity Building International.
Lillian Aluanga has been a reporter with The Standard Newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya, since 2004. In 2006, she was awarded the MSD Health and Medical award of the CNN Multichoice Africa Journalist of the Year competition for her story titled "The Gift of Healing".
Useful Links:
http://unccd.int
http://www.inwent.org/iij/index.php.en
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/tiempo/issue08/desert.htm
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