Media backgrounder MB/08/08

CRIC 7 reviews progress in the fight against desertification at meeting in Turkey

Rome, 3 November 2008: An estimated twelve million hectares of land are lost each year due to advanced degradation or other environmental damage. In Africa where some 60 per cent of the population depends on agriculture, land degradation affects about 46 per cent of the continent. A recent study shows that in the most productive areas of sub-Saharan Africa, degradation on arable land is threatening future food production.

Against this backdrop, the seventh session of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (CRIC7) will be hosted in Istanbul by the Government of the Republic of Turkey from 3-14 November.

The first special session of the Committee on Science and Technology (CST-S1) is being convened back to back with CRIC 7.

CRIC 7 comes at a critical juncture where desertification, like climate change and related issues for which there is no quick fix, risks being sidelined in global debate by the financial crisis and fears of a global recession.

“The triple scourge of poverty, climate change and high food prices constitutes a set of global challenges which require a fully coordinated global response to deal with today’s short-term needs and meet the medium to longer term imperative of higher and sustainable agricultural productivity and production” said Kanayo Nwanze, Vice-President of IFAD, prior to the CRIC meeting.

"Large areas of drylands are being relentlessly degraded. The decline in fertility of the land risks triggering a vicious cycle of wider environmental degradation, impoverishment and conflict, often jeopardising the stability of affected countries" warned UNCCD Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is one of the three Rio conventions established when the international community acknowledged the frightening reality of the damage that was being done to the planet.

The CRIC 7 meeting will be examining the UNCCD’s 10-year strategic plan (2008-2018) and framework to enhance the implementation of the Convention.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that desertification costs USD 9 billion a year in Africa alone.More than 50 percent of IFAD’s work is in Africa. Over the past 23 years IFAD has committed more than US$3.5 billion to support the sustainable development of dryland areas and combat land degradation in developing countries. 

“The impact of natural resource degradation is potentially even more devastating in financial terms than the current global meltdown. The socio-economic cost of inaction on people’s livelihoods is colossal”, said Christian Mersmann, Managing Director of the Global Mechanism of the UNCCD, which provides advisory services on sustainable land management.

Yet with political will and timely investments, results can be achieved in the dryland areas where there is also immense potential.

For efforts to combat desertification to be effective, local communities need to be engaged, so that indigenous and traditional knowledge regarding land management is incorporated into sustainable practice.

For example, in the Niger, stone ‘bunding’ and traditional planting pits were used to rehabilitate 9,000 hectares of barren crusted land with dramatic results.  The project reaped on-farm benefits of USD 65 per hectare annually after the first year.

The land rehabilitation techniques spread quickly to other areas and in some cases farmers, noting this new potential, sold some of their cultivated sandy soils to buy degraded land, stimulating the land market and increasing the area’s production potential.

The restoration of degraded land can also contribute to greater access to land and natural resources for the poor.

“Desertification and land degradation are still not fully recognised as a developmental problem. Seeing them as an environmental issue means putting them in a ghetto, whereas what is needed is a broad integrated approach” said Kwame Awere Gyekye, Programme Manager for Eastern and Southern Africa of the Global Mechanism.

He cited the example of Kenya, where hydroelectric dams get silted up because of erosion. “Power-generating capacity is lost, which in turn hurts consumers, who will have to pay more for electricity, and businesses, which may have to lay off workers. Yet if we give farmers incentives for sustainable management, to plant trees and not to grow maize, there is less erosion, less silting and so everyone gains” he added. 

---

Notes to editors

During the last fifty years, a quarter of the world’s topsoil, one-fifth of the agricultural land, and one-third of its forests have been degraded or lost.  This has contributed to the loss of biodiversity and the weakening of ecosystems that are the foundation of agriculture and food production.  

IFAD hosts the Global Mechanism, a catalyst to mobilize resources to implement the UNCCD.

Between 1999 and 2005, 63 per cent of IFAD-funded programmes and projects addressed UNCCD objectives. The Global Mechanism is hosted by IFAD because of the organization’s focus on rural development, agriculture and sustainable land management.

IFAD is an executing agency of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), an independent financial organization established in 1991 to provide grants to developing countries for projects that have global environmental benefits and contribute to sustainable livelihoods.

IFAD was selected as an executing agency because of its expertise in addressing land degradation, its recognition of the links between poverty and the environment, and its crucial role in UNCCD.

IFAD hosts the secretariat of the International Land Coalition, a global alliance of organizations dedicated to working with poor rural people to increase their secure access to natural resources, particularly land.

The trio of Rio conventions, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and UNCCD are interlinked, as are their action plans.

In 2012 the Kyoto Protocol to prevent climate changes and global warming runs out and a new climate protocol is urgently needed. The meeting of the parties of the UNFCCC in Copenhagen next year will be the last chance for governments to replace the current agreement.

---

IFAD was created 30 years ago to tackle rural poverty, a key consequence of the droughts and famines of the early 1970s. Since 1978, IFAD has invested more than US$10 billion in low-interest loans and grants that have helped over 400 million very poor rural women and men increase their incomes and provide for their families. IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized United Nations agency. It is a global partnership of OECD, OPEC and other developing countries. Today, IFAD supports more than 200 programmes and projects in 85 developing countries and one territory.