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Monitoring The UN > The UN and Sustainable Development

Land Resources
(Soils,Farming, Forests)
UNA-Canada's "On the Road to Brazil" Series
-Issue Paper No.5-

Land Resources: An Introduction

One of the major global challenges is to produce more food, pure water, fibre and timber for rapidly growing populations. Several factors, however, make this challenge seem overwhelming. One is the surge of more and more people and their spiralling demands on the land. Another is inappropriate farming systems such as the use of hillsides that are ill-suited to cultivation. A third is poorly designed irrigation systems over the last couple of centuries which have led to increasing salinity of the land. And finally, there is the potentially devastating effect of climate -- witness the series of dry years in the Sahel region of Africa during the 1980’s.

All of these factors have been major causes of land "degradation" -- that is, soil erosion, the spread of deserts, the destruction of forests, and other abuses of land resources. Moreover, the degradation of the natural resource base (soils, rangelands, forests and water) appears to be increasing. If this trend continues, the consequences for agriculture, forestry and whole economies could be highly negative. The aim must surely be to ensure that these sectors remain not only productive, but indeed, increase their productivity.

Soils and Farming

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 60% of the people of the Third World make their living directly from farming. The proportion reaches 70% in Africa and 75% in Asia. These farmers’ ability to feed themselves and to earn additional monies to improve their lot is critical to the survival of entire societies.

The challenge is enormous. First, the number of mouths to feed is growing steadily. Global population by 2025 is expected to be twice that of 1980. Second, farmers must grow their crops on roughly the same amount of land since most of the world’s arable land is already under the plough or pasture. Yet as agriculture around the world becomes more intensive and as ill-advised agricultural practices such as monoculture persist (when the same crop is planted year after year), land becomes increasingly vulnerable to erosion.

Grasslands become deserts when vegetation growth is reduced to a minimum. Desertification -- the making of more desert -- is the result of droughts, less rainfall than usual, overuse (too much cultivation and grazing), or wind patterns. In Africa, where the numbers of both people and animals have exploded, overgrazing in some countries is thought to exceed the carrying capacity of the range by 100 per cent. As more and more land is brought into permanent cultivation, the pastoral herding people are forced into marginal lands. Meanwhile, the desert swiftly advances: according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), in the early 1980s out of a total of 473 million hectares of productive drylands in Sudano-Sahelian Africa, 88% was classified as desertified.1

In Central America, the problem of too many people on too little land is compounded by perverse patterns of land use and distribution. Typically, the richest farmland in the river valleys is used as pasture for cattle -- land that is much better suited to basic crops for domestic consumption. Meanwhile, the small, land-poor farmers are driven either to cultivate hillsides or to cut down more forests. But the uncovered hillsides are more susceptible to erosion and soils wash away in a few years, while tropical forest soil is rarely suitable for intensive or prolonged cultivation. So the small farmers are obliged to move on, carrying their destructive habits with them.

In Asia, although the causes may be different, the consequences are depressingly similar. Loss of vegetation in India has meant that the area subject to flooding has doubled in 10 years. This is because there is no holding capacity on the land surface to slow the runoff and the soil that accompanies it, and also because the build-up of soil in riverbeds causes the rivers to rise to higher flood levels. Siltation has also impaired the efficiency of hydroelectric and irrigation dams.

The North American plains produce huge amounts of food, mostly for export, leading to their description as the "bread basket of the world." But they are losing their natural fertility as a result. Much of the land currently in production is subject to erosion, especially during prolonged droughts. The possibility of a drier climate in this region has encouraged the Canadian and U.S. governments to make plans to remove the most endangered areas from production, but an integrated land-use strategy, which would provide long-term solutions, remains elusive.

Forests

Forests have been described as the hearts and lungs of the world. Their heart-land description arises from the fact that most river systems originate in the forest. Forests prevent soil erosion, maintain high water quality, and regulate the flow of water in different seasons, thus providing the bloodstream of agriculture, industry and human communities.

Trees are compared to lungs because they "inhale" carbon dioxide and "exhale" oxygen. Through the process of photosynthesis, the carbon from carbon dioxide in the air is "fixed" (or converted to solid matter) and becomes a part of forest biomass (wood, bark, and leaves). This is an important element in the global carbon reservoir.

Forests also filter particulate pollution from the air, and improve local and regional climates. When rain falls on a forest, as much as 80% may be returned to the atmosphere by evaporation directly or through the leaf systems. Fundamentally, the forest acts as a sponge or a protective cover which stops rain from falling directly on bare land, and thereby causing excessive erosion.

Particularly in the tropics, forests are a major source of global genetic diversity. Although tropical forests cover roughly nine per cent of the world’s land area or 1.2 billion hectares, they contain over half the known plant and animal species, including 80% of the insects and 90% of the primates.

Tragically, the world is facing serious declines in forest cover. In a recent report, FAO found that annual tropical deforestation had increased from 9 million hectares in 1980 to 16.8 million in 1990. As population continues to expand, all the world’s forests are threatened.

There are a number of reasons for this crisis. One is the pressure on land: small farmers in poor countries "slash and burn" forest land in order to produce more food and cash crops. This practice is doubly destructive since usually these farmers do not even gain any money from the trees felled. Furthermore, tropical forest soils are often unsuited to agriculture and the agriculture is not sustainable for more than a few years. Land conversion to other uses is the major problem in most developing countries. In Brazil, for example, the vast majority of Amazonian deforestation is due to land conversion.

Trees are also cleared for fuelwood. Wood provides over 80% of the energy needs of Africa. According to FAO, the annual rate of fuelwood consumption now exceeds the rate at which tree stocks are either regenerating or being planted by about 30% in Africa.

The consequences are already serious and potentially catastrophic. Indiscriminate forest removal on watersheds has had disastrous results: loss of soil and land productivity, sedimentation of irrigation systems and turbines, and flooding in the plains. Large-scale forest clearance also may have had a devastating impact on global genetic diversity, and on gene pools of individual species.

The greenhouse effect is also partly owing to deforestation. The earth is now warming because of an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forests store more carbon than any other vegetation on land. Deforestation means fewer trees are exhaling oxygen which, therefore, increases the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The burning of wood as fuel makes the situation worse by increasing carbon dioxide emissions. Destruction of forests over past centuries has contributed substantially to the total increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Currently, it contributes to between 15-20% of the total greenhouse effect.

Solutions?

There are many remedies available to combat desertification and many policies that will promote the sustainable management of land resources. The challenge is to put them into effect. For sensible as these alternatives may seem from a distance, their implementation on the ground frequently runs counter to entrenched economic interests, traditional customs, political inertia and a host of other obstacles.

The World Commission on Environment and Development, better known as the Brundtland Commission, observed that poverty itself is a major global scourge:

Environmental stress has often been seen as the result of the growing demand on scarce resources and the pollution generated by the rising living standards of the relatively affluent. But poverty itself pollutes the environment, creating environmental stress in a different way. Those who are poor and hungry will often destroy their immediate environment in order to survive: they will cut down forests; their livestock will overgraze grasslands; they will overuse marginal land; and in growing numbers they will crowd into congested cities.

On the other hand, conserving the agricultural resource base has three huge benefits. First, secure resources and reasonable living lead to good husbandry and sustainable management. Second, migration from the countryside to cities is eased and less food is imported from abroad. Third, by putting money in Third World pockets, population growth is slowed.

Since the end of World War II, the number of cattle in the Sahel has increased five fold. This can be traced to the fact that the new countries nationalized land and did not allow the local population to participate in the decision-making process on how it would be used. Prior to that, each village owned or had the rights to the land. The elders made the decisions on how the land would be used and the livestock it could support. Indigenous knowledge such as this is the single best solution to land degradation. Land should be returned to the villages with the villagers themselves regulating its use.

A more sophisticated but also more costly approach is for developing countries to classify land for different uses, depending on "best use" criteria. This means taking an inventory of all the land in a country, which satellite monitoring and other new technologies make more feasible. This, combined with full public discussion and political will, would permit differentiation of infrastructure, support services, fiscal regulations -- depending on how the lands are designated.

At the same time, a delicate balance must be maintained for forests between sustainable development and conservation. Once again, sound policies must be based on scientific analysis of the capacity of forests and their soil to perform different functions, along with the involvement of local people who are both "victims and agents of destruction and who will bear the burden of any new management scheme."

For example, forestry can be extended into agriculture. One or more tree crops can be combined with food crops or animal raising on the same land. The agroforestry approach has been practised by traditional farmers everywhere: it is especially appropriate for small farmers and low quality lands. The challenge is to "revive old methods, improve them, adapt them to new conditions, and develop new ones." On the other hand, agroforestry is not a panacea: while it can make important differences, the fact remains that there is no system at the present time that will be able to feed the predominantly urban world of the year 2000.

International Efforts

Different international mechanisms have been tried with limited success. A UN Plan of Action to Combat DesertificationNB: a 200k file!! (PACD) was drawn up in 1977. It had three objectives: 1) to stop and then reverse the environmental processes of desertification; 2) to put in place ecologically appropriate, productive and sustainable land uses; and 3) to secure the social and economic advancement of the people affected.

Yet so far PACD is an almost unqualified failure. Combatting desertification has no immediate payoff; it is a long-term process. Both potential donor countries and recipients tend to favour projects with more immediate economic development goals. Moreover, the lack of attention to PACD may also reflect the fact that desertification affects the poorest and least politically powerful people in a country. Unless the catastrophe is both large and upon us -- as in the Sahel -- governments will not commit large amounts of money to programmes that have a high risk of failure.

Somewhat different criticisms apply to the Tropical Forest Action Programme (TFAP), which was jointly created by the UN Development Programme, FAO, the World Bank and the World Resources Institute in 1985.

TFAP imposed a uniform, "top-down" planning process involving legions of foreign consultants who often had inadequate knowledge of the diverse countries’ forestry institutions or practices, much less the economic, social and cultural conditions underpinning forest use. Moreover, since the planning process was almost entirely dominated by foresters, little attention was paid to the fact that virtually all deforestation in the tropics has been caused by agriculture.

A public outcry led by non-governmental organizations resulted in several reviews of TFAP and a major meeting in Geneva in March 1991 to try to thrash out a new structure that permits local people to have greater control over their own resources. A recent issue of The New Scientist magazine noted that the challenge is "for governments, citizens’ groups, forest dwellers, conservationists, timber companies and foresters to put their heads together to devise, for their country, a management plan that satisfies all who have an interest in the forest." Sadly, "achieving that all-important dialogue has proved to be almost impossible."

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