Desertification in the political wilderness

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CONFERENCES Desertification

in the political wilderness

The United Nations Conference Desertification, Nairobi, Kenya, August-9 September 1977

on 29

Action

between

now

and

the

year

2000.

Approaching a disaster One thing about a desert, you don’t have to worry that it will get eroded. Sixty million tons of the Sahara may be blown into the Atlantic in a single year, as one researcher has claimed, but, if you’re interested, they say you can still see Rommel’s tank tracks across the dunes. The 900”million dollar question, however, is whether there will be more or less desert in 20 years’ time. Because that is the current annual pricetag on desert making, a largely man-made process which is now devastating the world’s useable land resources, according to the recent UN Conference on Desertification (UNCOD) . It’s a question which directly affects more than 50 million of the people living in the arid and semi-arid zones which cover one-third of the earth’s land surf&ce-and indirectly many hundred millions more. It may indeed affect all of us, given that these lands support half the world’s cereal growing, half the cattle and a third of the sheep. The answer, unfortunately, as the Nairobi conference had to admit, depends on that elusive elixir called words, the political will : in other readiness of governments to commit resources on a sufficient scale to hold desert spread in check. If that will can be found-a very big “if”-the conference concluded that desertification could be halted by its Plan of

But if things go on as they are, the conference was told, we will have lost a third of all our farmland to desert by the end of the century; the drylands will have one billion people to support instead of the present 600 million, and all kinds of ecological disasters-the rape of the tropical rainforests, catastrophic overgrazing, etcwill have rendered life all but impossible in much of the arid zones. If things go on as they are. But of course they seldom do. It is much more likely that they wiIl either get better-through natural checks and balances coming into play-or else a lot worse. For example, in the developing countries, which are mostly the ones concerned, population growth combined with unsustainable land use is seen as the major contributory factor in desertification. Estimates of the population factor need to be treated with caution, not least because only 20 of the 58 dryland countries have published a census in the past decade. But recent figures suggest that in many Third world countries the population growth rate has passed its peak, and has in some cases begun a significant decline. In 20 years the effects of such a trend-if not annulled by othersmight well exceed the impact of any international conference, for all its value in concerting research efforts

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Conferences

and drawing wider attention to an underestimated global problem. The fact is that even without this UN conference there had already been hundreds of institutions and thousands of researchers working on dryland problems for many years. So the state of the art does not appear susceptible to dramatic, short-term improvements. The idea of a sub-Saharan green belt, honoured in Nairobi with what they delighted in calling a transnational feasibility study, is now more than 40 years old. This makes it a little younger than the first work on “teleconnections’‘-links between climatic variations hundreds or thousands of miles apart-which climatologists are now eagerly embracing as the great hope of the future. Technical measures In the field, the introduction of modern technology has certainly proved no panacea for dealing with desertification. To cite only the most obvious example, thousands of square miles of farmland are having to be abandoned every year due to waterlogging and salinisation associated with large-scale irrigation schemes. And the conference’s main paper on technology admitted candidly that “once reliance is placed on a technological solution to one problem, it becomes necessary to introduce additional technologies in order to cope with problems arising from the technology used to solve the first problem”. At the global information level-as distinct from local and national efforts on the ground-some of the best hopes may lie in the fields of climatology and computer modelling. One of the basic UNCOD documents, on ecological change, stressed that the first requirement of a holistic approach to research was a model of how each component fits into the ecosystem. Computer modelling of dryland ecosystems only really got under way in

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the early 197Os, but the conference paper was able to point to current work of this kind in Australia, Egypt, Iran, Israel, and the USA. Modelling the effects of alternative land-use strategies by computer might yield “imperfect predictions”, it said, but they were still likely to be better than those arrived at in any other way. Needless to say, there are strict limits on what the climatologist can do to mitigate a problem arising largely from the vagaries of human behaviour. And it was clear from recent events, the conference was told, that “governments, economists, chieftains, herdsmen and cultivators alike have dangerously short memories for adverse weather”. Using the climate But there are some hopeful indicators, notably in the field of climate prediction. The successful forecasting of climatic events in dry zones, which may in time be possible as the identification and interpretation of teleconnections becomes more precise, could make a major contribution towards halting the desert advance. This possibility will begin to be developed next year, when the World Meteorological Organisation and the International Council of Scientific Unions launch a 12-month project to make detailed worldwide observations of the atmosphere, using space satellites, aircraft, ships, and balloons. The project has been described as the largest scientific experiment ever undertaken internationally for peaceful purposes. The conference was offered little encouragement, however, in respect of modifying the weather. Most of the ideas in this area would be prohibitively expensive, the experts concluded, and while tried techniques such as cloud-seeding might work in some cases, often in desert-prone subtropical countries, “the major problem is to create the cloud in the first place”.

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In the end, it all comes back to the question of political will and how much priority governments will be prepared to give to preserving their land against many social and economic pressures. There’s certainly not much

Alternatives The

to limits

“Alternatives

conference, of Rome, and the

to

sponsored

Growth by

the

:

the evolution of a conference ‘77”

Club

the University of Houston, Mitchell Energy and De-

velopment Corporation, organised by the Society for International Development, Woodlands,

and Texas,

held 2-4

joy in the fact that UNESCO published 32 thick volumes of research on the subject during the 1950s and 1960s. The whole series is now out of print. Robin Sharp London

at The October

1977 The elegant suburban setting of The Woodlands, Houston’s newest 20 000 acre “planned community”, seemed, at times, a rather strange backdrop for a conference that had as its topic “the nature of growth in equitable and sustainable societies”. Its setting was only one illustration of the conference’s inability to focus on a consistent approach to the question of growth. The conference did succeed, however, in bringing together some of the most distinguished and creative thinkers in equilibrium studies. The two-and-a-half day event saw plenary and workshop sessions led by Aurelio Peccei, founder and chairman of the Club of Rome; Lester Brown, president of Worldwatch Institute; David Sternlight, chief economist for Atlantic Richfield Corporation; Herman Kahn, director of the Hudson Institute; and other government, corporate, academic, and independent thinkers and actors in the growth-no-growth forum. The split which characteriscd the conference is epitomised by the way this ten-year project has attempted to change its image over the first three years of its life. In 1974 Texas

oilman George Mitchell, spurred by the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” study, sponsored the first of five essay contests to culminate in what was then called the “Limits to Growth” conference. He offered $20 000 for the best papers on the problems inherent in the transition from growth to equilibrium of population, material and energy use. The consumption, winning essays, none of which debated the actual question of limits, were nevertheless written within the context of the ideas of global material and social constraints. However, following the 1975 conthe Mitchell group shied ference, away from the “doomsday” associa“limits” theme and tions of the changed the programme’s title to “Alternatives to Growth”. If this year’s conference is proof, the change in title has not changed the attitude of some of the more catholic no-growth advocates, whose views of the sustainability of the present global social system are profoundly more negative than those of their “thepresent-structures-areflexible- enough to- solve- the-admittedly-gigantic-problems” colleagues. The contrast between these two groups’ views, although not sharp enough to cause overt clashes, disturbed the intellectual continuity of the discussion. To illustrate: the organisers of the conference considered themselves fortunate (as well they should) to have US House Speaker Tip O’Neill and House Majority Leader James Wright as speakers. However, both politicians,