NAIROBI, Kenya, November 11, 2002 (ENS) - Traditional, indigenous knowledge and modern land management techniques will be wedded in a new $50 million program to heal dying and degraded lands on the margins of Africa's deserts. These lands account for about five percent of Africa's land area and are home to an estimated 22 million people.

The unique plant life that has evolved to survive in these dry and arid lands could harbor potentially promising drugs and products for agriculture and industry, experts involved in the project believe. Conservation of these plants is one aim of the program is in each of the nine participating countries.

Drought and erosion have degraded this land in Africa's Sahel region. (Photo courtesy Agropolis-Museum)

Dr. Saidou Koala, global coordinator of the program who is based at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Niamey, Niger, said it would build on over five years worth of pilot work. This has unraveled some of the clues to the causes of land degradation in these sensitive areas, and has identified solutions powerful enough to drive local and national action plans.

This new phase of the Desert Margins Programme involves nine sub-Saharan African countries - Botswana, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, Namibia, Niger, Senegal, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Targeted for regeneration are key dryland areas and sites from the acacia savanna of Matebeleland in Zimbabwe to the Sudano-Sahelian Zone of Senegal, from the dwarf shrub savanna of southern Namibia to the denuded lands of the Kargi settlement in northeastern Kenya.

The first step is to unravel the causes of land degradation and damage in each of these areas before drawing up action plans for arresting and reversing the decline.

Dune fixation with windbreak fences made from branches of Balanites Aegyptiaca. (Photo courtesy FAO)

The project is aimed at offsetting some of the worst impacts of global warming, which thousands of scientists reporting to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say is already occurring.

Unless urgent action is taken, the project experts warn, climate change will worsen conditions for the peoples and the lands of the desert margins, making it tougher for them to cope in traditional ways with droughts.

For thousands of years, local people have exercised survival strategies in these arid areas that have allowed them to grow crops and graze livestock without sacrificing the fertility and stability of the land.

The Turkana of northern Kenya traditionally plan crop planting around an intimate knowledge of the behavior of frogs and birds, such as the ground hornbill, green wood hoopoe, spotted eagle owl and nightjar, which are revered as "prophets of rain," UNEP says.

Turkana people on the shore of Kenya's Lake Turkana (Photo courtesy Liberty Africa)

But driven by the imperatives of increasing population and contact with people from industrialized countries, such traditional cultures have eroded in favor of Western or Northern lifestyles. The arid lands and their biodiversity also have eroded as traditional methods of cultivation were abandoned.

"It cannot have come a moment too soon," said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's executive director. "This new phase of the Desert Margins Programme, with crucial support from the GEF, is in line with the poverty reduction aims of the Plan of Implementation agreed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development just over two months ago. Land degradation, desertification and drought has also been identified as a first priority for the environment component of the New Partnership for Africa's Development."

"UNEP's latest Africa Environment Outlook says that some 66 percent of Africa is classified as desert or drylands and currently 46 percent of Africa's land area is vulnerable to desertification, with more than 50 percent of that under high or very high risk," he said.

For the cause of spreading deserts, some experts point to "the impacts of the globalization of trade, which had led to unstable, and often rock bottom prices for such commodity crops as coffee and tea," UNEP said today.

In Niger's dry Sahel, a Tuareg boy clears irrigation channels in a market garden for the cultivation of maize and peppers. (Photo by J. Hartley courtesy FAO)

Developing alternative livelihoods will be a key part of the project. A pilot study in Bamako, Mali, has shown that planting banks of trees for fodder, close to the city, has cut pressure on nearby forests while boosting incomes. The fodder banks are producing 4.5 tonnes per hectare giving an income of $630 a year in a country where the average annual wage is $270.

Ahmed Djoghlaf, director of UNEP's Division for GEF Coordination, said, "The new project is the largest ever undertaken by the GEF in the area of land degradation and meets the very pressing needs and objectives of the UN's Convention to Combat Desertification."

Desertification is defined as an extreme form of dryland degradation triggered by climatic and poor land management practices that means the land is no longer productive.

"There is no single cause behind land degradation and desertification in these drylands and there is no silver bullet able to solve these complex social, climatic and poverty related problems," said Toepfer. "However, solve them we must for the sake of the people living there and for the sake of these often hauntingly beautiful landscapes that play their own special role in the web of life."