Exploitation Turning Vast Areas of Africa into a Virtual Wasteland

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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10/19/99

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY

Deforestation, overgrazing and harmful irrigation practices are

transforming vast areas of Africa into a virtual wasteland. 850,000

square miles are classified as degraded lands. Land degradation

worldwide threatens local livelihoods, while cumulatively imperiling

global ecological functionality.

g.b.

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Title: Exploitation Turning Vast Areas of Africa into a Virtual

Wasteland

Source: Associated Press

Date: October 16, 1999

AHOUE, Ivory Coast (AP) -- Strangled weeds grow in the ashes of a

rain forest burned into oblivion. Across the continent, deserts

overtake grassy meadows. Floodwaters wash away fertile farms.

Overshadowed by war, poverty and disease, the biggest threat to

Africa's future lies in the land itself, U.N. experts and scientists

warned Saturday.

Deforestation, overgrazing and harmful irrigation practices are

transforming vast areas of the world's poorest continent into virtual

wasteland. National economies are crippled, fueling social and

political havoc.

The effects of generations of exploitation are being felt by farmers

in the village of Ahoue, 12 kilometers (8 miles) east of Ivory

Coast's commercial capital, Abidjan.

Once a place of plenty, checkerboard patches of land on the

surrounding hillsides now lie bare from years of erosion. Remie Ake,

one of the village's richest landowners, says more than a quarter of

his family's 200 hectares (500 acres) is barren.

"The land is tired," Ake said. "And our people are suffering without

food. There is no work for them any more, and each year there is less

food on the table."

Unless current trends are reversed, Africa will be unable to feed

two-thirds of a projected 1 billion population in 2025, according to

a United Nations-World Bank study released Saturday to coincide with

World Food Day. Already 200 million people are chronically

malnourished, double the figure 30 years ago.

Most Africans today eat about four-fifths of what they did in the

1950s, when the continent was a net exporter of food.

It all comes down to the soil.

In an era when chemical fertilizers, pesticides and modern machinery

have boosted food production to record levels in the United States

and Canada, African farmers struggle to survive using shortsighted

farming methods that often degrade the fragile soil, said Hans van

Ginkel, rector of the U.N. University, which has research facilities

around the world.

For generations, subsistence planters, stock herders and loggers have

engaged in a battle with the land. They slash and burn virgin forests

and savanna grasslands, often replacing them with cash crops that

leech life-giving nutrients such as potassium and nitrogen from the

soil.

Rapid population growth in burgeoning urban slums such as Lagos and

Kinshasa has increased the pressure on the overtaxed soil. Erosion

and floods are often the result.

The land is lashing back.

"The low fertility of African soils is the single most critical

impediment to the region's economic development," Van Ginkel said in

the study. "We cannot begin to make real progress in the battle

against poverty and malnutrition in Africa until the problem of

degraded soil is addressed."

Researchers see few easy solutions. As long as civil wars and

political upheaval are rife, with foreign aid money going first

toward peacekeeping missions and refugee disasters, agriculture

development will continue to be neglected.

Already, 2.2 square kilometers (850,000 square miles) is classified

as degraded land, the U.N.-World Bank study says.

"I would say the odds are bleaker than even the U.N. report would

suggest," said Donald Rennie, an agronomist and former dean of

agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. "With the

kind of governments and political problems Africa has been left with,

there seems little possibility of food security ever being achieved."

Others pin hopes on improving cooperation between scientists, Western

donors, African governments and farmers.

African researchers in countries such as Ghana and Kenya are

developing ways of replenishing nutrients by using phosphorus

fertilizer and native legume plants that return nitrogen to the soil.

In Ivory Coast, agronomists are locked in a fight against time to

provide alternatives to farmers who are obliterating the country's

rain forests in a voracious search for rich virgin land. Already, 90

percent of the trees have disappeared and the rest could be gone in a

decade.

The deforestation could have devastating long-term implications for

the region's tropical ecosystems and weather patterns.

Conservationists say it also could also ravage Ivory Coast's

lucrative cocoa and coffee crops, among the world's largest.

"If our farmers discover ways to improve their crops without

depleting the soil and turning to virgin forest every few years, they

will do it," said Tiemoko Yo, director of Ivory Coast's national

agronomy research institute.

"Our task is to help give them those solutions before the land runs

out. If we fail, the cost will be high."

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