Exploitation Turning Vast Areas of Africa into a Virtual Wasteland
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
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
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."