Last Updated- Jun 21, 2009 16:36 - - 1 Comment


Desertification devastates African economies, Ghana loses 5% of agricultural GDP

DesertificationThe phenomenon of desertification is having devastating effects on African economies, and Ghana is losing two to five percent of agricultural GDP, and urgent action is required to fight the menace.

The United Nations defines desertification as “land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities”.

The World Bank recommends a substantial improvement in land management practices as necessary to reduce the risk of land degradation.

Around 85 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans live in rural areas and are fully dependent on the land for their livelihoods. Most are small scale farming communities reliant on rainfall.

According to the World Bank, land degradation, and desertification, a specific type of degradation common in Africa, presents risks to human security by reducing the productivity and resilience of croplands, rangelands and woodlands, as well as the useful life of infrastructure such as reservoirs and canals. It reduces the availability of food, fodder and fuel wood, and compromises critical life-sustaining functions including water filtering, flood control, drought resistance and carbon storage in soil and vegetation. In worst-case scenarios, land degradation also has the potential to trigger conflict over natural resources.

When these factors are taken together, land degradation places an unnecessary drag on economic growth, the World Bank has said on the commemoration of the World Day to Combat Desertification. The day is celebrated in June every year fell on June 17 this year.

An estimated 485 million Africans (65 percent of the entire African population) are affected by land degradation.

Approximately 22 percent of vegetated land (almost 500 million hectares) of Africa has been degraded, and 66 percent of this area is classified as moderately, severely, or extremely degraded.

About 11 percent of total African land area (332 million hectares) is drylands affected by human-induced soil degradation.

The level of degradation is having the following economic effects on African countries: The cost of land degradation in Madagascar is 15 percent of GDP, or US$290 million, mostly attributable to deforestation.

The annual cost of soil erosion in Uganda is in the order of US$132-396 million.

Ghana has experienced an annual productivity loss of 2.9 percent in all crops and livestock due to erosion and nutrient depletion.  This translates into approximately two to five percent of agricultural GDP.

Ethiopia suffers from yearly losses of US$106 million from nutrient removal from agricultural areas, US$23 million from forest losses, and US$10 million from the loss of livestock capacity, amounting in all to US$139 million or about three percent of agricultural GDP.

The gross annual income loss from desertification amounts to US$332-355 million (10-11 percent of AGDP) in Ethiopia, US$67-78 million (9.5-11 percent of AGDP) in Malawi, and US$58-68 million (5.5 – 6.5 percent of AGDP) in Mali.

The World Bank Group is doing its part to reduce land degradation risks to sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa, it has said.

The Bank’s work centers on scaling up support for sustainable land and water management practices, reinforced by strategic regional activities, in particular in the context of the TerrAfrica platform for scaling-up sustainable land management.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, TerrAfrica has mobilized $150 million in funds that are expected to leverage an additional $1 billion to support this goal. Both TerrAfrica and NEPAD are working with African governments to develop and support Country Strategic Investment Frameworks (CSIFs), aimed at integrating strategies and programs to promote SLM with a focus on strategies to address climate change, and to mainstream these within national development strategies and policies, the Bank has stated.

By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi

Email This Post Email This Post | Print This Story Print This Story

Comments

One Response to “Desertification devastates African economies, Ghana loses 5% of agricultural GDP”

  1. Stephen Klaber on June 22nd, 2009 1:05 pm

    The largest cause of desertification in Africa is the enormous infestation of African waterways with weeds: Typha, Phragmites, water hyacinth lettuce and fern. Weeds are a large part of desertification worldwide. Typha, which dominates the region where Lake Chad used to be, is in many ways the worst. It can survive the dessication that it creates longer than its competitors, and lives long enough to finish off the wetland it is killing. It has done so to most of the tributaries to Lake Chad, and nearly to the lake itself. The weeds are very resilient, and their control is a never ending process that can only be sustained at a profit. That profit is available in energy. Typha is an excellent ethanol feedstock, quite suitable for charcoal briquettes, or biomass briquettes, and digestible or pyrolizable for fuel gas. Only a market as insatiable as the energy market can absorb a resource so terrifyingly renewable as Typha. If Africa doesn’t conquer Typha, Typha will conquer Africa.

Got something to say?