How To Stop Desertification

African Business, July 2009 by Wycliffe Muga

Perhaps the greatest pan-African environmental challenge, and one with enormous
political and economic implications, is how to arrest and reverse the southward advance
of the Sahara desert. A few projects are trying to do just that.
There is room for debate as to the speed at which the Sahara desert is expanding - from
the conservative 600m a year, to the extravagant claim on Wikipedia that it is more like
40km a year. But there is no doubt that the desert is steadily expanding southwards into
sub-Saharan Africa. That has been confirmed by ground observations and orbital
photographs from space missions.
In most of sub-Saharan Africa, the majority of the population are small-scale subsistence
farmers making their living from the land. So progressive desertification carries with it
the threat of increasing numbers of desperate, hungry people from the countryside
leaving unproductive land, that was once marginally productive and able to support them,
moving into Africa's towns and cities in search of work and food. This explosive scenario
is very much a feature already in many African cities and could assume nightmarish
proportions if even more land continues to be degraded to desertification levels. But all is
not lost. There is a long-established organisation in Eastern Africa dedicated to resisting
the desert's encroachment. It began as the Intergovernmental Authority on Drought and
Desertification (IGADD) but was later reconstituted as the Intergovernmental Authority
on Development (IGAD) so as to widen its mandate. Member countries include Sudan,
Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, and Djibouti.
But, as is so often the case, where the large and slow-moving bureaucracies of
intergovernmental organisations shuffle papers, progress on the ground is being made by
smaller, independent NGOs.
One such NGO, Arid Land Resources, is a Kenya-based group. In Northern Kenya's arid
and semi-arid lands, apart from livestock, one of the few economic activities available to
the region's nomadic communities is charcoal making. It is estimated that over 70% of
Kenyan households - in rural villages as much as in the poorer neighbourhoods of major
towns - use charcoal as their primary domestic fuel, with cooking gas and electricity
being distant and improbable aspirations for these people. However, there is a serious
environmental impact to charcoal - use in Northern Kenya. The felling of trees is
contributing to the spread of desertification - that dramatic change from green woodlands
and grassy savannah to the endless brown of dusty sand dunes and rocky plains.
Yet in some parts of the region, the threat of desertification has been effectively halted.
According to Arid Land Resources, which is pioneering the sustainable use of natural
resources in Northern Kenya, a better use for these trees has been found. The Daaba
community for example, used to cut down the Acacia senegal tree to make charcoal, but
have since found a sustainable income from these trees by harvesting gum arabic, a sticky
substance often found oozing out of the trunks of acacia trees. This gum is used as an
ingredient in adhesives, confectionary and medicines. For those trained in the techniques
of harvesting this substance, gum arabic can be a very good source of income as it is
much in demand both locally and globally. And although it is nowhere near replacing
livestock as a source of income in this zone, a promising start has definitely been made.
This reminds us that science and technology, when properly applied, can usually create
solutions to even the most complex and intractable of human problems. In this case, the
approach involved initiating a programme of environmental conservation by creating a
new economic opportunity for people living in a harsh and unforgiving land.
There is actually a name for this approach to solving environmental problems: It is
known as free market environmentalism.
The acknowledged pioneer of this approach is Professor Terry Anderson, the executive
director of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman,
Montana, US. His central insight is that providing economic incentives to individuals as
well as to communities can effectively direct their self-interest towards serving
environmental policy.
Although Prof Anderson's research is concerned with a large variety of broad
environmental goals, in East Africa his ideas have thus far been applied mostly towards
conserving wild animals, forests and the grasslands. Free market environmentalism
argues that for wilderness and wildlife to be preserved, they must be perceived by local
communities as assets from which they can draw economic benefits, or else their
existence will not be sustainable. This requires getting the incentives right - a principle
tenet of free market environmentalism - by giving local people an ownership stake in
resources. Whether the property rights are assigned to individuals or to community
groups, the effect is the same - owners have something to lose from poor stewardship and
something to gain from good stewardship.
In the example from Northern Kenya, the communal asset remained the same (the Acacia
senegal trees) but the use of this asset was dramatically changed from one which was
destructive and unsustainable (charcoal production) to one which was both sustainable
and supportive of national environmental goals (gum arabic production).
The problem however with what has been achieved by Arid Land Resources, is that it is
not really 'scalable'. It is an effective solution to the problem of desertification in one part
of one country; it cannot necessarily be applied across a number of countries, or even in
all the arid and semi-arid parts of Kenya, as not all these areas have tree species that
produce gum arabic.
Nor is this the only successful effort at fighting deforestation through the use of science
and technology that has had to struggle with the potential barrier of 'scalability'. At one of
the world's premier research universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) there is a laboratory looking into finding alternatives to firewood for the
developing world. This is the Development Laboratory, led by an award-winning
engineer, A my Smith, which has developed a low-cost method for producing charcoal
briquettes from agricultural waste, e.g. wheat and rice stalks; banana leaves; corn cobs;
and bagasse - the fibrous remnant of the sugar-cane milling process. The briquettes are
produced using a 55-gallon oil drum and a simple mechanical press that costs less that
$20, creating an inexpensive, clean-burning cooking fuel that does not contribute to
deforestation.
When I was in the US last year, I spoke to a doctoral student at MIT who is following up
and expanding on the success that has been achieved thus far by Amy Smith in Haiti,
where this technology has gained a degree of acceptance. This is another Amy - Amy
Banzaert, of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. She conceded
that - despite the success gained thus far - there is still work to be done before the project
can be scaled up; and that they had not reached a point where the briquettes could replace
charcoal as a primary fuel and stop the use of forest products as cheap domestic fuel.
For most of the millions at whom this project is aimed, there is research yet to be done in
terms of ensuring that the use of the charcoal briquettes does not have unanticipated,
negative environmental consequences if the project is scaled up significantly. Also, a
transferable business plan needs to be devised before there can be any attempt at
widespread scaling.
So it would seem that coming up with a first-class idea for reducing deforestation is one
thing: scaling it up to a point where it is used by millions is quite another.
If asked where the solution to this intractable problem might lie, I would suggest that it
would most likely involve offering huge cash prizes to anyone who can come up with
effective and scaleable models for reversing desertification across sub-Saharan Africa.
I say this because right now, there is one such prize for any team of scientists who can
demonstrate a way to fight another great environmental challenge, global warming, by
perfecting a method for reducing the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
This prize, of some $25m, was put up by Sir Richard Branson, CEO of the Virgin Group.
The objective is to remove one billion metric tonnes of carbon gases from the atmosphere
every year over a 10-year period. I believe sub-Saharan Africa needs some equally
generous philanthropist to put up the prize money for the fight against desertification, so
as to encourage teams of scientists, economists, agronomists and engineers to work
towards finding means to stop the Sahara desert's advance. It would probably not need as
much money as the Branson Prize, especially if there were multiple levels of competition
- with prizes for intermediate achievements - and perhaps small grants to support ongoing
projects. But there can be no doubt that some such initiative is required.
COPYRIGHT 2009 IC Publications Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5327/is_355/ai_n32151164/?tag=content;col1