United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)

Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention CRIC 5

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 12-21 March 2007

 

Panel Discussion 5:

Measures for the rehabilitation of degraded land, including four strategic areas of the Bonn Declaration

 

By Jack Wilkinson, President of the IFAP

 

Mr. Chairman,

My name is Jack Wilkinson; I am a farmer from Canada and the President of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP). Our Federation has in membership 115 national farmers’ organizations from 81 countries, representing 600 million farm families worldwide.

It is both a pleasure and an honour for me to be here with you today to participate in this panel to address the farmers’ experiences and views in relation with the rehabilitation of degraded land. IFAP has been engaged in the work of the Convention to Combat Desertification for many years now and we are pleased to have this opportunity to share the views of farmers with this Committee. Farmers, as an important segment of the population living in dry land areas and affected by this disaster have made substantial efforts in their daily lives to fight desertification.

Mr. Chairman, agriculture is the first victim of desertification and along with it the food security of vulnerable populations.  For farmers, desertification is represents a daily struggle against food insecurity. The process of land degradation essentially affects arid lands. According to some estimates, the livelihoods of more than one billion people are threatened by land degradation in  110 countries, mostly in Africa. Approximately 70% of the 5.2 billion hectares of arid land devoted to agriculture are degraded.  Farmers face the depletion of natural resources such as fertile topsoil, organic matter, plant cover and healthy crops by desertification.

 

For many farmers in developing countries, land is the only means of subsistence. Without access to arable land and water, rural communities become extremely impoverished, as they are unable to produce sustainable amounts of food for survival.  Low farm incomes, as a result of poor agricultural land, intensify the unsustainable use of land, forests and water.  Farmers are then trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty, thus contributing to further environmental degradation. In addition, the lack of public services in arid regions contributes to farmers leaving degraded lands to join overcrowded cities in search of supposedly better living conditions.  It is expected that over 135 million people may have to abandon their land within the next few years if this trend is not reversed. It is an alarming and unacceptable situation, particular in the most affected continent: Africa.

 

Farmers, throughout the centuries, have developed practices to combat desertification such as composting, mulching, the collection of rainwater, agro forestry, zero tillage, conservation agriculture for their own survival.

They are therefore not only victims of desertification but also active stakeholders, with a great potential to correct land degradation and restore degraded land through implementation of innovative land practices. These experiences in combating desertification are not well documented. For this reason, it is difficult to evaluate the overall consequences of desertification in agriculture.  

What is obvious, however, is that these traditional farming techniques cannot alone ensure the sustainable development of rural communities in desert areas. Governments need to put in place integrated development measures at the national, regional and international levels, which encourage social and economic change through the involvement of the communities concerned in the struggle to combat desertification. This is a key factor for success.

 

It requires capacity-building measures of stakeholders in local communities so that they can play their full role in integrated development measures, and in particular it requires support for farmers’ organizations so that they become project enablers.

I would like to share with you the experience of one of our member organizations In this regard. The Ugandan Cooperative Alliance (UCA)  is an apex cooperative organisation. UCA’s mission is to provide high quality support services to co-operatives and their members on a sustainable basis. UCA has this developed a range of services to benefit its farmer members, including measures to help farmers’ combat land degradation and help them fight against desertification.

Approximately 80 percent of Uganda’s population lives in arid rural areas. These areas are remote from urban centres, have poor infrastructure and poor information flow.  Marketing of goods and services is very difficult under such circumstances and the local communities in these areas have no alternative but to dispose of their produce at give away prices and pay dearly for goods obtained from elsewhere. This situation has not helped efforts to address poverty in these areas. By being organised through the Uganda Cooperative Alliance farmers and co-operators have been able to work together to improve agricultural marketing systems and information flow.

 

With structural adjustment and the complete breakdown of Co-operative Unions in the 1990s, rural producers were left without proper tools to access markets and influence prices. One of the innovations tested and experienced by UCA is the creation of locally-based and flexible Area Co-operative Enterprises (ACE) to fill this gap left by the collapse of cooperative unions.  UCA designed a co-operative marketing channel which enables organized producers to overcome constraints and put them in a position where they could survive in a more liberal system by producing new products and seeking new markets. The strength of the new system is based on the fact that it is rooted in the farm movement and designed in such a way that it gives some sort of protection to the producers because they are combining their strengths and are linked to multiple channels. An ACE can represent over a 1000 farmers. ACE leadership and members identify and select enterprises for project implementation following which the ACE leadership assists members in sourcing for advisory service, and facilitates retrieval of market information and financing. There are five players who make up this system: farmers, input dealers, primaries, ACEs and SACCOs (co-operative financial institutions that are producer owned and savings oriented rather than credit driven).

The ACEs act as “brokers” in providing services to farmers based on negotiations with input suppliers, private processors and produce buyers. One of the main roles of the ACEs is to find markets for a wide range of member products and sell on their behalf. They also provide appropriate technologies for Uganda’s dry land communities. ACEs have developed value-added processing such as the solar drying of perishable products to be packed for export. ACEs also provide training and education in the area of soil management, conservation and promotion of technical farming methods. Training courses cover: Land management techniques (erosion control through soil and water management/ conservation), the use of improved fallows, cover crops and organic materials, the use of pest and drought resistant crops, forest conservation and support to create tree nursery beds.

The use of such a participatory approach that enhances farmers’ livelihoods has allowed the project to be welcomed in many communities. Short and long term effects have included a noticeable increase in the level of biomass, reduced soil erosion, greater availability of wood fuel, improved soil fertility and conservation of bio-diversity.

Through such an integrated and holistic approach, farmers have been empowered with skills, a choice of enterprises that give them stable and maximum income, a strong voice and bargaining power as well as affordable financial services. All these have contributed to increased productivity and production, food security and incomes.

The Ugandan experience shows that farmers’ organisations, when properly supported and enabled, can be very efficient structures to help farmers at the grassroots’ level combat desertification in a sustainable way. It is therefore important to support the capacity of farmers’ organizations so that they are able to deliver such services as extension actions for raising awareness and of rural populations regarding the introduction of good farming practices. Besides, through these organizations, farmers are able to formulate their own policies and have a voice to lobby their governments to take into account their interests. 

 

Farmers are willing to change, but they need support at two different levels.

First, the support of the research and scientific community is critical. Through the development of appropriate technologies and practices farmers will be able to reverse the trend of desertification and land degradation. That is why researchers and farmers need to work closely as both communities complement and need each other.  Farmers have accumulated throughout generations, local and indigenous knowledge that is worth being harnessed and documented and even sometimes scaled up and adapted to different circumstances. This means that researchers need to take into account this knowledge while listening to the needs of farmers. Farmers need researchers to disseminate information on local knowledge and techniques available within farming communities. As well as documenting techniques that farmers have used through the ages to fight desertification, researchers need to go further with “applied research” to adapt agricultural practices to specific varieties of crops in dry land areas. Research findings are also important so that farmers get a maximum of benefits from rain fed agriculture, which is dominant in dry land areas. 

The second level of support has to come from national governments, NGOs and the donor community.  Farmers are ready to change their agricultural practices, but where this is done to produce “public goods” they need an incentive system for doing so. For example, they need to be remunerated for the services they provide to protect ecosystems. For this reason, it is important to integrate sustainable agriculture into governmental policies and establish incentives and stewardship measures to encourage farmers to use the most sustainable agricultural practices. National governments and donors need to help to pay the bill for extension services to farmers so that they can make the necessary adaptations and so the enhance the productive capacity of the land.

For example, in the field of carbon sequestration, dry land areas represent huge reservoirs to fix carbon. There is a big opportunity here for farmers to generate income through carbon sequestration activities such as agro-forestry, and conservation agriculture. Governments should ensure that carbon credits created by a change of agricultural practices be attributed and paid to the farmer. This would provide farmers with an alternative source of income while promoting good agricultural practices.

In the field of bioenergy, there is also a huge potential for farmers to be tapped provided it is done in a sustainable way with sound policies from governments to make sure the production of bioenergy benefits the farmers. Farmers want to become providers of value-added products instead of producers of raw materials and buyers of energy. Therefore, farmers’ ownership is key and must be facilitated to ensure improvements of their incomes and to avoid all the benefits going to large bioenergy industries.

Mr Chairman, these are only some of the arguments in a strong case of investing in agriculture and farming communities in dry land areas. And supporting the efforts of farmers is critical to turning dry land areas into economic assets and attractive lands.

In other words, and to summarise what I have said earlier, investments have to be made in five areas, namely:

1. Promoting family farming and local food security which are the engines of economic growth.
2. Strengthening all the assets of rural development - natural, social, physical, human and financial capital.
3. Developing people-centred and right-based approaches to rural development
4. Enhancement of data to convince policy makers of the economic benefits of regenerating the land.
5. Documentation of success stories in resource management practices in affected areas.
6. Donor and government financial support for action.

 

Finally, Mr. Chairman, the funding issue at the international level is critical. There is a need for the Global Environment Fund (GEF) to support the implementation of the Convention in addition to funding land degradation related actions. In this context, there is a necessity to enable farmers’ organisations to have direct access to GEF funding to support them in their actions to combat desertification.

We look forward to working with your Committee and the Secretariat of the Convention to bring these recommendations from farmers into our common fight against desertification.

I thank you for your attention.