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afrol News, 4 July - Climatic evidence collected over the 20th century raises concern over the desertification process of the Sahel zone. The main effects of desertification are losses of property and ecosystems, the disruption of crop production systems, changes in basic socio-economic life-styles and a reduction in the human carrying capacity of the land. Mauritania, Senegal and Mali are highlighted. According to a new report by the US agency Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS), the climatic zone of the Sahel - between the Sahara desert and the moist Sudan savannahs of Africa - has been dropping further into desertification over the last century. The Sahel has suffered the effects of at least four major droughts over the course of the 20th century, namely the droughts of 1914-1918, 1942-47, 1968-73 and 1983-85. Thousands died from starvation in the wake of these droughts. The most recent drought of 1968-73 was responsible for more than 250,000 human fatalities throughout the Sahel. "These painful events opened the public's eyes to the disastrous consequences of the phenomenon of desertification," FEWS reports. Desertification is triggered by climate change and anthropic action. The main climate-related causes of desertification are lower rainfall and higher temperatures. The main anthropic causes of desertification are non-sustainable farming practices, the clearing of land and overgrazing. West Africa in general and the Sahel in particular have experienced exponential population growth over the past twenty years, compounding the problems created by its unfortunate geographical arid position. Monitoring activities by FEWS personnel in five Sahelian countries had shown "a shrinkage in the number of forest species throughout the area between Mauritania and Chad over the period from 1960 to the year 2000." The lower rainfall had triggered a "25 percent reduction in tree density for trees over 3 meters in height throughout northern Senegal between 1954 and 1989." The deforestation has direct economic consequences for rural inhabitants. Farmers and herders alike rely on forest resources. "In fact, perhaps they should be lumped together under the more appropriate term of 'agro-sylvan-pastoralists'," FEWS says. The gathering of forest products was "an important survival strategy in times of famine." With more than 58 percent of its land desert and another 30% threatened by the continued encroachment of the Sahel, Mali has suffered tremendously since the devastating droughts hitting periodically since the 1970s. In Beledugu, Mali, wild fruits, nuts and leaves had accounted for over 60 percent of the food intake by households during the height of the 1988 pre-harvest lean period (May to October), a study showed. "Unfortunately, ten or so years later, most species which, at one time, had been used as a food source are disappearing from village lands in a trend which has become irreversible for want of proper land use planning." Mauritania presently is experiencing a food crisis due to unseasonable rains and general desertification. After 30 years of climatic degradation, including increased droughts and desertification, Mauritania's agricultural zone has now shrunk to a 200 km wide strip running east to west, representing the present limit between the Sahara desert and the savannahs. Local villagers in the Sahel had further noticed other, more severe effects of desertification in the Sahel, including a deterioration in soil fertility and crop yields, the drying up of backwaters and seasonal lakes and ponds, crop failures for non-early-maturing varieties of grain and mass rural-urban migration, FEWS reports. Regional, national and local environmental programmes were however making a positive impact in several cases, the US agency concludes.
Sources: Based on FEWS and afrol archives
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