Parts of S America Turning Desert, UN Warns

by Jorge Pina

About a million square miles in Latin America are already considered arid and another million sq. miles are semi-arid, warned Raquel Pena-Montenegro, IFAD director for Latin America and the Caribbean.

A global conference on the issue was held last week in Recife, Brazil, where it was announced that the drought in Brazil's impoverished northeast is no longer an annual phenomenon, but has apparently become a permanent situation and is turning the region into a desert.

Causes of desertification, according to IFAD, include climate variability and unsustainable land use, such as over-cultivation, over-grazing, deforestation and poor irrigation practices.

If immediate action is not taken, the process will grow beyond human control, creating a global crisis in the 21st century, warn experts.

The human cost is devastating. Millions of people are forced to cross national borders in search of new, fertile lands and opportunities. An estimated 135 million people will have to leave their homes as a result of desertification in the near future, according to IFAD.

IFAD, the United Nations agency whose mission is to aid the poorest of the poor, was chosen in October 1997 to mobilize and channel resources to fight desertification around the world.

The agency is a founding organization of the Global Mechanism created by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), a network dedicated to preventing the environmental problem.

The Convention, an international legal entity that requires the 144 signing countries to cooperate in anti-desertification measures, went into effect December 26, 1996.

The drylands issue has been one of IFAD's primary concerns. Since its creation in 1978, the agency has invested more than $3 billion in desertification prevention projects.

Pena-Montenegro indicated that the most critical situations in Latin America are found in Brazil's northeast, northern Venezuela, northern Argentina, northern Chile, the high plains of Peru and Bolivia, and the dry tropics of Central America, Cuba and Haiti.

IFAD hopes to call international attention to Latin America and the Caribbean's high desertification rates because, currently, global priority is focused on Africa, explained Pena-Montenegro.

Latin America needs to invest at least $100 million to begin reversing the desertification process. The sum would represent "a starting point," said the IFAD regional director.

But this type of land degradation is an issue on all continents, affecting nearly one billion people in 110 countries and 70 percent of the earth's arid lands used for agriculture.

Poor management of soil and water resources, logging, and other unsustainable human activities threaten to trigger the uncontrollable spread of deserts, endangering the lives of millions of people and forcing them to seek better lives elsewhere.

In Brazil, eight of the nine northeastern states contain areas that have already turned to desert or are considered semi-arid, and they continue to expand.

A severe drought that has lasted since early 1998 has created emergency situations for local residents, forcing the region's officials to turn to the federal government for help to prevent starvation.

In Paraiba state, no rain was recorded during this year's rainy season. Some 87 percent of the state's municipalities have no water, leading the government to declare the state a disaster area.

Last year, Paraiba recorded just 136 millimeters of rain (its normal rainfall is 500 mm per year), the equivalent of the average monthly rainfall in the rest of the country. In 80 percent of the northeastern states' territory, small farmers faced losses reaching 90 percent.

The region has suffered food shortages for the last two years, with serious consequences for public health. Infant diarrhea, a result of malnutrition, caused 77 percent of deaths reported for children under age five.

Infant mortality rates jumped as high as 85.7 per 1,000 births in drought-stricken areas, compared to Brazil's national average of 40 deaths per 1,000.

The immediate result of the drought is the desertification of Ceara, Piaui, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraiba, Pernambuco, Sergipe, Alagoas, and part of Bahia states, a region that is home to more than 50 million people.