Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 6 • Number 7 • 14th April 2006

Desertification Conference Highlights Trade Impacts

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Trade liberalisation can adversely impact on the ability of communities dependent on drylands to practice sustainable land management, participants heard at a 11-12 April international conference entitled “Desertification, hunger and poverty”. The conference was organised by the Graduate Institute of Development Studies and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and included over a hundred participants, many of which were from developing countries and especially Africa. In a session on risks and potentials of agricultural development in the drylands, Marc Paquin of Unisfera suggested that unless mitigating measures are adopted, agricultural liberalisation can provide an incentive for the expansion of unsustainable monocropping through large-scale, privately owned agriculture (see also Bridges Trade BioRes, 13 May 2005). Such practices, he said, degrade the land, marginalise dryland-dependent people and prevent them from safeguarding the soil diversity on which their future food security depends. However, Barry Shapiro from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) suggested that when joined up with scientific expertise, technical assistance and sustained efforts, exports of foods from drylands can increase the incomes of communities affected by drought and desertification and restore the diversity and extent of plant cover.

Participants in the sessions noted that there is a need for political will and funding to promote sustainable land management and the implementation of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Focusing largely on Africa and the Sahel region, one participant suggested that “trade goes hand-in-hand with debt” insofar as lower prices for exports of commodities has limited governments’ ability to shake off their debt burdens and, as a result, their ability to allocate adequate resources to addressing land degradation. Such degradation, participants said, is “the environmental concern of the poor” because it hinders peoples’ abilities to feed themselves in some of the least developed areas of the world. Approximately two thirds of the 900 million people that live in extreme poverty in rural areas live in drylands at risk of desertification, they noted, and global markets for the handicrafts, ropes and other products from these areas should be enhanced. Negotiations on lowering barriers to trade in goods and services that are environment-friendly are currently underway at the WTO (see related story, this issue), but no one has yet proposed to include goods produced in drylands.

ICTSD Reporting.