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Desertification has become the latest environmental peril to win its
own UN treaty. But, unlike predecessors covering global warming and destruction
of the ozone layer, the new treaty leaves the problem it addresses ill-defined.
And a last-minute compromise on funding at the final negotiating session
last week failed to extract the ‘new and additional resources’ from industrialised
countries that arid nations, especially in Africa, had hoped for.

Two years ago, the Earth Summit called for a convention to combat desertification.
Delegates from more than a hundred countries reached agreement on a final
text last week. The chairman of negotiations, Bo Kjellen from Sweden, said:
‘I think we did well, but what counts is what effect the convention will
have on the ground.’

The treaty aims to secure the long-term productivity of farmland in
arid areas by relying on local projects. The UN Environment Programme
claims that desertification affects more than 900 million people spread
over a quarter of the world’s land area and ‘seems to be occurring at an
accelerated rate’. But the data to back up this claim has always been elusive.

Debates have raged over whether expanding areas of desert-like land,
seen especially in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, are caused by changing
climate or misuse of the land by people, and whether the changes are reversible.
The UNEP has defined desertification as degradation of soils in arid regions
‘resulting mainly from adverse human impact’. But since 1990, the Saharan
desert has been retreating, apparently because of improved rainfall.

The notion of desertif-ication as a ‘global threat’ has also been attacked
by academics (‘Mirage of the shifting sands’, New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ, 12 December
1992). Last month, two British geographers who wrote the UNEP’s World Atlas
of Desertification, which was published two years ago, launched a blistering
attack on the idea.

Nicholas Middleton of the University of Oxford and David Thomas of the
University of Sheffield, in their book Desertification: Exploding the myth,
claim that UNEP has created ‘a self-perpetuating institutional myth’ about
desertification. The myth includes the idea that deserts have advanced
on a broad front, and that dry lands are fragile ecosystems vulnerable to
permanent damage by humans. The UNEP also says desertification is a major
cause of human misery, and that the UN is best placed to prevent it. Thomas
and Middleton call desertification ‘an all-too-convenient scapegoat’ for
‘social maladies that may be due to political mismanagement’.

Middleton said this week that the convention is ‘a smokescreen for governments
to throw up their hands and say famine is the fault of the gods, or of peasants,
and not them’. Much more useful would be ‘a programme of research to find
out what is really going on in the drylands’.

In this scientific morass, Western governments have been more than usually
reluctant to offer extra money to fight desertification. In particular,
the Global Environment Facility based at the World Bank, which is the main
funding body for tackling environmental problems, has refused to define
desertification as a ‘global’ problem eligible for money.