PRESS BRIEFING BY EXECUTIVE SECRETARY OF CONVENTION TO COMBAT DESERTIFICATION

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY EXECUTIVE SECRETARY OF CONVENTION TO COMBAT DESERTIFICATION

Preventive and remedial measures to enable those living in the world's drylands to improve their productive capacities in agriculture and livestock, and to make a living for themselves and for future generations were what the Convention was all about, Hama Arba Diallo, Executive Secretary, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and/or Desertification, Particularly in Africa, told correspondents this morning at a Headquarters press briefing.

The third session of the Conference of Parties to the Convention to be held in Recife, Brazil, from 15 to 26 November, would bring together almost 2,500 participants to review what had taken place since the Convention’s adoption in 1994 and its entry into force in December 1996, he said. Desertification was affecting more than 100 countries worldwide with 1.2 million people living in areas prone to the phenomenon. It was hoped that Recife would produce a renewed commitment on the part of the international community to support measures which would facilitate the Convention's effective and timely implementation through programmes of action being devised at the national, sub-regional and regional levels.

There was more to it than environmental degradation, because desertification had economic and social consequences, not only in Africa, but also worldwide, he continued. The loss of soil fertility was causing major economic and social problems in the affected countries. Those who were no longer in a position to make a living or produce enough food were looking elsewhere for other means for their livelihood. Migration often created more problems for the host country, which did not always welcome migrants with open arms. There had been a lot of migratory movement both within Africa and from Africa to Europe.

There was also migration, he said, between Latin America and North America. Recent studies had shown that migration had been increasing due to the degradation of ecological conditions in the countries concerned. There was one study in particular which showed the movement between Mexico and the United States. Nearly 2,000 Mexicans migrated into the United States per day.

Since the Convention’s entry into force, the bulk of the international community's efforts had been the formulation of national action programmes, he said. Recife would be a review of what countries had done since 1996 to implement the Convention. Today, there were half a dozen programmes ready in Africa, five in Latin America and the Caribbean and two in Asia. The session would also determine if the international community had been supportive of those measures. Often the international community had been slow to support action at the national level. Now that programmes had been formulated, he hoped that the donor community, particularly the developed countries and the international financial institutions, would come forward and support the implementation process.

Asked if it was disappointing that only half a dozen programmes had been formulated, considering that many more than that number had been affected in Africa, he said that it was not. The formulation of the national action programmes

Desertification Briefing - 2 - 27 October 1999

was a long, drawn-out process. Involving local communities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the relevant technical bodies in the process took time. For the Recife meeting, countries were asked to submit national reports on measures taken to implement the Convention. The best turnout had been from Africa, from which 41 reports had been received so far. However, without the necessary technical and financial support from their partners, it would not be possible for countries such as Mali, Namibia or Mauritania to initiate the full implementation of their national action programmes.

The international financial institutions and donor countries did have a place in the programme of the Recife meeting, he added. Many of them had shown their interest in following those processes at the national level in the countries concerned. In Recife, they were expected to indicate what they had done or planned to do, so as to support the implementation of the national action programmes.

With regard to national action programmes, one particularly successful case in Africa had been Mali, he said. That country had been in the forefront of identifying measures and formulating an action programme, which had been developed with the full support of local communities and partners from developed countries and international financial institutions.

In response to a question on the Global Mechanism, he said that the Mechanism was a structure established under the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to facilitate the identification of resources in the donor community as well as access to those resources for the affected countries.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF), he added, had four focal areas -- climate change, bio-diversity, international waterways and the ozone layer. To the extent that activities to combat land degradation were also activities that could impact those four focal areas, countries could have access to funding from the GEF. Any good action to combat land degradation could also be shown to have an impact on the protection or restoration of bio-diversity or in the mitigation of climate change.

As to the costs of desertification, he said that those included losses in production of cereal, livestock and in the availability of water resources to meet human and animal consumption. The estimated loss of $42 million, in his opinion, was a very conservative representation of what was occurring year in and year out, while no action was being taken to change the patterns in agricultural and livestock production.

Fortunately, he said in closing remarks, desertification was a problem for which there were solutions. Today, those solutions would appear to be much cheaper to carry out than what would have to be done 10 or 15 years from on. At present, opportunities existed in Africa, Latin America and Asia to prevent further land degradation. While the affected countries had accepted their commitments under the Convention, they could, by themselves, only achieve so much.

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