Alternative livelihood systems in the Drylands: The need for a new paradigm

Abstract

The publication of this special issue of GeoJournal devoted to desertification could not have been timelier. The process of desertification continues unabated in the world's drylands, especially in Africa south of the Sahara, where its impact has been most severe causing relentless environmental degradation and poverty, malnutrition and famines among the people. In spite of this, the topic has gone out of fashion among the international intelligentia, eclipsed by more spectacular challenges of global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, threats to biodiversity, and marine pollution. These new ecological disasters-inwaiting are now the main focus of the agendas of the North and West, receiving the bulk of the additional financial resources the international donor community is making available, through such mechanisms as the Global Environment Facility (GEF). In the meantime, desertification is being talked out of existence and replaced by such concepts as soil degradation and land management, which fall outside Western environmentalists' perceptions of environmental problems. It is due mainly to the countries of Africa, supported by their relevant regional bodies the Organisation for African Unity (OAU), the Permanent Interstate Committee to Combat Drought in the Sahel (CILSS) 1) and the Intergovernmental Authority on Drought and Development (IGADD), and on the international side by the United Nations Sudano-Sahelian Office (UNSO) that the recent United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) kept the issues of desertification and drought alive in the text of Agenda 21. What Has Gone Wrong?