Annexes

Implications for implementation
Definition and classification

Implications for implementation

The key aspects of sustainable dryland development strategies which have been elaborated in the document need to be interpreted and recast by national authorities and other organizations according to local circumstances and organizational mandates. The potential role of local, national, regional and international bodies with respect to each key aspect is indicated in Table 1. in a similar vein, Table 2 relates key aspects to major categories of land and production system, while Table 3 elaborates on where and how international bodies might specifically contribute, in terms both of key aspects and production systems.

An effective strategy is a comprehensive strategy, that addresses central policy and organizational issues as well as specific departmental or disciplinary inputs. Countries with diverse conditions will need separate strategies for different areas. Thus, in a country as agro-ecologically and ethnically diverse as Kenya, five dryland area development strategies might be required to focus the specific inputs and actions on the different needs of each ecology, e.g., the very arid northern rangelands, the more productive southern rangelands, the eastern dryland cropping areas, the lightly populated coastal hinterland (often with tsetse challenge), and the drier highlands. However, most countries would require fewer dryland area development strategies. Moreover, there also needs to be an umbrella strategy in order to ensure the necessary policy and organizational infrastructure and to establish priorities between areas. Likewise, the national drylands strategy has to be integrated with broader national strategies, in order to ensure complementary development between areas and sectors.

The implications for the UN system of national drylands development strategies lie not in new activities but in coordination and shifts in emphasis. Many UN agencies and other international bodies (e.g., ICRISAT, IGADD, CILSS) have roles to play. However, clearly a lead role in supporting national dryland agricultural development strategies lies with FAO. There are many functions which the UN system could perform in this regard, including the provision, in useful form, of statistical and other arguments in favour of drylands development. A major effort is also required to stimulate more accurate drought forecasting, as an aid to developing better drought strategies and increased food security. There is also a role in facilitating the exchange of germplasm, technology, and development experience between countries.

Table 1. Relevance of Strategy Components by Organizational Level

¹ Excludes normal Flows of aid;
XXX Major responsibility;
XX Shared responsibility;
X Essential inputs;

No entry indicates no essential input.

Table 2. Relevance of Strategy Components by Category of Land/Production Systems

XXX Critical issue;
XX Major issue;
X Leaser issue; No entry indicates limited or no relevance.

Table 3. Strategic Inputs by FAO by Strategy Components and Land/Production Systems

XXX Major responsibility/capability;
XX Important area of involvement (especially policy options);
X Influence expressed mainly through FAO Conference and other international bodies.

Definition and classification

The central objective of the key aspects of dryland strategies presented here is to arrest land degradation and promote sustainable development in the drylands of the developing world. Since the term drylands is interpreted in many different ways, a working definition is presented in this annex.

Definition

Drylands embrace both arid and semi-arid lands, as well as more desertic (hyper-arid) areas. These lands are characterized by low and erratic precipitation which is reflected in relatively low and notably unpredictable levels of crop and livestock production. Typically arid areas receive less than 200 mm of winter rainfall annually or less than 400 mm of summer rainfall, while semi-arid areas receive 200 - 500 mm of winter rainfall or 400 - 600 mm of summer rainfall. However, the main feature of their dryness lies less in total precipitation as in the negative balance between precipitation and evapotranspiration. Drylands have thus been defined as areas where mean annual precipitation is less than half of the potential evapo-transpiration. This in turn is reflected in the number of growing days that constitute the length of the growing period for crops.

Of these various criteria, FAO chose growing days as the relevant criterion, and defines drylands as lands with a growing period of less than 120 days. Within this range, arid lands have less than 75 growing days while semi-arid lands have 75 days or more. The value of using growing days lies partly in the fact that several of the sets of statistics produced by FAO (including population support capacities of different land areas) are grouped according to growing periods rather than by other climatic criteria. For detailed work, especially involving pasture or rangeland, problems can arise from the fact that grass responds to intermittent showers that are not registered as growing days, but that is not a problem at the level of analysis attempted here.

Sustainable development has also been defined in several ways. One succinct definition is 'development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs'. The definition adopted by FAO is as follows:

'Sustainable development is the management and conservation of the natural resource base, and the orientation of technological and institutional change, in such a manner as to ensure the attainment and continued satisfaction of human needs for present and future generations. Such sustainable development (in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors) conserves land, water, plant and animal genetic resources, is environmentally non-degrading, technically appropriate, economically viable and socially acceptable.'

Land degradation is less frequently subject to definition but in general terms refers to loss of productivity through damage to soil and/or natural vegetation. It implies a loss that is more than ephemeral and is part of a downward trend which has to be reversed if the former or potential level of productivity is to be attained. Land degradation is used here in preference to desertification, since the latter (however it is defined) conjures the image of trend towards desert, which is not helpful to the recognition of degradation in the full range of conditions under which it occurs. However, the present strategy addresses desertification as much as it addresses poverty or any other of the products of over-use or misuse of the drylands.

FAO estimates of land potential are usually calculated for about 100 countries in the developing world. Statistics relating to areas of drylands and their populations frequently omit several countries with substantial tracts of dryland, most notably China and Mongolia but also other countries such as Oman. China specifically is cited because, with a land area of almost 10 million km² and a population of around 1 000 million, the omission of that country or any part of it distorts the total picture substantially. There may be over 6 million km² of drylands in East Asia.

In global terms the picture that emerges is that the drylands of the developing world total some 20 million km² supporting a population in 1975 of around 430 million. Of this population, Africa supports 70 million, Latin America around 40 million and the remaining 320 million are distributed through the Near and Middle East and the rest of Asia including China. Since 1975, these populations may well have increased by a further 15 per cent.

As regards the population support capacity of the drylands, the 1975 population in Africa was already close to the maximum projected as feasible under a high level of inputs (which far exceed present-day inputs). This means that in many areas the support capacity of the land is already far exceeded. In Latin America there is potential to support more people in the drylands, though locally there is already population pressure and especially in the arid zone. For the rest of the developing world, current statistics (or the analysis thereof) permit no generalization. Nonetheless, with a population now approaching 500 million, it would be irresponsible to conclude that there is not a pressing problem.

Global Classification.

Both the term drylands and its antithesis, well-watered lands, emphasize moisture availability rather than climate per se, but they equate closely with the concept of arid and humid climates. Drylands embrace semi-arid, arid and hyper-arid (desert) climates, while well-watered lands embrace sub-humid, humid and hyper-humid climates. Dry sub-humid climates occupy the middle ground and are best held in that position, to be included or excluded from either category depending on circumstances. In reality there is no clear line where water becomes abruptly limiting or non-limiting, and much of a drylands development strategy will apply to dry sub-humid areas.

It follows that all of the world's land surface can be classified either as dry or well-watered, to be sub-divided further according to relative aridity or humidity. Aspects of climate other than moisture availability can be indicated, at the same global level, through a parallel classification based on latitude. The descriptors tropical, temperate and polar help immediately to categorize the type of drylands under consideration. Other parallel classifications can be superimposed (e.g. specifying continent or region), though for purposes of a global strategy it is not helpful to take subdivision too far. It is useful to separate high elevation (mountain) drylands from the rest, and to specify major seaboards (where this confers ease of access by boat and/or fisheries potential), but features such as soil type are better covered by local site descriptions than in a global classification.

Local Classification

Features for categorizing drylands at the local level vary according to whatever local factors determine land use and productivity. Commonly these include:

Climatic factors, expressed in terms not only of annual indices but also of the seasonality of precipitation and of periods too cold or dry for plant growth, including (where statistics allow) probabilities of drought.

Soil and vegetation, with particular reference to the moisture retentivity and erodibility of soils and to the physiognomy of the natural vegetation (i.e. whether annual or perennial grassland or dwarf shrubland, etc., indicating if cover is moderate, sparse or absent but citing genera or species only where these have particular ecological significance).

Land use and population pressure, indicating the prevalence of pastoralism, cropping and other forms of land use, and whether population density is low, moderate or high relative to the population support capacity of the land (also whether the land is disputed between different users or countries).

Other features such as topography, surface and groundwater availability, the extent of land degradation and, in Africa, the presence of tsetse flies; all of which may impact greatly on land use and development.

Where cropping prevails and rangeland is unimportant, an agro-ecological zonation, of the type developed by FAO, could substitute for the above categorization. However, this is inadequate for purposes of range and livestock development since, of the features listed above, the FAO zonation considers only soil type and growing periods for arable crops no more than 10 per cent of the drylands of Africa, Asia and Latin America are in fact cropped.

Responsibility for categorizing drylands according to local conditions and needs rests with national authorities. To attempt that task here would yield a myriad of dryland types which would be confusing in its length and would still omit many gradations and variants that have local significance. However, it is possible to extract four major types which are both radically different one from the other and encapsulate the essence of the drylands problem.

Major Dryland Types

Dry uplands. Although limited in area, mountain and other elevated drylands have a distinctive character. In temperate zones they tend to be inhospitable (though they may provide valuable summer grazing) but in the tropics they are often densely populated. Tropical upland areas are often preferred sites for settlement and, even when arid, are more favourable for living and for crop production than neighbouring lowlands. In such circumstances, they have been foci of settlement and civilization for centuries.

Examples occur in North Yemen and in northern Ethiopia. In the former case, irrigation from groundwater has supplemented more traditional methods of water harvesting and so has helped support a growing population.

In Ethiopia there is less opportunity or tradition of irrigation, and population pressure is more acute. The famines and periodic mass starvation that have affected northern Ethiopia over the past 20 years are too well-known to require description here. More than anywhere else in the world, the dry uplands of northern Ethiopia typify the disaster situation of the drylands; the situation where an excessive population is confined to a limited resource, to the degradation of the land and the complete impoverishment of the people.

Lower elevation dry croplands. More widespread, though still limited in area, is the situation where rangeland has been brought under cultivation. Examples occur in China, India, North Africa and the Middle East, East Africa and the soudano-sahelian zone of West Africa. The designation lower elevation is intended only to differentiate these areas from upland areas; the elevation may be over 1500 m, especially in the heart of continental masses, but on plateaux rather than mountains.

Over such a wide area, dryland cropping is practiced under many ecological and socio-political conditions. Typically the areas concerned are semi-arid but include arid lands also. Expansion of cropping into the arid zone is often a recent response to population pressure and/or mechanization; sometimes with modest success if the sites are well-chosen, but more usually (as in North Africa) with poor crop yields and major land degradation. Where irrigation is feasible, on the other hand, sustained cropping is also feasible, and (as in China) has been practiced for generations.

Although dryland farmers often keep livestock, and may make extensive use of range grazing, crops are usually the basis of subsistence. Development efforts therefore need to focus first and foremost on the croplands, even where these are small in area compared with the associated rangelands. However, livestock production can still be a central component, in terms of draught power and/or manure and also to militate against the climatic risks inherent in dryland cropping.

Arid rangelands. Pastoralism is still the predominant form of land use in the drylands, even though it supports only a minority of the people. Although still practiced in the semi-arid zone (in tropical Africa especially), pastoralism is more characteristic of arid rangeland, where often it represents the only, practicable form of land use. It may involve cropping (agro-pastoralism) but its essential feature is extensive livestock husbandry utilizing range grazing and browse. Arid zone pastoralism requires mobility, with movements determined not only by feed availability but by the availability of drinking water and, in the temperate zone, by temperature.

Pastoralism, much more than settled agriculture, is governed by the environment, and pastoralists form an integral part of the ecosystem. More rain produces more feed which supports more livestock; and more livestock leave less feed for drought periods, which then cause livestock (and sometimes people) to die, until more rain brings more feed again and the cycle is repeated. And the greater the number of pastoral families seeking to maintain a subsistence herd or flock, the greater the probability that overgrazing will reduce the capacity of the range to respond to rain when it comes. In that event the natural cycle becomes a vicious cycle, with increasing land degradation and mortality.

Nor can agricultural inputs such as new varieties and fertilizers offer much hope for alleviating the rigours of pastoralism. Additional water points can serve as a palliative but are no help in the longer term unless used to introduce improved management systems. Only through the more efficient management of available resources — coupled with marketing and other services (including health and education) adapted to the mobility that pastoralism demands—can a measure of stability be achieved and a framework for further improvement created.

Deserts. This over-used term tends to be applied to the driest areas of any country or region. Many such areas are relatively well vegetated, and here would be included in the category of arid rangeland. Others support major irrigation schemes. However, there remain substantial areas that are too dry to justify major development input. They may be ice-bound or dunefields or, if vegetated, rarely used and unimportant to neighbouring pastoralists. Areas too eroded to justify restoration may also be included in this category. All such land needs to be delineated so that it may be explicitly excluded from the development effort, or at least relegated to a low priority. It could be unwise to ignore such areas altogether unless it has been proven that groundwater or oil or other mineral resources do not occur. Specific inputs may also be required on the fringes of sand deserts, to arrest sand encroachment into more productive areas.