World Day to Combat Desertification

The Future of the Drylands:
What is the Role of Land Rights?

ILC Statement
June 17th 2006

For the two billion people who live in dryland environments, desertification is a challenge to basic survival. The vast majority of these families are poor, living on less than one dollar a day. Desertification - partly a result of man-made land tenure and resource management systems that are not well-suited to drylands contexts - threatens to entrench the most vulnerable communities in a cycle of poverty, hunger and environmental degradation. To profile desertification as a major threat to humanity, the United Nations has declared 2006 as the International Year of Deserts and Desertification.

Deserts are fragile ecosystems. They must be managed in full appreciation of their unpredictable nature. More rain may fall in one day than the average for several years, or one area may receive abundant rain while a short distance away it remains dry. Local people have developed land tenure and natural resource management systems to accommodate this unpredictability. Mobile pastoralism is one of the most highly adapted livelihood strategies to deserts. Pastoralists follow the rains. This mobile approach to life not only benefits the health of their livestock, but also means that fragile ecosystems can recover from heavy but temporal use. To support such strategies, land tenure systems have remained flexible, accommodating different resource users at different times, spreading risk and minimising vulnerability to climatic factors.

However, many land tenure systems adopted by governments have favoured the private property interests of elites or outsiders. Where this has occurred, the flexibility that resource users require to cope with risk is lost. It also means that livestock are more likely to graze continuously in the same area, reducing the resilience of ecosystems to degradation and ultimately desertification. Misguided attempts at replacing traditional tenure systems with inappropriate models from different social and ecological contexts are a major root cause of desertification and poverty in many dryland areas.

An increasing number of households that have to cope with desertification are headed by women, as deteriorating environmental conditions force men to migrate elsewhere in search of employment. Women who remain are expected to cope with added household chores and responsibilities that are harder to fulfil, and often without being given the financial, technical or social resources to do so. Strengthening the rights of women in arid areas to access and manage land and natural resources is a prerequisite for overcoming the challenges of desertification.

The 2006 World Day to Combat Desertification on June 17th theme "The Beauty of Deserts - the Challenge of Desertification" emphasizes that deserts are magnificent ecosystems. Nobody knows this better than the many people who have for generations lived in and around them, knowing the functions of their environment intimately, and adapting their lifestyles and tenure systems to suit the harsh demands of desert ecosystems. It is long overdue that the knowledge and customs of these local people are put at the centre of attempts to halt desertification. Acknowledging the uniqueness of desert ecosystems, and of the cultural heritage of people who live in them, also opens up possibilities for these people to improve their incomes through activities such as eco-tourism. The starting point is to provide security of tenure for communities over important common-property natural resources. This is how conservation and sustainable use can be achieved.

On the World Day to Combat Desertification 2006, the members of the International Land Coalition, an alliance of civil-society, United Nations and intergovernmental organizations, call upon governments and their partners at national and global levels to recognize the strengths of tenure systems developed by people who live in drylands, and to support their attempts to use dryland ecosystems in a sustainable manner. Bruce Moore, Director of the Land Coalition, has emphasized that it is only recently that the rest of the world has begun appreciating this. "In 1977 the UN Conference on Desertification identified pastoralism as a major cause of degradation. This causality was repeated by UNEP in 1992 at the UN Conference on the Environment and Development. However, the 1994 UN Convention to Combat Desertification finally recognized that improvement of livelihoods in drylands should be based on community participation, admitting that the increase in degradation was due not to pastoralism, but to external agencies imposing inappropriate tenure systems in dryland areas. "

Ultimately, the formidable challenges to traditional tenure systems in contemporary societies can only be met by informed action and the joint efforts of resource users, their governments, and other partners. The support of appropriate land tenure systems for dryland communities will be a major step forward in the challenge that humanity faces to halt desertification.