Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Desertification
As forest cover diminishes, all too often the desert moves in. Desertification is one of the
most serious forms of land degradation, and it's one to which the countries of the Sahel
are particularly vulnerable. Some areas of the Sahel are losing over 50 metric tonnes of
soil per hectare per year, and the desertification that results has reached critical levels in
Niger, Mali and Mauritania, each of which could be entirely consumed by the Sahara
within a generation. But desertification is also a problem for countries beyond the Saheli-
an danger zone: a high-to-moderate risk of desertification exists in Sierra Leone, Liberia,
Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal, which all suffer from serious erosion.
Until the intrepid Mungo Park reached the Niger River close to Ségou on 21 July 1796, European map-
makers were convinced that the river flowed east-west and originated in the Nile or Lake Chad.
The major causes are desertification are easy to identify - drought, deforestation and
the over-exploitation of fragile soils on the desert margin - and are the result of both hu-
man activity and climatic variation. But one of the most significant causes in West Africa
is the use of deliberately started fires. Such fires are sometimes necessary for maintaining
soil quality, regenerating savannah grasslands and ecosystems, enabling livestock produc-
tion and as a form of pest control. But all too often the interval between fires is insuffi-
cient to allow the land to recover, thereby exposing the soil to wind and heavy rains, and
degrading the soil beyond the point of recovery.
West Africans are often blamed for the destruction of their own environment, but the
reality is far more complex and there are other causes that date back even further. Many of
the problems began in colonial times, when farmers were encouraged to plant thirsty cash
crops (such as the peanut) that require intensive farming - traditional methods involved
fallow periods, which allowed the soil to regenerate. Thus deprived of essential nutrients,
the soil required fertilisers to recover, but these were often too expensive for poor farmers
to afford. The soil began to unravel.
This process was exacerbated by well-intentioned animal-husbandry and well-building
schemes funded by the EU in the 1960s and '70s. Herd sizes increased without any ac-
companying growth in pasturelands. In the absence of fodder, the additional cattle and
goats ate the grasses and thorns that bound the soil together. Patches of desert began to ap-
pear around villages that once lay many kilometres south of the desert's southern bound-
ary. As populations increased and enticements by Western seed companies prompted more
farmers to increase the land under cultivation, the few remaining trees and forests were
cut down, thereby accelerating a process that began centuries ago.
