Arid Land Development and Combating Desertification in Pakistan - Combating Desertification in Asia, Africa and the Middle East - page 219

• The two most important driving forces of land degradation in Pakistan are limited

land resources and population increase. The result is small farms, low production
per person and increasing landlessness. A consequence of land shortage is
poverty. Land shortage and poverty, taken together, lead to non-sustainable land
management practices, the direct causes of degradation. Poor farmers are led to
clear forest, cultivate steep slopes without conservation, overgraze rangelands
and make unbalanced fertilizer applications.

• Agriculture has been and continues to be the principal driving force of the

national economy, accounting for 26 % of GDP and, together with agro-based
industries, contributing 80 % of export earnings. Over half of the labor force is
absorbed by the sector, which has been performing below potential as a result
of various technical, social and structural constraints. The sector as a whole is
passing through a transitional phase from subsistence to increasingly commercial
production. There is, however, a gap between the well-resourced commercial
sector with large holdings and access to reliable irrigation and the traditional
sector, which includes farmers with small subsistence holdings whether irrigated,
or Barani, tenants and physically marginal farms outside the Indus basin.

Keywords Desertification • Land degradation • Resources-utilization •
Irrigation • Rangelands • Snow melt • Biodiversity • Salt affected land • Hindu
Kush • Sindh • Balochistan • Waterlogging • Forest

1 Introduction

Pakistan, with a great variety of landscapes has a diversified relief including the
majestic high mountain ranges of the Himalayas, Karakorams and Hindu Kush,
snow-covered peaks, eternal glaciers, and the inter-mountain valleys in the north,
vast rich irrigated plains in the Indus basin, stark deserts and impressively rugged
rocky expanse of plateaus in the south-west of Balochistan.
The country is characterized by a continental type of climate, which is arid and
semi-arid (Fig. 12.1 ). There is an extreme variation in temperature depending on
the topography of the country, which experiences an overall deficiency in rainfall.
One-fourth of the country's land area, which is suitable for intensive agriculture,
is seriously subjected to wind and water erosion, salinity/sodicity, water logging,
flooding and loss of organic matter. Watersheds in upper Indus and its tributaries
suffer from unfavorable soil and moisture regimes. Accelerated surface erosion
due to deforestation in the catchments is reducing the life of Tarbela and Mangla
reservoirs, which provide water for 90 % of the food and fiber production in the
country.
Outside the Industrial basin, water mining without ground water recharge has
resulted in sharp declines in water table in areas like Balochistan. Over-exploitation
and misuse of rangelands extending over a vast area are seriously constraining
livestock production, thus adversely affecting the livelihood of pastoral communi-