Review of Efforts to Combat Desertification and Arrest and Reverse Land Degradation in Myanmar - Combating Desertification in Asia, Africa and the Middle East - page 287

Table 14.3 Rate of soil erosion under different levels of soil cover
Testing period
(During wet
season)

Plantation
plots along
contour

Plantation
plots along
slope

Bare soil (no
grass)

Natural
vegetation

Rainfall amount
per rainfall event

26 June to
7 October

0.63 t/ha 0.21 t/ha 0.22 t/ha 0.18 t/ha 3.8-2 mm 17 rainy
days with total
rainfall of
200 mm
Data from Land Use Division, Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation (U Kyaw Yee, personal
communication 2011)

9 Challenges

There is widespread land degradation as population increase. Demands for new and
inappropriate land uses and husbandry practices are on the increase. A proper land
use policy is the key to control land degradation due to improper land use and
to ensure a sustainable use of land according to their productive capabilities and
constraints. Up to now such a policy is lacking.
Efforts to combat desertification and arrest and reverse land degradation are still
in progress in Myanmar. There are still many things that we don't know about the
degradation of productive lands and the expansion of desertified land. We would like
to achieve control technologies to reduce the rate of land degradation/desertification.
From the scientific and technological point of view, we have low understanding of
technologies on control of DDLD due to the needs for diverse levels of education
as well as the lack of sufficiently proactive machinery and insufficient conversation
between decision makers, scientists and media.
The main challenges to sustainable agriculture and rural development in
Myanmar, could be (a) shortage of competent human resources in research
and development activities, (b) lack of financial and or physical access of the
farmers to the available inputs, (c) development and transfer of appropriate and
sustainable agro-technology which are environmentally friendly, and (d) lack of
marketing system that guarantee a fair share of benefit for all parties involved in the
system. For the time being, only outdated aerial photograph interpretation and soil
survey data (semi-detailed and topographic) are available, thus there is a need for
improved methods to identify and collect more accurate information concerning the
severity and extent of land degradation in Myanmar. Myanmar needs international
cooperation and coordination among the network's countries for the establishment
of a land degradation database, which will be of great benefit to land development.
To prevent land degradation, reliable and up-to-date information on the potential
and constraints of the various agro-ecological zones and the production potential
of each of them based upon systematic and quantitative land suitability and
productivity assessments are required. A general national soil maps was made in
the 1960s, but since then only little progress was made towards the creation of a
national soil/land data base, due to financial and technical reasons.