Over 130 mayors from cities in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe met in June in the German city of Bonn for a forum on "Cities and Desertification".
Around 3 million rural dwellers in developing countries are estimated to be leaving their homes each year because their land can no longer support them. Land degradation, or desertification, has forced them to become migrants. Overwhelmingly they make their way to the shanty areas of cities and put a huge strain on services, such as housing, water supply, waste removal and treatment, health care and education, which are already over-stretched.
Half the world's population already live in urban areas, and the problem of migration caused by land degradation is growing. "If nothing is done to stop the root causes of desertification, around 30 million rural dwellers could be forced out of their homes in the next ten years", said Fawzi Al-Sultan, president of the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), one of the organisers of the Bonn forum.
Agenda 21 - the document agreed at the Earth Summit in 1992 - says that desertification affects 70 per cent of all drylands, amounting to 3.6 billion hectares, about one-quarter of the world's land area. Almost one in six of the world's population are affected - some 900 million people.
Nearly half the mayors at the forum came from Africa, the most seriously affected continent. The Ugandan capital, Kampala, is probably not untypical. Designed for 10,000 people, it now has 1.5 million residents. "People who usually come to the cities come from rural places where the soil is exhausted. The desert has come to the city - and it's having a really big impact", said Sarah Nkonge Muwonge, acting mayor of Kampala. "Already Kampala is exhausted, it has no more land. If nothing is done, unemployment is going to increase, insecurity is going to increase and we shall have a lot of illegal settlements, and we just can't provide for them all", said Ms Muwonge. Finance was needed, she stressed, to tackle the root causes of the problem.
Around a thousand people a month are migrating into Tanzania's new capital, Dodoma. "People practice shifting cultivation in forest areas and move on after 2 years or so", said Peter Mavunde, the city's Lord Mayor, "but much of the forest land is now so degraded that people have nowhere to move to. Except to the city". But what can mayors do about problems like these? "We're helping village people by providing electricity to their villages, and we're planning to relocate small-scale industries in rural areas to provide employment", said Mavunde. He stressed also the importance of secure land tenure in tackling the problem. "When people have secure tenure of their land, they are more likely to protect it and invest in it", he pointed out.
In some countries, the problem is also being tackled by rural communities themselves. In the Mahboobnagar district of India's state of Andra Pradesh, for example, where land and livelihoods have been eroded, small-scale income generating projects, water harvesting schemes, and the planting of trees to protect the soil are being undertaken by womenıs groups. Results are dramatic.
"At least 40 per cent of people in the district used to migrate to the town every year, some on a seasonal basis. Migration has now stopped", said Venkat Ramnayya of a Hyderabad-based organisation, Youth in Action, which is assisting the groups.
Hama Arba Diallo from Burkina Faso, Executive Secretary of the Bonn-based United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, warned that migration problems are spreading to European cities. "In Burkina Faso, we had only 8 per cent living in the big cities 35 years ago", he said, "but in 5 years time, nearly 50 per cent of our population will be in the urban areas. The capacity of cities to accommodate so many people drifting in from the countryside will just become exhausted. This is going to be a dramatic situation, but then, as long as the people in the rural areas believe that the only way for them to get a job or to make an income is to come to the urban areas, this is likely to happen. I'm just afraid that those in Burkina Faso who cannot make it in Ouagadougou will go to Abidjan, but if in Abidjan nothing comes along, then they will just move on, maybe now to Europe. This is happening".
Mr Diallo warns that "what we are seeing today is nothing compared to what is coming, because the populations in the rural areas of Africa are getting poorer and poorer. And they know they are not taking any risk because for them things can
only be better than what they left in the rural areas".
The Convention to Combat Desertification is supporting initiatives to stop land degradation, while IFAD is funding projects to help to people to stay on their land. IFAD is also housing a "Global Mechanism" which is coordinating fund raising for anti-desertification projects.
In the search for solutions to the problems, the mayors looked beyond the Third World. "The lifestyle and consumption pattern of Northern cities generate a demand for natural resources which, unless they are managed sustainably, can contribute to land degradation", said Bärbel Dieckmann, mayor of Bonn, one of only a handful of European mayors to attend the forum.
"The cities and local authorities in the North, in Europe, do not believe that desertification is anything to do with them", said David Meyrick, an advisor to the
Toronto-based International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, which is made up of over 400 local authorities world wide; "but every city demands resources and has what we call an ecological footprint. This means that the demand for natural resources within the city extends very far afield and into the Southern hemisphere and into the dryland areas. Cities in the North through their consumption patterns and their lifestyles impose demands through the global economy on the dryland areas and are a contributory factor in terms of land degradation".
As a follow-up to their meeting, the mayors agreed on a programme called Cities Against Desertification, so as to be involved in the fight against the land degradation which is forcing people from their homes.
John Madeley
