Foreword: 10th Anniversary Review: Addressing land degradation and climate change in dryland agroecosystems through sustainable land management

Camilla Toulmin

Camilla Toulmin is the Director of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). An economist by training, she has worked mainly in dryland Africa on land rights, soil fertility, and natural resource management.

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Camilla Toulmin introduces Richard Thomas’ 10th Anniversary Critical Review

Dryland degradation, or desertification, has been the focus of numerous global initiatives including the Convention to Combat Desertification. ‘Desertification’ has often been very unhelpful as a term, and subject to much debate and dispute in the scientific literature, because it is associated in the public mind with the idea of an advancing desert. Such an association has often been encouraged by those agencies responsible for desertification-related activities, since pictures of sand dunes provide photogenic material for publicity documents. However, desertification is not concerned with problems of mobile sand dunes but with much broader and more significant processes of land degradation which are usually found many kilometres from any real desert. It is a combination of factors which, over time, render land less productive, as a result of processes which include soil erosion, loss of soil fertility, changes in soil structure, and a reduction in plant cover and the biological diversity of plants and animals. These processes have the effect of making the agricultural or livestock systems less productive in terms of yields of useful outputs and more vulnerable to shocks such as drought. Sustainable land management, as argued by Richard Thomas in the following review, is clearly a more sensible and practical approach than the exhortary but vague goal of combating desertification.

Farmers throughout the world recognise the dangers of soil degradation damaging the productive capacity of their land. However, the impact in dryland areas can be particularly harsh and the very low incomes of dryland populations mean that such people are particularly exposed to risks of food shortage and impoverishment.

But, many dryland people are also very resourceful. Sustainable land management can be achieved by more careful management of soils, water and vegetation, building on indigenous knowledge and techniques. In addition, the great importance of economic, institutional and socio-cultural factors is now seen as key, along with the recognition that farmers need a clear economic incentive if they are to invest in a more intensive form of agricultural land management. Far from being hopelessly backward and unwilling to change their farming methods, local people are often remarkably flexible and able to adapt to large changes in rainfall patterns and economic opportunities. Traditional knowledge and techniques have been shown to provide, for example, a good basis for developing improved methods of soil management, in combination with outside science and innovation.

While some see drylands suffering from ‘over-population’, recent thinking shows this to be much too simple a view of the dynamics linking population density, the status of the natural resource base, and broader economic and institutional factors, such as agricultural prices and security of land holdings. In many places, growth in population brings a positive change in land management: land becoming scarcer makes it more valuable, leading to more careful maintenance of soil fertility and increased investment in the construction of soil and water conservation structures. Good prices for crops provide a further incentive for farmers to invest in making their land more productive. But this virtuous circle in which population growth is accompanied by rising investment in land does not always happen. Equally, technology by itself will not bring about change unless it is allied to an economic and institutional context in which adoption of new methods makes sense.

JEM rightly celebrates its 10th birthday. Let's hope that in the next 10 years, together we make a real improvement in the environment and development prospects of poor people in the world's drylands. Their political marginalisation means that few dryland people have a strong voice to influence the policies and practices which affect their lives, yet they also have much to teach us in terms of managing risk, diversifying activities, and building resilience in productive and social systems.

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