
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 29, 1994                   TAG: 9403300146
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PREVENTING FUTURE FOOD DISASTERS

SAVING SOMALIA from widespread starvation brought on by civil war is but a tiny part of the challenge the world continues to face but largely ignores: Thirteen million to 18 million people in developing nations, mostly children, are dying each year from hunger, from malnutrition, from poverty-related causes.

An hour from now, 1,700 more will have died. It's hard to comprehend in America, where most people have more than enough to eat, that one of every five people in the world can't get enough food to sustain normal work, and many of them are too malnourished for even minimal activity.

Yet, while population grows rapidly (doubling every 30 years in many countries), the world is losing arable land to desert at an alarming rate. Of the world's 12.8 billion acres of dryland that is used for agriculture, more than two-thirds is degraded or threatened with desertification, by one estimate. In Africa, the figure is 73 percent.

What this means is that without dramatic intervention, an already grim global picture will turn grimmer. And changing it won't be a job for the Marines. This will take the world community.

An international convention to combat desertification is meeting in Geneva this week to negotiate a treaty scheduled to be signed in Paris in June. Unfortunately, critical issues divide the haves and the have-nots, the more affluent North and the governments of developing Southern nations.

A successful response will require internal reform in many developing countries. Where power rests with elites served by comfortably entrenched bureaucracies, there is resistance to working closely with localities and citizens groups. Yet real progress toward reversing damage to the land can be made only by the people who live on it and draw their sustenance from it.

Farmers must be assured of being able to hold onto their land, giving them a stake in its long-term health; local people must be involved in designing and implementing anti-desertification projects; women must be afforded educational and economic opportunities as well as family planning services to lower unsustainable birth rates - and to make full use of women's abilities.

Even with such good-faith efforts, however, it's a fact that not every affected country will have the money needed to reverse soil losses. With desperately poor people scratching for mere survival on already degraded soil, it is unrealistic to expect effective reclamation and conservation efforts without some help from the richer nations.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that to do what's needed - to develop ecologically sustainable agriculture, plant trees, improve irrigation and take other conservation measures - will cost between $10 billion and $22 billion a year for 20 years.

Soil degradation, moreover, is hardly a problem exclusive to developing countries. While the U.N. Environment Program estimates that Asia forgoes $21 billion a year of income because of desertification and Africa $9 billion, it estimates that North America is forgoing $5 billion a year.

Surely the privileged few have not just an obligation to help the rest, but also an interest in doing so. America's own Depression-era dust bowl is evidence of how quickly fortunes can be reversed by lack of wisdom in using nature's gifts. And how regaining the blessings of the land can require investments in money and effort, technical expertise and vigilance.

by CNB