Over the years, Agriculture in Africa has been plagued by desert encroachment, deforestation and unplanned agriculture. This has led to the gradual disappearance of semi-arid lands, such as grasslands or shrublands.

According to history, the word ‘desertification’ originated from a French botanist André Aubréville’s 1949 work on African rainforests, though a study argues that it may even be traced back to the 19th-century French colonial North Africa. Talks of desertification in Africa began when the Comité d’Etudes commissioned a study to explore the prehistoric expansion of the Sahara Desert, which was obviously due to natural occurrences at the time. The phenomenon has existed in Africa for thousands of years and isn’t new.

 However, with societies developing and human activities rising, desertification has worsened considerably in recent decades.

It is no longer news that Africa is home to one of the world’s most famous deserts, the Sahara, which is growing at a rate of 48 kilometres per year. Desertification and the expansion of deserts were not initially due to human-induced climate change, as they are nowadays. The world’s greatest deserts formed through natural processes interacting over many years, such as the evaporation of water, upward winds, the descent of warm air and low humidity.

 The European Commission’s World Atlas of Desertification posited that more than 75% of the Earth’s land has already degraded. Unsurprisingly, the majority of desertification is due to climate change from the destruction caused by extreme weather events, such as droughts and fires. Reports from the United Nations Development Program’s Drylands Population Assessment II, disclosed that arid lands account for two-thirds of the African continent and three-quarters of Africa’s drylands are used for agriculture.

The United Nations (UN) also observed that more than 24 billion tons of fertile soil erode annually due to desertification, which can happen for various reasons. The most common are deforestation, poor agricultural and livestock practices, including overexploitation of natural resources. Desertification has a massive impact on the environment, including loss of biodiversity and vegetation, food insecurity, increased risk of zoonotic diseases (an infectious disease transmitted between species) such as COVID-19, loss of forest cover and shortages of drinking water due to the loss of aquifers.

Unfortunately, human activity has more recently come to either grow or shrink these deserts. To put human contributions into perspective, the Sahara has been growing rapidly since the 1920s, covering 10% more land than it used to, according to a study by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientists at the University of Maryland (UMD). The modern study of desertification that we are familiar with today, which considers climate change, emerged from studying the 1980s drought in the Sahel region, which is inarguably the most vulnerable region on the continent. 

The Sahel lies between the Saharan Desert and the Sudan Savannah. It is a 3,000-mile stretch of land that includes ten counties and is under constant stress due to frequent droughts, soil erosion, and population growth, which has increased logging, illegal farming and land clearing for housing. 

The 1980s drought is not the first human-induced event that affected the Sahel region. The desert has historically experienced a long series of droughts, but one of the most significant is the Sahelian drought and famine of 1968. It lasted until 1985 and was directly linked to the death of approximately 100,000 people and the disruption of millions of lives. Human exploitation of natural resources (such as overgrazing and deforestation) was originally believed to be the sole cause behind the drought. Still, it has been suggested that large-scale climate changes also triggered the drought.

Despite being the most affected area in Africa, the Sahel is not the only region dealing with desertification. Some of the most affected areas include the Karoo in South Africa, which has endured semi-arid conditions for the last 500 years, Somalia, which has suffered three major drought crises in the last decade alone, and Ethiopia, with 75% of its land affected by desertification and a major famine between 1983 and 1985. With desertification becoming a more significant problem each year, these consequences will only increase if nothing is done to curb the climate crisis.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been very active in studying and developing arid areas for some time. The integrated management of natural (and particularly plant) resources in arid areas has been pursued in multiple programs: baseline studies on arid areas since the 1950s; an integrated programme to develop the Mediterranean area in the early 1960s; numerous studies and programmes in the 1970s and 1980s, notably the FAO/ Unesco programme evaluating and mapping desertification (1979), the inventory and monitoring of pastoral ecosystems in the Sahel (particularly in Senegal), a study on soil degradation (FAO/UNEP/UNESCO 1975), and the EMASAR Programme (International Cooperative Programme on the Ecological Management of Arid and Semi-Arid Rangelands in Africa, the Near East and Middle East); finally, numerous programmes developed during the last 30 years, with the UNDP or under trust fund sponsorship, to control wind erosion and sand movement at the national and regional levels.

Forest Trees to the Rescue

The multi-purpose utilization of woody species and formations conditions policies and particularly rural development programmes in arid areas. A strategy has gradually taken shape, particularly after the incidence of drought in a number of areas and both regional coordination, such as the CILSS/UNSO/FAO Consultation on the Role of Forestry in a Rehabilitation Programme for the Sahel (1976) and the Green Belt Project in North Africa, and intra-regional and global coordination such as the United Nations Conference on Desertification (1977), FAO’s Expert Consultation on the Role of Forestry in Combating Desertification (Saltillo, Mexico, 1985) and the Silva Conference organized by France (Paris, 1986) together with FAO and the EEC.

The emerging strategy is based on: i) a recognition of the role of forestry in arid areas with due consideration of the different ecological, social and economic factors; ii) a framework of principles (integration, diversification of activities, recognition of the role of each plant storey, the return of forest benefits to the local communities), objectives and priority areas for action.

The objectives are mainly to sensitize all interested parties to the importance of tree and forest resources in the sustainable use of the natural resource base; to consider natural resource conservation and enhancement in national development plans; and to channel greater and more varied natural resource management benefits to the local communities.

The Tropical Forests Action Programme (TFAP) has confirmed and consolidated these objectives in its respective components for the control of desertification, the conservation of watersheds in arid areas, the production of wood-based energy and agro-silvo-pastoral integration. Recent developments confirm the need for the integration of forest resource management in arid areas in actions to promote sustainable agricultural development, the conservation of biological diversity and integrated land management.

FAO’s recent programme, “the Conservation and Rehabilitation of African Lands”, recognizes the impact of deforestation and degradation of tree and shrub cover in arid areas on the degradation of African lands and prioritises actions for the management of forest resources and plant rehabilitation to control desertification.

This strategy is reflected in FAO’s forestry activities in arid areas. Within the framework of its regular programme, it supports national institutions about planting techniques, the improvement of trees and woody species genetic resources in arid areas; it operates related information exchange networks with the regional and subregional organizations; it publishes case studies, guidelines and handbooks on agro-forestry and the contribution of trees and shrubs to agricultural production in arid areas, on the development of fuelwood resources and the enhancement of soil fertility, water use and watershed management.

In conclusion, information and experiences related to arid-area forestry are exchanged through FAO’s statutory bodies, particularly the Regional Forestry Commissions for Africa, the Near East and Europe and their joint “Silva Mediterranea” Committee on Mediterranean Forestry Questions, with its five technical cooperation networks.