POVERTY

Poverty is one of the major causes of soil degradation in southern Africa. Poverty forces people to overuse their land resources. They cannot afford to consider the long-term consequences.

Soil degradation makes poverty even worse because the land becomes less productive. People can no longer feed themselves, purchase what they need and look after the land.

More than half of rural families in Malawi, for example, cultivate less than a hectare each. In the southern part of the country population densities top 300 people per square kilometre. Subsistence farmers crop their small holdings almost continuously. They have no cattle to supply manure or pull ploughs because there is no land for grazing or to grow fodder. They cannot produce enough food for themselves, let alone buy fertilisers and other inputs that would reduce the degradation.

It's not, however, only subsistence farmers who are responsible for making some soils unproductive. Even commercial farmers -- who have more access to financial and technical assistance -- share the blame. For example, white South African farmers' poor farming methods have caused the appalling abuse of land resources in that country. These methods, among others,include overstocking, overgrazing and cultivation of marginal land.

According to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), overgrazing causes three-quarters of the soil degradation in southern Africa. While subsistence livestock owners are often blamed for soil degradation, large portions of the region's degraded lands -- particularly in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana -- are occupied by commercial ranches.

POPULATION

Southern Africa has one of the fastest growing populations in the world. The region's population is expected double to 260 million in 25 years. But the land does not physically grow and cannot carry so many people.

The more people there are, the more food, land for settlement and agriculture they need. The challenge for the region is trying to boost food production by about three percent a year to keep pace with an annual 3.15 percent population growth rate.

It is tempting to point to population as the all-important factor in soil degradation, but the relationship between the two is by no means clear-cut. Some areas with high population densities have extreme soil degradation while others have little due to careful land husbandry.
For example, parts of northern Tanzania have had extremely high populations for decades, but little soil degradation because of sophisticated and intensive sustainable agriculture using irrigation, trees and contours.

LAND ALLOCATION

Land allocation is intimately related to population densities, poverty and soil degradation. Political and socio-economic factors determine how restricted the access to land is. Under the original systems of customary tenure in southern Africa, members of a community collectively had the right to occupy land by virtue of their birth or by offering allegiance to the chief.

But colonial administrations interfered with that system of land allocation. They didn't recognise that traditional African forms of agriculture, like pastoralism and shifting cultivation, were appropriate and sustainable uses of land.

In South Africa, for instance, where whites control more than 80 percent of the land and 15 million people are confined to the remaining 14 percent , the skewed land distribution has driven black farmers onto marginal land. Today the homelands are scarred by dongas (deep gullies).

The colonial land policies were designed to deliberately disadvantage African farmers and ensure a supply of cheap labour to white-owned farms and mines. Subsistence farming became uneconomic and destructive land uses like overgrazing, over-cultivation and deforestation were institutionalised.

ARMED CONFLICT

Due to the war in Mozambique, people have been concentrated in "safe" areas, particularly coastal areas. Most of the soils in these areas are fragile and easily degraded. Three-quarters of the population lives in a 50-km-wide strip along the coast.

Quickly-built, unplanned settlements built in Mozambique on islands and along the coast have severe erosion because they are on unstable sandy soils. There are similar problems of localised deforestation and soil degradation refugee settlements in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Malawi. In Angola, large-scale movements of people from cities to rural areas, and more recently from rural areas to cities, have led to concentrations in refugee camps throughout the country. In certain areas, rangelands have been overgrazed due to cattle being restricted to small areas. The traditional system of exchanging cattle for food has been interrupted. Pastoralists in the south of the country are now obliged to grow their own crops, sometimes in areas unsuitable for cultivation.

REVERSING SOIL DEGRADATION

Southern Africa has to face its pressing problems of soil degradation with a lack of affordable appropriate technology, and a poor record of success in soil conservation. The science of soil conservation has existed for more than 50 years. Yet soil conservation programmes have rarely worked because they have not considered the needs of farmers, who were expected to put in a lot of labour without obvious increases in crop yields or income.

Soil conservation programmes must be based on local priorities, and make use of local competence and know-how.

Soil degradation can be solved by boosting plant cover or controlling movement of soil and water with specialised tillage practices such as no-tilled ridging. Cultivated land can be protected by rotating crops and including cover crops such as grazing or hay grasses.

At present the precise costs of unchecked degradation and the benefits of conservation for southern Africa have not been calculated, but economic analyses in the United States indicate that without significant changes in crop pricing and subsidies for erosion controls, farmers using existing forms of soil conservation will lose money.

Agricultural subsidies can make a big difference to how many people a given area can support, as people do take advantage of cheaper fertilisers and other inputs. In most parts of the region, however, subsidies have not been directed at the most highly populated areas. There's room for more examination of this issue, together with strategies for development capable of supporting high population densities without soil degradation.

Schemes to reduce soil degradation will not accomplish anything if they do not address the underlying disease -- rural poverty -- and the factors maintaining it. An efficient system of commercial agricultural production is a laudable goal and a significant achievement if and when it is reached.

But if a large number of subsistence farmers are unable to support themselves and must degrade the land, it will not solve soil degradation problems.

Land redistribution is also important to redress the imbalances created under colonial rule. In South Africa, for example, the effects of decades of social engineering, which reserved land and other resources exclusively for the white population, need to be corrected.

CONTACTS

ANGOLA
Associaáao Angolana para o Meio-ambiente
CP 2110, Luanda, Angola

BOTSWANA
Botswana Society
P O Box 71, Gaborone, Botswana

LESOTHO
Lesotho Conservation and Preservation Trust
P O Box 1017, Maseru, Lesotho

MALAWI
Environmental Education Unit, Min of Agriculture
P O Box 30134, Lilongwe 3, Malawi

MOÄAMBIQUE
Centro de Informaáao e Documentaáao, MinistÇr°o da Agricultura, CP 3658,
Praáa dos Her¢is, Maputo , Moáambique

NAMIBIA
Environment and Land Management Sector, Ministry of Agriculture
P Bag 13184, Windhoek, Namibia

SOUTH AFRICA
Share-Net
P O Box 394, Howick 3290, South Africa

Directorate of Resource Conservation, Department of Agriculture
P Bag X120, Pretoria 0001, South Africa

SWAZILAND
Yonge Nawe Conservation Clubs
P O Box 2061, Mbabane, Swaziland

TANZANIA
Selian Agricultural Research Institute
P O Box 6024, Arusha, Tanzania

ZAMBIA
Department of Agriculture
P O Box 50197, Lusaka,
Zambia