Annexes

Annex 1
Welcome address

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am delighted to welcome all of you, officially on behalf of FAO and especially on behalf of the Agriculture Department. I am particularly delighted, not only because I see many familiar faces and many old friends from when I was closer to soil science than I am now, but also because our partnership is essential for the important LADA endeavour. The reason for the present meeting is that we have received approval from GEF for the second phase of LADA project preparation

The LADA process started with a request from the UNCCD to look in more detail at land degradation issues and desertification and to build a scientific basis for land degradation estimates and assessments. It is clear that FAO cannot do this by itself, since many people have information that is very important. Above all, this joint effort aims not just at the perfection of the assessment, but very much also at the implementation. You may wish to keep as a running thread in your discussions the issue of “What do we actually do with this?” Studies must have a very concrete outcome. To paraphrase one of our Director-General’s favourite expressions, “people do not eat paper”. For us, this clearly refers to the commitments that member countries have made at the World Food Summit, to halve the number of the world’s hungry. That is what should be in the back of our minds – how can this kind of monitoring and assessment actually lead to concrete action and to more sustainable agriculture?

Land degradation has been with us possibly as long as agriculture itself. And the geologically inclined among us know that land degradation is a normal, natural process and an essential part of landscape renewal. What we are looking at today is the intensification of land degradation as a result of human intervention. You know much better than I what this means in practice, but one of the most telling statistics that comes to mind is the following. There are about 1 billion people in this world who are the absolute poor, surviving on less than a dollar a day – probably there are even more. There are about 800 million people who are food-insufficient. But about 2 billion people in this world are affected by land degradation: land degradation affects many more people than just the absolute poor. It is a complex set of problems across all latitudes and all ecological zones of the world. It is not just a problem of developing countries, or of the tropics. We must come to terms with the commonalities and the specific differences across ecologies and socio-economic environments.

You are to embark on yet another assessment, and I say “yet another” because the world already has several assessments of land degradation. But there is something new today in the international arena in which the discussions on land degradation take place – or rather, several new things: better geo-information tools; and the recognition that land degradation is a biophysical, economic, social and environmental issue.

We have a much better computer base than we ever had before, so we are better able to start linking national assessments, international efforts, satellite-based information with soil surveys and other existing information. We have much better facilities and systems for spatial analysis than before. Still, we cannot yet link production data to degradation data on a spatial basis. Geo-referencing our basic statistical data, including on land use and production, is one of FAO’s challenges. However, there is also a risk in this – it is very tempting to sit behind a computer and do wonderful analyses of overlays, but land degradation is a reality in the field for people and their communities.

We have recognised that we must find ways to integrate the qualitative knowledge of how people work in degraded situations or how they improve land, and some of the social and anthropological data, with the quantitative assessments of land degradation, use and productivity. We now have a better understanding of the facts of land degradation than before, of its costs in terms of loss of biodiversity and in terms of declining or stagnating production. We also understand its effects on water resources, etcetera, but this knowledge is still very patchy. But we do not yet have a quantitative insight into the economics of land degradation. Even though many people have been working on this, in today’s globalised, market-driven world we cannot calculate the value of arable land – there is no consistent market for good land, for topsoil, for soil organic matter or carbon sequestered. The LADA process that this meeting will be building will need to create a better understanding of the economics so that not only farmers and not only Ministries of Agriculture, but also Ministries of Finance will be convinced that it is worthwhile investing in the mitigation of land degradation or in land improvement. This is an area, like the value of biodiversity, where work is needed to estimate, assess and determine the long-term costs of not investing in countering land degradation.

Extensive monitoring has been done in the past and it remains very tempting to continue do this in a merely descriptive manner – the easy way. It is much more difficult, and much more challenging, to formulate testable hypotheses. Where is the most severe land degradation in specific areas, and why? One very rough hypothesis is that there is a complicated, non-linear relationship between agricultural intensification and land degradation that may look like a parabolic curve. At very low levels of intensity there is probably very little land degradation - what springs to mind is traditional shifting cultivation in areas with very low population pressure. If the system is managed very carefully, very intensive annual crop production, as in the Dutch polders and elsewhere, also may result in little or no land degradation, or even land improvement. But there is a whole series of systems at intermediate intensity, where land degradation takes on different forms and is linked in some ways to intensification.

We should gain a better understanding of the relationships between land degradation and intensification, not just because agriculture is often blamed for land degradation but also because in many areas, agriculture is the only suitable manager that can protect the land against degradation. It is the people living on the land, the farmers, the people making forestry their livelihood, that have to invest in the land. So the very best way, except in the case of pure nature conservation, will be to invest through agriculture and forestry and with the participation and initiative of the people living on the land. That is why the complex relationship of land degradation and improvement with intensification of agriculture and generating income is a very important one. These issues present an important set of challenges, particularly against the backdrop of this year.

In June this year the World Food Summit – five years later will be convened in Rome, where the commitment of governments towards halving the world’s hungry will be reviewed. As you know, in the Rome declaration of the World Food Summit, November 1996, there are several statements on sustainable intensification and sustainable production – and this year’s World Food Summit will evaluate where we are and where to go from here. This year is also the year of the Johannesburg summit – ten years after the commitments made by Governments at Rio. So this year, both the environmental community and the agricultural community of the world will be meeting. Land degradation and agriculture are core issues for both, so it is important and timely that we are holding this meeting and that the LADA project is starting now. I hope that some of your insights and ideas can already be fed into the preparatory process for the Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and for the World Food Summit.

I am looking forward to the outcome of your discussions. This is an important subject. I believe we have a role as a global LADA partnership. So I wish you success and thank you.