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Participation in the fight against desertification

When one talks of participation of rural people in the fight against desertification, there is need to define just exactly what one means. Rural people who are surviving in the face of declining soil fertility and water availability are already participating in a range of complex livelihood strategies. Many foresters and agriculturalists use participation as related to putting a halt to encroaching desert-like conditions as the process of refraining from overuse and even enriching remaining resources.

Men and women who come from a tradition of farming and herding for their livelihoods are keenly aware of the nature that surrounds them. They recognize when they are forced into practices which over stress the available natural resource base of woody vegetation leading to soil degradation and less desirable water regimes. The question then is how can policy makers and technical specialists enhance the commitment of local farmers and pastoralists to utilize resources in a sustainable manner and avoid moving to other fragile lands which cannot support them?

Two points should be examined in the effort to enhance this type of participation: access to and control over adequate resource base; and, organizational and methodological approaches to empower people to participate.

1. Access and control. Without adequate resources for sustainable livelihoods, the resource is bound to be used in an unsustainable manner. A number of farming and herding systems which used to be sustainable in arid conditions are no longer viable A major change for both cultivators and pastoralists has been loss of control over adequate land and water resources. Studies show that successful strategies, especially in the arid or semiarid areas, or where the weather (rainfall) is erratic, are usually extensive and planned on "worse case" scenarios. Farmers frequently use cropping-fallow agroforestry systems with multiple crop and tree outputs and herders use transhumant patterns also profiting from diversified products. Studies have shown that socially these societies frequently limit their population size to that which the environment could sustain.

However, many governments have favoured more intensive and continuous cropping and ranching based on maximizing output during good or average years. In a number of countries governments see fallow or seasonal pasture as "unoccupied" or "unused" and classify it as government land or encourage new settlement. These actions reduce available land to current users and sometimes make the area effectively an "open" resource over which there is no effective control. Loss of local access to and control over previously used resources compromises the viability of sucessful production systems. To strengthen effective local participation, governments and technical agencies need to facilitate access to adequate resources for sustainable livelihoods and local control over the benefits of wise management.

2. Methods to empower women and men to participate. Several issues are involved in the empowerment process: freedom to effectively organize; access to and input into information, research and extension systems; participatory methodology in designing and controlling activities; and decentralization of authority and management of funds.

In many countries, farmer organizations are developing to support more effective purchases or marketing when the resources are scattered and communal buying or selling makes more economic sense. Local organizations which can communicate concerns, manage sustainable communal systems and purchase or market goods more effectively can be a great incentive for local participation. Government policies should be aiming at supporting and strengthening these local organization forms.

Improved information, extension and communications are expecially important in drylands. Misinformation about the economics of herder or fallow system farming is rampant. Land-use in fragile areas builds on what may seem to the technician to be less than the maximum output and too diverse and scattered to specialize or capitalize on the most efficient technologies. However, the adopted strategy may be the most effective for taking advantage of micro-sites and surviving through the vagaries of erratic rainfall.

Most suggested "improved" technologies require increased labour, capital and expertise. Long-time residents know labour demands of various family members at different seasons, local benefits from reciprocal social and economic strategies, and the environmental realities during both good and bad seasons. Local people are constantly carrying out research and experimentation to improve their returns. Participation built on collaboration between local people and technical specialists in developing extension and research strategies is important in all forestry-related activities. However, it is especially important in areas of extensive production systems where policy makers and technical specialists are apt to be much less familiar with the livelihood strategies and have fewer production alternatives which fit the social, economic and physical environment. Participatory assessment, planning, monitoring and evaluation are important in all forestry activities.

Decentralization of planning, management and financial resource use is especially important in dry and fragile lands where scattered resources require local support for management. Access and control, organization, research and extension, planning and the related monitoring and evaluation must be in the hands of those with the most to lose should the areas become desert-like or non-productive.

The FAO has programmes and approaches to support technical specialists, especially foresters and extensionists, and local men and women to search for the best local solutions in the struggle for sustainable livelihoods, even in fragile lands. FAO has material on working with local organizations and institutions and on locally controlled marketing systems. It has tools to integrate nutrition and food security issues into forestry activities, on working with participatory approaches, on analyzing land and tree tenure or access/control issues. It has documented types of local knowledge of farmers and herders in fragile lands upon which to evolve improved strategies. It has tools for looking with farmers and herders to identify the types of species of trees which have the required socio-economic attributes to address some of their problems. FAO is currently working on farmer to farmer extension to help facilitate more appropriate responses to increase sustainable livelihoods from available land and tree resources. A number of field projects managed by FAO are taking advantage of these new approaches to strengthen people's participation in fostering effective and sustainable local governance over these fragile resources.

Mai 1993

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