United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan says that desertification is exacerbating extreme poverty and sparking conflict over dwindling resources, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia.
”Across the planet, poverty, unsustainable land management and climate change are turning dry lands into deserts, and desertification in turn exacerbates and leads to poverty,” Annan said in a message for World Environment Day.
”There is also mounting evidence that dry land degradation and competition over increasingly scarce resources can bring communities into conflict,” he said.
Dry lands are found in all regions, cover more than 40% of the Earth and are home to nearly two billion people — one-third of the world population.
About 10% to 20% of dry lands are already degraded, which is a ”serious obstacle to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, and is jeopardising efforts to ensure environmental sustainability”, Annan said.
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika said that with deserts growing ”at an alarming rate”, desertification will be ”one of the global problems of the 21st century”.
”Deserts are threatening the food security of poor countries, particularly in Africa, where the number of malnourished people doubled to 200-million in 1995 from 100-million at the end of the 1960s,” Bouteflika said at an international conference here marking World Environment Day.
2006 is also the International Year of Deserts and Desertification. — AFP
