IFAD and desertification

Over the past 23 years IFAD has committed more than US$3.5 billion to support the sustainable development of dryland areas and combat land degradation in developing countries. More than 70 per cent of projects supported by IFAD have been designed to help herders and small farmers in ecologically fragile and marginal environments.

Arid and semi-arid areas are often remote and very poor. The people who live in them have little access to technology and information or to markets and basic infrastructure. They are often unaware that they are putting at risk the natural resource base on which they depend, and they do not have the luxury of alternative sources of income and food.

IFAD’s operations in these areas promote innovative approaches to help poor farmers break out of the poverty cycle that obliges them to degrade their limited land resources to satisfy their immediate subsistence needs. Operations focus on safeguarding the land and its resource base. Their objective is to boost incomes and productivity through the development of small-scale irrigation, agroforestry, fruit-tree plantation, community-based natural resource management and rural infrastructure, and through off-farm income-generating activities that reduce stress on the land.

Many programmes and projects have been designed to make the most of women’s unique abilities to improve food security and community-based natural resource management. They also develop existing indigenous and traditional technologies to conserve soil, water and plant cover, and have devised new means of achieving the same results in response to conditions in specific locations.

At government level, IFAD encourages budgetary allocations to benefit marginalized areas and policies to decentralize land management and reform land tenure ownership. It fosters partnerships for advocacy through national and international policy dialogue, regional exchanges and workshops, and collaboration in local and global initiatives. To this end IFAD hosts:

• the Global Mechanism, the system set up to mobilize resources to implement the 1994 UN Convention to Combat Desertification
• the International Land Coalition, dedicated to improving rural poor people’s access to land and natural resources

IFAD is also an executing agency of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and member of TerrAfrica, a multidimensional partnership that works to provide a collective response to land degradation and desertification in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

Source: IFAD

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