Read at : http://www.seabuckthorn.net/index.php/?p=87.

Heal the World: Desertification blog

Jan 22nd, 2008 by Natalie Anne Lanoville

As touched on in my recent post, Seabuckthorn holds back the desert on the windy plains of Asia, desertification is a grave problem throughout the world, from traditionally arid, low-production areas to lush, productive greenbelts. Human activities (including redirection of surface water, siphoning of groundwater, intensive farming practices, clearcutting and many other factors) are implicated in much of this desert encroachment.

There are committed, effective people and organisations working in isolation all over the world to combat this growing threat, but according to Dr Willem VAN COTTHEM, the owner and sole contributor to Desertification: All about desertification and poverty, agriculture and horticulture in the drylands, efforts to act, research and support activists have been hampered by a lack of centralised information.

As he states on the About page of his blog, VAN COTTHEM (Professor Emeritus of Belgium’s Ghent University and current Scientific Consultant for Desertification and Sustainable Development) has been working for years to compile data and resources relating to desertification, low water agriculture, sustainability, poverty and related areas of interest, first via an email network and now through his blog.

The main reason for the establishment of such a network is that I noticed, when speaking with my colleagues of the Committee for Science and Technology (CST) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), that we all spend a lot of time searching the internet for interesting publications concerning our fields of interest. Everyone is looking for the same information, spending considerable time to find mostly the same articles, all of us reading these texts to see if their content is important enough, and if it is, to use that info for our own purposes.

Dr VAN COTTHEM excerpts portions of relevant articles along with links to the full text, supplemental links and occasionally, editorial commentary. The professor’s blog also maintains a selective blogroll, as well as a detailed and relevant categories list.

Again, for me all this is a question of offering time-saving to my readers. This is not MY BLOG, it is OURS for I am only the administrator to easy up the work of many colleagues and friends. My blog visitors seem to be very happy with this system, as I offer them a chance to save plenty of time by aggregating valuable information on all aspects of the topics in a sort of newsletter, in which I (re)publish that what seems to be of some interest to most of us. This way, we all save time for more practical things to do and meanwhile we bring interesting websites and blogs to the attention of many more people worldwide than one single site or blog could do for itself.

The result is a huge compendium of relevant data, articles and research on myriad topics relating to sustainability. For continuing over hundreds of posts to find and make available information to support sustainability efforts all over the world, Dr VAN COTTHEM’s Desertification is helping to Heal the World.

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MY COMMENT : SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Thanks, Seabuckthorn, for your appreciation of my humble contribution to effectiveness in the daily work of many people about desertification, poverty and sustainable development. Should we all join hands to achieve an optimal return on our personal investments, instead of competing each other for “success” in our individual enterprises, we would make this world quite easily better (or should I say “heal this world more easily” ?).  Let us join hands through our blogs !

The main objective of my 3 blogs on “Desertification” (Engl.), “Secheresse” (Fr.) and “Zaden voor Leven” (Dutch for “Seeds for Life“) is to create a spiritual tie between all those wanting to help people living in poverty, be it in the rural areas of the drylands or in any other poverty conditions, e.g. the urban poor.

A country is much more than the sum of its expanding, wealthy cities, more than GDP, big business or capital alone. Development of agriculture and horticulture, necessary for provision of the basic food for those living off the land, is one of the key elements in sustainable development of a country. Continuously growing attention for development of Information Technologies (IT) should not push the primordial role of farming in a country’s welfare into oblivion.

In developing countries many children die of preventable diseases and malnutrition. At the very bottom, in poor neighborhoods of the cities and in the distant villages, children remain very vulnerable because of lack of investment in field actions and slow economic changes. Supply of clean water and sanitation seems to be the major challenge, but enrichment of food, particularly in vitamins and mineral elements, should be part of their care picture.

Lately, I noticed a certain trend to move some of the agricultural workforce of the rural areas to jobs in industry and services by delivery of improved school education, which is in growing demand in towns, but also in the villages. In many developing countries, education is seen as an important step to enable poor rural youngsters to exit from agriculture, especially in the drylands where drought is affecting annual income of the families. As a major part of the rural labor force is still active in agriculture, some governments try to lower its percentage by opening doors of low-technology industries to better educated young people. Thereby, rural exodus seems to be stimulated, which would be catastrophic for the future of “green” agriculture.

However, if sufficient public investments in agriculture and horticulture would lead to diversification, as they certainly can, important added value would be created. Not only the bulk food crops should keep pace with the growing world population, but higher quality food and cash crops or herbs should become an interesting tool in the quest of sustainable development of the rural areas.

I do not agree that higher income in agriculture would lead to higher aspiration of the youngsters and consequent migration from farming to services and industry, in other words to rural exodus, from the family farm or garden to the factory or office in town. On the contrary, marked improvements in farming methods and infrastructure will make the agricultural sector much more attractive. Better education and capacity building in that sector, fine-tuning and adaptation of modern methods and technologies to local conditions, will yield higher productivity. Nowadays, the aim of developing countries should not be to attract youngsters from their low-skilled farming environment towards a high-skilled industrial environment, but to invest fully in the development of the agricultural sector.

It is my personal experience that still a lot has to be done to improve the daily life of rural people in the drylands. Therefore, I started a few months ago with an action to collect seeds of vegetables and fruits, which would otherwise disappear in our Western garbage bins. Isn’t it extraordinary that our “waste seeds” are able to make children in the drylands healthier ? Time will come that we create a European network with enthusiastic volunteers to collect seeds in their own country and send these to development projects of their choice all over the world.

It is as simple as the “seed of Columbus“: each viable seed can germinate in the most hostile of environments and bring new plants. When each of these plants produces flowers and fruits, local seeds can be harvested, thus making the local poor less dependent on help from outside. Isn’t that a nice contribution to “healing the world” ?