Environment and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa: Managing an Emerging Crisis by Isaac N. Luginaah & Ernest K. Yanful

Author:Isaac N. Luginaah & Ernest K. Yanful
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

1.2 Land Degradation

Land degradation is a process which results in the land losing its productive capacity to sustain life and poses a serious threat to both agricultural productivity and biodiversity. Since most societies in Africa rely on agriculture for survival, land degradation presents a major threat to livelihoods on the continent. Consequently, with continued land degradation, more people on the continent are likely to sink deeper into poverty. Muchena et al. (2005) have noted that land degradation continues unabated in sub-Saharan Africa, with 65% of agricultural land, 31% of permanent pasture land, and 19% of forest and woodland degraded. Human factors are largely to blame for this state of affairs, with the major causes being overgrazing (49%), agricultural mismanagement (28%), deforestation (14%), and overexploitation of vegetation for domestic and industrial use (13%). Factors promoting land degradation in Africa include poverty and economic pressure, high rates of population growth, agricultural mismanagement of soil and water resources, lack of agricultural intensification, deforestation, overgrazing and insecure land tenure.

Several scholars have sought to establish the impact of security of land tenure on management practices (see, for example, Duraiappah, 1998; Muchena et al., 2005; Bugri, 2008). Theoretically, it can be argued that there is a positive correlation among land tenure security, enhanced agricultural production and sound environmental management practices. If people do not have title to land, they have no incentive to invest in long-term improvements. Overexploitation and degradation of natural resources are likely to occur as the costs of degradation are borne by society as a whole, whereas benefits accrue to individuals. This is supported by the decline in the effectiveness of traditional grazing management methods in rangeland, owing partly to an increase in both human and animal populations. Across the African continent, free-range grazing has led to overgrazing, especially in arid and semi-arid areas, resulting in deteriorated land cover. A study by Bugri (2008) demonstrated that even though most stakeholders in north-east Ghana perceived their tenure security to be high, poor agricultural production and environmental degradation were evident in the region. The study concludes that the failure of stakeholders’ high perceptions of their security of tenure to translate into enhanced agricultural production and sustainable land use practices implies the existence of other non-tenurial factors with negative consequences for agricultural production and environmental management. This demonstrates the need to adopt a holistic approach in the study of environmental management practices as land degradation is frequently a result of an interplay of a combination of variable factors.

Land degradation has also been associated with soil erosion, which washes away the productive layer of the soil. In South Africa, it is estimated that water erosion affects 6.1 million hectares of cultivated soil, while wind erosion affects an estimated 10.9 million hectares of cultivated soil, resulting in a mean annual loss of 2.5 t/ha/year (Economic Commission for Africa, 2002). The ECA report also estimates that 30% of smallholder farmland in Zimbabwe is now totally degraded. A similar situation can also be observed in Malawi (Table 1) where soil erosion had major impacts on crop yields.

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