The Declaration on the Commitments to Enhance the Implementation of the Obligations of the Convention to Combat Desertification" may sound a mouthful. But it is unlikely to still the hunger of those ravaged by the devastating sweep of desertification around the globe and in the Subcontinent. The Fourth Conference of Parties ("COP4") to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD), was held in the affluent city of Bonn, hardly impoverished for being no longer a capital city. On the contrary, the city is doing well as an upgraded international congress centre. And the city's wealth was evident in the mass of its inhabitants thronging the shopping centres, even while delegates met to discuss an excruciating problem affecting the world's poorest one billion in more than 100 countries, mostly in Africa. The only gift to the meek that have inherited an earth scorched by desertification was the Bonn Declaration. A poor man's gift at best, produced after painful negotiations over 12 days, reflecting goodwill and little else from the better-endowed delegations among the 175 countries gathered for COP4.
Desertification is too dry a subject to get anyone excited, it seems. It is about the parched regions of the world that are neither exotic nor enticing for tourists, even the eco-tourists. Desertification brings to mind images of creeping desert sands, but the term actually refers to land degradation, loss of soil fertility and conditions of drought that transform once-fertile agricultural dryland regions. Poverty, political instability, deforestation, improper irrigation, climate change, urban expansion, migration, famine, food scarcity and loss of life and livelihood are all both causes and consequences of the vicious cycle of desertification.
Poor cousin
Those hardest hit by desertification are the poorest in the poor countries. The Convention, which came into force six years ago and is now ratified by 172 countries—the US being one of the last to do so—is a poor cousin of the conventions on biological diversity and on climate change that emerged from the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. It is literally a poor man's convention, both by subject and the funding neglect it suffers from. Implementing the CCD is as remote as in the beginning, mainly because desertification is not a priority for the donor nations. It is not fashionable, and does not carry the same glamour associated with eco-politics. Simply said, the poor have not been able to 'sell' desertification.
The aim of the Convention is to protect the more than one billion people and their degraded lands by promoting effective "preventive" and "regenerative" action. To use a cliché, the fight against deserti-fication is about "sustainable development". But how this is to be achieved is a question that has gone unanswered through the three earlier conferences that preceded Bonn. At COP4, a discerning observer would have been constrained to say that if money is what is required to fight back desertification, it certainly will not be forthcoming.