The UNDP-UNEP joint venture, the UN Sudan-Sahelian Office (UNSO), assisted 22 developing countries in the Sudano-Sahelian region of Africa with their national programmes to combat desertification. These countries, many of them the least developed, are most seriously affected by desertification. Such activities included: coordination of anti-desertification programmes within the region, promotion and encouragement of regional cooperation, provision of general policy guidelines for the direction and coordination of anti-desertification programmes, support for efforts undertaken to combat desertification at national level, working with various donors, mobilizing financial resources, assisting governments in translating the PACD recommendations into concrete projects, helping governments prepare national PACDs, and monitoring the implementation of the PACD in the region.

Implementation of specific recommendations of the PACD

Recommendations 1-3: Assessment of desertification and improvement of land management

Assessment of desertification is essential for each affected country. This requires national machinery, especially to evaluate how desertification affects the people, and a programme of land use planning and management based on ecologically sound methods. Many developing countries plagued by poverty could not accord the priorities required to act upon these recommendations appropriately. A shortage of human and technical resources prevented many countries from mounting proper assessment machineries. Some countries have gone much further than others simply because they have a tradition of land use planning that has long been operative for other purposes, such as irrigation or commercial farming. Although some achievements have been made in increasing public awareness and participation since UNCOD, much more remains to be done.

Recommendation 4: Combination of industrialization and urbanization with the development of agriculture and their effects on the ecology in arid areas

Industrialization and urbanization, if properly conceived and pursued, can reduce ecological pressures on drylands, thereby ameliorating desertification in such lands. During the last 14 years, a series of workshops and training courses enabled people from developing countries to study the problems associated with urbanization and industrialization and their impact on desertification in the USSR and China. A number of publications were issued by UNEP in this connection. Sufficiently industrialized and urbanized countries, such as those in Latin America, are nevertheless succeeding in providing relief to the hardpressed rural environment. In the Middle East, the development of the oil industry has helped relieve rural areas. Much more needs to be done by UNEP in cooperation with the UN Commission for Human Settlement (UNCHS/Habitat) and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) to fulfil this recommendation.

Recommendations 5-10: Corrective anti-desertification measures

Corrective anti-desertification measures at the national level are of primary importance in determining success or failure. A great deal of international support has been extended during the last 14 years in the form of disparate projects, particularly in Africa but they are completely incommensurate with the magnitude of the problem. An examination of the projects shows that the majority are studies, planning and programming missions, and seminars and workshops with very few field-based actions. The assumption is that once sensitized, the governments themselves should identify and plan the anti-desertification field projects. The most impressive recent field projects concern sand dune stabilization (China, Iran, Mauritania), water improvement (Burkina Faso), and rangeland rehabilitation, reforestation and integrated rural development (Niger). Action to restore degraded irrigated lands is difficult and costly; it is easier to institute corrective measures in newly established irrigation schemes. Failure will always result at the national level where a tradition of management has not hitherto existed and future efforts should be directed at assisting the countries concerned to acquire such knowledge. Frequent and prolonged droughts, especially in Africa, and rapid population growth and unplanned demographic changes, including the refugee problem, remained serious obstacles to notable progress. The results so far achieved seem to suggest that a broad-based rural development strategy is the real answer.