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Desertification : Ultimate argument for freehold land ownership
2005-07-13 08:52:13
By Nimi Mweta
When will the government accept the introduction of freehold land ownership might actually be a matter of date rather than principle, as is generally believed to be the case.
As discussion continues on environmental destruction and how it is worsened by climate change, answers are few or aren’t coming through anymore.
Gone are the days when hope was being placed on planting trees all over the country; the problem’s too big.
A scan at the way in which environmental issues have been taken up shows a succession of methods or in a way, of principles.
The first phase was tied with previous campaigns during the socialist era, namely that of issuing orders on what should be done, which wasn’t altogether a failure.
Water sources or the starting points of rivers and streams have been protected in many areas through by-laws on river bank farming, etc.
Beyond this specific area, it is hard to say which other issue of environmental conservation is a success or has chances of bearing fruit, save perhaps for urban tree planting.
This has two aspects, one that is public and may have consumed a lot of resources without much to show for, like planting trees across major roads or highways.
Another is letting trees grow on private plots, habitations or such others, which is successful.
Examining the wider debate on environmental conservation shows a dependency attitude that sits virtually idle and awaits the United States to sign on the Kyoto treaty, so that hope comes up.
Examples though of how land is managed or reclaimed in many areas shows that this is irrelevant, that plenty needs to be done.
Indeed with China’s energy consumption rising by leaps and bounds, plus India and to an extent Brazil, the latter’s farming expansion cutting up huge swathes of the Amazon each year, is the US signature that vital?
Numerous examples exist around the world of land that has been reclaimed from desert, showing that not only is it possible to prevent deserts from happening, but they can also be reversed.
Yet it is clear from a portion of environmentalists that desertification is more or less an irreversible process, rather than a state of affairs that is at best temporary or conditional.
It is merely an indication that no one has set to sort it out yet.
A recent discussant of the issue in the pages of this newspaper has lately pointed out weaknesses of the other two elements in environmental thinking in the country.
After the directives went away, there came the voluntarism of tree planting, which evidently can’t get anywhere, for it is merely an activity for specialised concern, a ritual, not a sustainable activity. The last is ‘education’ to get people to preserve forests, trees....
There is for instance the perennial question of the destruction of tree and forest cover for charcoal burning, and peasants’ happiness to be pursuing that trade, with ready buyers from town.
Of late it is even being said that Tanzania is a major exporter of charcoal to the MidEast; the surprising bit isn’t this export opportunity; it is rather that the MidEast finds gas expensive for cooking. Who knew that Gulf residents need charcoal?
When a BBC reporter was recounting experiences of what he saw in the areas where Israeli colonists are to be removed and the houses destroyed so as to build new Palestinian residences, this feature came out.
The land was at the beginning just desert, but colonists came up, cycled the water (sand, gravel, etc) to make it clean (at the Sabasaba fair a firm was selling such technology). Gaza now grows all sorts of perennial crops.
For unclear reasons or just because of the laziness arising from thinking that others are rich and we are poor, none of these solutions seem to being noticed by decision makers here.
They think in terms of a scatter of projects that never bring up a total situation where land use can be transformed, namely, where land users have roughly the same idea of what to do.
Shall charcoal burners, livestock herders, crop cultivators and plantation owners one day agree on how to protect the forests, trees? How many seminars will be needed?
Since policy making has always been geared to protect the parochial pro-peasant, pro-tribes and pro-uzawa aspects of land use, and all idea of changing it leads to growling and fuming, nothing will change. Most of Africa is approaching deserts, because the psychology of governance and of nationalism generally is the same everywhere.
Only with a desert situation engulfing the whole continent shall freehold land be allowed, for the new owners to start regreening the land again. ‘Binadamu wote ni ndugu zangu’ shall wait for a while.
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