Causes of Land Degradation in Asia

Figure 2.1 clearly explains the situation of Asia where most of the areas are at high risk of land degradation. This is the largest continent of the World with a huge population load and

has to meet the food demand for its large population. Most of the land in Asia is dryland;¹ however Asia together with the Pacific region has been reported to have half (fifty four percent) of the World’s population with only seventeen percent share of the World's land (UN/FAO 1992). Even in this situation, this region of Asia and the Pacific is in a better position than Africa and South and Central America. These regions can fulfill the requirement of the food needed by such a huge population with the production of cereals and other comparative crops. For this purpose, they can use technology and new agricultural practices.

The excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides increases the output but has a negative impact in the form of causing land degradation (UN/FAO 1992). Mainly, degradation occurs through natural hazards, but anthropogenic is also widely observed, e.g., salinity, sodicity, and alkalinity (Blaikie and Brookfield 1986: 4). Because of salinity, ninety percent of the farmland in Abu Dhabi (UAE) has lost its productivity (Henzell 2009). Water Tables in most areas are not up to the standard, and soil has lost its fertility. Fifty percent of Central Asian land is salinized because of the poor drainage system attribuTable to a lack of investment and improper maintenance after independence from the Soviet Government (Ji 2008: 10).

Such population pressure also causes other types of land degradation, e.g., overgrazing, over-cropping, and lower soil fertility, as shown in Figure 2.2, together with some social problems such as poverty, poor management of a farm system, and the loss of traditional agricultural framing practices (UNCCD 2003). In addition to the afore-mentioned problems, deforestation for agriculture and city expansion is common because of population pressure, and urban expansion has emerged as a major form of land degradation, since most of the agricultural land is being converted into plots for lodgings or industries (FAO 1992).

In 1980, four million hectares of forests were cleared in Asia for agriculture. Indonesia is an interesting case where deforestation was started in the Seventies, when there was a boom in a timber market at a World level. At that time, Indonesia was the most important exporter of wood logs in the international market, and this contributed a major source of earning to its GDP. Thus, Indonesian forests were degraded at an extremely high rate, which was estimated as 2.4 percent per annum in 1993 (WRM 1994).

1According to the United Nations, Dryland are areas with an aridity index value of less than 0.65; they comprise dry sub-humid, semi-arid, arid and hyper-arid areas.

0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

vegetation Removal Over Exploitation Unsustainable Agriculturral Activities Industiral Activites Overgrazing

Figure 2.2: Causes of Land Degradation in Asia and Pacific Region Source: UNEP/ISRIC (1990)

Land in Asia is mostly dryland and is a major cause of desertification. Failure to undertake resource management polices in these semi-arid and arid areas has caused land degradation by overgrazing, overexploitation of land and water resources, cultivation, and population pressure (Hong Ma and Hongbo Ju 2007: 55). As shown in Figure 2.2, desertification in Asia is caused by overgrazing in Middle, East, and Central Asia. This is a great problem in those regions where laws for grassland are not existed. Cattle are privately owned, but grassland is common property, and in these areas, overgrazing is increasing and causing loss of pasture areas. Sixty six percent of Kazakhstan is affected by desertification and drought. Similarly, eighty percent of the land has lost its productivity in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Erosion has an extremely bad effect on eighty eight percent of the arable land of Kyrgyzstan and on ninety seven percent of the agricultural land of Tajikistan (UNESCAP 2007). Water erosion of the cultivated lands is common in China, and salinity and waterlogging can be observed in

Iraq, Pakistan, and Russia (FAO 1992). As shown in Figure 2.1, Asia is at high risk of desertification as a total of 15,670,000 km² area is affected and 3,210,000 km² is experiencing severe effects. The remaining 7,980,000 km² has light desertification (Dregne 1986: 3).

Like the rest of the World, Asia also has a problem of land loss for agricultural production attributable to city expansion. The fast growth in industrial and other sectors is the main cause of increment in the population of large cities, together with the need for more houses and more places to live and work; a rapid expansion of urbanization has thus resulted. According to the definition of Johnson and Lewis (2007), the loss of biomass is considered as land degradation. Land is fixed in supply, and so the ultimate result is the use of agricultural land for urban expansion (Brunn, Williams and Ziegler 1992, Van 2006: 1), e.g., China has reduced approximately 20 percent of its agricultural production since 1978, mostly because of rural industrialization and small-town growth (FAO 2006). Israel, which was basically an agrarian economy and had a large setup of agricultural land, shifted most of the burden of its economy on the industrial sector in 1980, and the agricultural sector became economically unstable, contributing only at the domestic level (Fietelson 2002: 5).

Land degradation is increasing because of poor management policies and the weak institutional setup. Some nations are trying to solve this problem, e.g., in Egypt, the government is attempting to cover the ongoing land degradation process, but instead of cultivating old defective land, they have brought new land under cultivation and have increased productivity. To maintain this level of production, the government has introduced some policies (Nielsen et al. 2005: 159), starting a strategic plan with the collaboration of the United Nations in the coastal areas; through this management plan, they are also trying to reclaim their cultivable land, which is being degraded because of urbanization (Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) 2007: 18). Similarly, Iraq, which has also been a great victim of land degradation in the Middle East, has followed some new polices by the government and has solved most of this problem in the marshes. Now there is possibility of vegetation growing in marshes after flooding them. Both the government and the local people are trying hard to recover the old habitation in their native environment (ibid). Clearly, in the Middle East (Asia), the observed beneficial trend in vegetation has occurred because of government policies and local scale practices, indicating the vital role played by the institutions in removing land degradation (Nielsen et al. 2005: 159). In Turkey, improper land distribution is a major cause of land degradation. In some places, the farm size is too large and

is difficult to handle; in some places, however, the land parcels are small as a consequence of the sharing of inheritance. Such small pieces of land have contours that make plowing difficult. The introduction of land property rights for farmers has been extremely helpful in resolving this issue (Günay 2001: 3-4).