Environment: Earth's Creeping Deserts

A tide of ecological refugees from land turning to sand

Outside the great conference hall in Nairobi, 16 fountains sent up sparkling plumes of water, and black Mercedes limousines glistened in the bright East African sun. Inside, some 1,500 delegates from 110 nations sat in air-conditioned comfort. The splendid setting of the meeting could hardly have clashed more jarringly with its purpose. At the U.N.'s invitation, the representatives had gathered in the Kenyan capital last week to discuss and devise ways of containing what an increasing number of experts regard as a major environmental danger: the creeping, seemingly relentless spread of the earth's deserts.

More than a third of the earth's land mass is desert or desert-like, and one put of seven people—some 630 million—dwell in these parched regions. In the past, they have been able to scratch out a livelihood—barely. Now, largely through man's own folly, their fragile existence is threatened by a deadly disease of the land called, awkwardly but accurately, "desertification."

In only half a century, an estimated 251,000 sq. mi. (650,000 sq. km.) of farming and grazing land has been swallowed up by the Sahara along that great desert's southern fringe. In one part of India's Rajasthan region, often called the dustiest place in the world, sand cover has increased by about 8% in only 18 years. In the U.S., so much once fertile farm land has been abandoned for lack of water along Interstate 10 between Tucson and Phoenix that dust storms now often sweep the highway.

For most Americans, desertification is not a problem. But for many of the 78 million people who in recent years have had the ground under them turn to dust or sand, there is no easy escape. Washington's Worldwatch Institute estimates that the lives of perhaps 50 million people are jeopardized. As their fields and pastures become no man's lands, the dispossessed add to the tide of ecological refugees who have already swollen the Third World's ranks of unemployed and destitute. Unable to feed themselves, they place new strains on the food supply and create a tinderbox for social unrest. Warns U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim: "We risk destroying whole peoples in the afflicted area."

The deserts' cancerous growth came to worldwide attention in the early 1970s with the great drought and famine in Africa's Sahel, the band of impoverished land across the Sahara's southern flank. More than 100,000 people perished before the rains finally came in 1974, and that was not the end of the tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of tribesmen remain in camps, and the desert's encroachment has not halted. Senegal told the U.N. meeting that it feared its coastal capital, Dakar, would soon be engulfed.