Desertification Convention adopted.

In a concerted effort to help over 900 million people around the world fight the life and death battle against the degradation of their fragile drylands--the process known as desertification--more than 100 Governments concluded negotiations on 18 June in Paris on a global legal agreement to address the situation.

The adoption of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and/or Desertification, Particularly in Africa was the culmination of 13 months of work. The text was formulated by a special Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee over five sessions, the last of which had begun on 6 June.

Committee Chairman Bo Kjellen of Sweden, who oversaw the intense drafting process, called the Convention "an important step forward" towards improving life in the drylands, in that it establishes a framework for national, subregional and regional programmes to counter desertification, which is occurring worldwide at an accelerated rate, affecting some 2 5 per cent of the Earth's land area.

Caused by overgrazing, overcropping, poor irrigation practices, deforestation and other unsustainable socio-economic practices, as well as by climate variations, this especially serious in Africa, where 66 per cent of the continent is desert or dryland.

The Convention calls for international action, including the mobilization of "substantial financial resources", transfer of antidesertification technologies from developed to developing countries, information exchange, and research and training programmes. Four annexes detail how the agreement will be implemented regionally in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Northern Mediterranean, respectively. One particularly innovative feature is that it commits countries to a "bottom-up approach" that calls for local populaces and national authorities to work with the international community, which is indicative of the recognition that desertification must be fought at the grass-roots level.

The Convention, which was called for at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de janeiro and mandated by the General Assembly in resolution 47/188 for completion by June 1994, will be opened for signature at a special high-level meeting of Government ministers, to be held in Paris on 14 and 15 October 1994. It will enter into force 90 days after it has been ratified by 50 countries, a process which is expected to take approximately two years.

In the interim, a resolution was adopted by the Committee calling for "urgent action for Africa". It recommended that affected African countries and donor nations initiate without delay implementation of the Convention. Another resolution called for a sixth Committee session, to be held in January 1995, to begin the work of coordination and monitoring, which would later be taken over by a Conference of Parties, composed of the countries ratifying the agreement.

A previous UN Plan of Action to Combat Desertification, adopted in 1977, fell short of expectations, it has been reported, because of inadequate funding and a too narrow, technical focus. It failed to give enough recognition to the socio-economic causes of the problem and did not involve local populations in the process.

To improve the effectiveness of existing international finance, the Convention establishes a "Global Mechanism" to identify and coordinate available funding sources. Also, under the new text, Governments are urged to pursue the possibility of financing anti-desertification action through the Global Environment Facility (GEF), in cases where curbing desertification can be linked with the GEF's four mandated funding areas: preventing climate change: ensuring the conservation of biological diversity; protecting international waterways; and reducing depletion of the ozone layer. The GEF is the interim financing channel for the legal agreements--the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change--signed at the Earth Summit.