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Namibia: Conservation Farming 'Key to Enviro Goals'
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The Namibian (Windhoek)
31 July 2008
Posted to the web 31 July 2008
Absalom Shigwedha
CONSERVATION farming, a system that enriches the soil, will form part of a 10-year programme aimed at reversing land degradation in Namibia.
For the first five years, the Country Pilot Partnership for Integrated Sustainable Land Management (CCP-ISLM) will target the Otjozondjupa, Kavango, Caprivi and Oshana regions.
"Some of the projects will be conservation farming," the Executive Director of the Namibia Nature Foundation (NNF), Dr Chris Brown, said in Windhoek yesterday at the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between NNF and the Ministry of Environment and Tourism.
The NNF is the implementing agency and over the next five years, the CPP-ISLM will seek to promote good practices to reverse land degradation, both by building up national and regional institutions and professionals and through promoting best practices in the most affected areas.
These areas will include communal farms, communal conservancies and resettlement farms.
The memorandum was signed by Environment Permanent Secretary Dr Kalumbi Shangula and Brown.
CPP-ISLM is a joint initiative between the Ministry, the UNDP and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) aimed at fighting land degradation to enable Namibia to reach its Millennium Development Goal number 7, which is environmental sustainability.
GEF funded the programme with US$9 million while the World Bank contributed US$1 million.
Shangula said Namibia had identified land degradation as a serious problem that called for remedial intervention and that integrated ecosystem management strategies were needed to effectively address the underlying causes of land degradation.
UNDP Resident Representative Simon Nhongo said the CPP-ISLM programme was the first of its kind in Africa, encompassing development partners, civil society organisations, government ministries and regional councils.
He said almost three quarters of Namibia's population depended heavily on land and as such the value and the ecological state of the land were vital for poverty reduction.
NNF's Brown said improving people's livelihoods was one of the most effective ways of addressing land degradation.
He said technological solutions to desertification and unsustainable land management practices, implemented in isolation, had failed to deliver positive results.
"We need to implement socially appropriate, participatory approaches on an assessment of very local land-use and development option," he said.
Brown said the starting point of the CPP will therefore to work at very local level with communities, their respective authorities and local support organisations to plan from the ground.
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"This means putting the communities at the centre of the process," he added.
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