UN food chief: Poorest areas have zero harvests left

Droughts and flooding have become so common in some of the poorest places on Earth that the land can no longer sustain crops, the director of the World Food Programme’s global office has said.

Martin Frick told the BBC that some of the most deprived areas had now reached a tipping point of having “zero” harvests left, as extreme weather was pushing already degraded land beyond use.

He said that as a result, parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America were now dependent on humanitarian aid.

Mr Frick warned that without efforts to reverse land degradation globally, richer countries would also begin to suffer crop failures.

The Global Environment Facility estimates that 95% of the world’s land could become degraded by 2050. The UN says that 40% is already degraded.

When soil degrades, the organic matter that binds it together dies off. This means that it is less able to support plant life – reducing crop yields – and absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

Soil is the second largest carbon sink after the oceans, and is recognised by the UN as a key tool for mitigating climate change.

“There's too much carbon in the air and too little carbon in the soils,” Mr Frick said. “With every inch of soil that you're growing, you're removing enormous amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere.

“So healthy soils – carbon-rich soils – are a prerequisite to fixing climate change.”

Land degradation can be caused by modern farming techniques removing organic content from soil, but also prolonged droughts interspersed with sudden, extreme rainfall.

Scientists say many extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense as a result of climate change.

While it is hard to link climate change to specific droughts, scientists have said global warming has made certain ones, like the recent one in East Africa, more likely.

Mr Frick said that in Burundi, in East Africa, months of heavy rain and flooding had damaged 10% of its farmland, making it unusable for the upcoming harvest season.

He pointed to a UN report, released in March, which found that cereal crops in the Darfur region of Sudan were 78% below the average for the previous five years amid civil war and drought.

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