Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Agroforestry and Sustainable Land-use in Semi-arid Africa

Agroforestry and Sustainable Land-use in Semi-arid Africa Jan-Joost Kessler, Wageningen 1. Introduction The problem of land degradation has received par- stry), sylvopastoralism (the combination of pastoralism and forestry) and agrosylvopastoralism. ticular attention since the 1970's, when throughout the semi-arid zones in Sub Saharan Africa drought periods caused massive starvation of animals, and food shortage among human populations. Land degradation in (semi-) arid regions is often referred to as desertification, which is somewhat misleading since it does not necessarily involve the south-ward extension of the desert. Recent findings have in fact shown the desert to retreat in years of good rainfall (TUCKER et al. 1991). In this paper land degradation is interpreted as the result of over-exploitation of the natural resources, indicating that the exploitation level exceeds the carrying capacity of the land. Initially, one of the main causes of desertification was considered the energy crisis, leading to excessive wood cutting. Reforestation was therefore considered an important remedy. Early attempts of reforestation were mainly large-scale and centralised. Major disadvantages appeared to be the high costs and the low rate of participation from the rural communities. Community forestry followed, but was also gradually abandoned because com munities appeared difficult to motivate for management of communal properties. Recently, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie de Gruyter

Agroforestry and Sustainable Land-use in Semi-arid Africa

Download PDF
10 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/agroforestry-and-sustainable-land-use-in-semi-arid-africa-RVzm0b6KC1

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the
ISSN
2365-7693
eISSN
2365-7693
DOI
10.1515/zfw.1993.0008
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Jan-Joost Kessler, Wageningen 1. Introduction The problem of land degradation has received par- stry), sylvopastoralism (the combination of pastoralism and forestry) and agrosylvopastoralism. ticular attention since the 1970's, when throughout the semi-arid zones in Sub Saharan Africa drought periods caused massive starvation of animals, and food shortage among human populations. Land degradation in (semi-) arid regions is often referred to as desertification, which is somewhat misleading since it does not necessarily involve the south-ward extension of the desert. Recent findings have in fact shown the desert to retreat in years of good rainfall (TUCKER et al. 1991). In this paper land degradation is interpreted as the result of over-exploitation of the natural resources, indicating that the exploitation level exceeds the carrying capacity of the land. Initially, one of the main causes of desertification was considered the energy crisis, leading to excessive wood cutting. Reforestation was therefore considered an important remedy. Early attempts of reforestation were mainly large-scale and centralised. Major disadvantages appeared to be the high costs and the low rate of participation from the rural communities. Community forestry followed, but was also gradually abandoned because com munities appeared difficult to motivate for management of communal properties. Recently,

Journal

Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie – de Gruyter

Published: Oct 1, 1993

There are no references for this article.