IFPRI Report

Research in North Africa and West Asia to Benefit Farmers on Fragile Lands

From North Africa to West Asia runs a band of fragile, arid land that supports barley and sheep production for many millions of the poorest people of the region. This band is the frontier between the land that is sown and the land that is desert. Barley and pasture are the main sustenance for about 80 million sheep and goats in these low-rainfall areas. Since the 1960s, the number of people and sheep using this land has increased two to three times and barley area has almost doubled. As a result, the fragile soils have been degraded, plant species have been lost, and in some cases the land has been rendered useless.

Efforts to introduce new technologies for producing barley and managing resources in the region have failed, even when the technologies have been used successfully in other similar ecological areas. The culprits are often poor policies, a lack of effective local institutions, or an absence of secure property rights. Now researchers and policymakers in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia have joined forces with farmers, representatives of nongovernmental organizations and the private sector, and social and biological scientists from IFPRI and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) to examine these complex environmental and social problems and to work together to find solutions. The three-year project will integrate policy, institution building, and property rights research with technology research, to better examine sustainable resource management and social welfare in low-rainfall areas.

This participatory research and outreach project begins with national workshops to identify priority concerns and includes regional workshops to share results. The project is being undertaken with the guidance of a steering committee made up of national coordinators from the eight countries, donors to the project, and researchers from IFPRI and ICARDA and will include field research in all accessible countries.

Problems throughout the region differ among the countries, but all involve competition between barley and rangeland for sheep production in areas that receive less than 300 millimeters of rain a year. In some countries open-access land policies have been the source of trouble. In others, a lack of alternative livelihoods for sheep and barley producers has led to overuse of the land. And in others, subsidizing sheep production during periods of drought has led to overgrazing and resource degradation.

Workshops held in late 1995 and this year in four countries identified a number of topics for research in the region. These include market liberalization and its effect on incomes, resource management, and technology adoption; drought management strategies, including technology options and policy reforms; property rights and their effect on resource management, including the competitive forces between cropping and herding in rangelands; and modeling to evaluate or simulate the effects of changes in policies, technologies, and property rights on resource use, farm incomes, and equity.

An unusual aspect of this project is that it is funded primarily by the national research programs, whose staffs conduct the research. Additional support to the national programs and to IFPRI and ICARDA is provided by the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development.