The Economics of Desertification, Land Degradation, and Drought

The NGOs and religious organizations also helped significantly in building the capacity of
local institutions to manage natural resources. They also helped mobilize communities to plant and
protect trees. For example, the farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR)—in which communities
protect or plant new trees and harvest fuelwood, fodder, nitrogen fixation from leguminous trees,
windbreaks, and other ecosystem benefits—was initiated by a religious organization (Reij, Tappan,
and Smale 2008). The authors estimated that villages with FMNR had 10–20 times more trees than
they had had before FMNR started. Consistent with Bai et al. (2008a), higher tree density was found
in villages with high population density (Reij, Tappan, and Smale 2008).
The lessons we can draw from Niger are the institutional vertical (rural code) and horizontal
(grassroots NGOs and religious organizations) linkages, which gave local communities the mandates
and the capacity to manage natural resources. The rural code provision, which allowed communities
to benefit from their tree planting or protection efforts, also created strong incentives to farmers to
invest their limited resources. All these complementary conditions fostered the successful tree
programs in Niger.
Peru
Soil nutrient depletion in Peru is moderate, because the use of nitrogen and phosphorus is
considerably large and has shown an upward trend (Figure 6.11). 65 Hence we will not evaluate the soil
nutrient depletion problem.
Figure 6.11—Trend of nitrogen and phosphorus use, Peru
Source: FAOSTAT.
Soil erosion remains a major problem in Peru’s Andean region, which covers about 30
percent of the country, whereas salinity is a problem in the irrigated crops of the arid and semiarid
coastal region, which covers 34 percent of the country. Posthumus and de Graaf (2005) showed that
soil erosion reduces maize yield by 2 percent on plots with slope of 1–5 percent. The cost of
establishing terraces was estimated to be $364 per hectare, whereas NPV of plots with terraces—
computed after netting out the NPV if a plot did not have terraces—was $984 per hectare (Figure
6.12). The cost of action is actually lower if we consider that establishing bench terraces is a longterm
investment, which further shows that the cost of action is much lower than the cost of inaction.
65 Except for 2008, when fertilizer prices abruptly increased, leading to a decline in both nitrogen and phosphorus use
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