… Over 2 000 delegates in attendance
WINDHOEK– Over 2 000 delegates from 195 countries will be attending the 11th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP 11) that started yesterday in Windhoek.
The conference is aimed at improving the living conditions of people in dry arid countries, maintaining and restoring land and soil productivity and mitigating the effects of the worldwide drought. New Era caught up with two delegates from Swaziland who want to promote sustainable land management for improved food security and enhanced environmental protection.
Winnie Ncongwane and Lynn Kota are two young women with a passion for sustainable land management. They represent a government-funded initiative called the Lower Usuthu Smallholder Irrigation-Global Environment Facility (LUSIP-GEF) Sustainable Management Project intended to mitigate climate change, conserve biodiversity and improve food security through sustainable land management. Ncongwane who is the LUSIP-GEF communications coordinator explained that their organisation is a pilot project housed by the Swaziland Water and Agricultural Development Enterprises (SWADE) and will be implemented over a four-year period, which already started in 2011. She says the project has successfully worked with rural communities and benefited about 4 200 households in Swaziland. The two are of the opinion that Namibia could learn a lot from their project since Swaziland also has land degradation hotspots.
“The project will benefit smallholder farmers. As the project expands nationally, smallholder farmers including agro-pastoralist and sustainable arable farmers in other regions where there are land degradation hotspots will also benefit,” Ncongwane explained. Asked what some of the benefits to communities are, she said communities with land degradation hotspots in farming projects will be able to restore their land, mitigate against the loss of biodiversity and provide them with a steady food supply by catalysing the development of a range of alternative livelihood opportunities. Livelihood opportunities, she said, will be promoted through conservation agriculture, livestock enterprises and permaculture, which includes backyard gardens and multiple-mixed cropping legume production.
She further said the project has some components, one being the sustainable land management approach at national level, which promotes the development and mainstreaming of a harmonised, cross-sectoral approach to sustainable land management and also to overcome national barriers and the improvement of the legal and policy framework.
The second component she highlighted is the sustainable use of land resources, whereby local communities will be assisted to plan better and to manage their land resources prudently. “This component will focus on raising sustainable awareness, skills and the ecological literacy of local people,” according to her. The conference ends next week Thursday.
By Albertina Nakale