Degradation of the natural resource base, coupled with high rates of population growth and food insecurity, is a major development problem in the Arid and Semi-Arid areas of sub-Saharan Africa.
The majority of the poor and food insecure are concentrated in rural areas, where their livelihoods depend on smallholder agriculture, rural labor markets, and livestock production.
Alleviating poverty, managing agricultural development, and ensuring food security for fast growing populations will increasingly depend on intensification of land-use, as much of the land suitable for agriculture has already been used.
Sustainable intensification of agricultural production (without degrading the resource base) in the less-favored, fragile and marginal environments, therefore, continues to pose enormous challenges to researchers, development practitioners, and policy makers.
Poor soil fertility and scarcity of water (low and variable rainfall), effects of climate change, accompanied by underdevelopment of infrastructure, institutions, and markets, make the rain-fed agriculture in the semi-arid tropics inherently risky.
This means that the poor inhabiting such areas will have to adjust and adapt their livelihood strategies in ways that ensure their subsistence in a risky environment. Risks reducing adaptive strategies also influence production technology choice, be it agriculture or livestock, including investments in NRM innovations.
With increasing scarcity of land, adjustment and adaptation towards increasing population density was initially made possible through area expansion.
As opportunities for expansion disappeared, agriculture encroached into fragile ecosystems largely unsuitable for farming (steep slopes and marginal lands), often without the necessary resource improving investments, leading to soil degradation, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity.
Lack of strong institutional structures governing property rights in land and predominance of open access and unregulated common property rights enabled increasing incursion of farming into marginal areas.
It is from the foregoing challenges that Arid Lands Resource Management Project II (ALRMP II), through the NRM component, seeks to address the unsustainable use of Natural Resources by tackling the three systems that contribute to NRM. The three systems contribute to NRM are:-
i) The Nature system, which is the interaction of land form, climate, flora and fauna (a variety of resources and zonal variation in climate determine the nature of resources and their response to sustainable management).
ii) The User system comprises the resource users, their property and their forms of territorial organisations.
iii) The geo-political and macro-economic framework that includes state policies and institutions, the external entities and forces which influence all the above and determines the opportunities for trade and territorial expansion by resource users.
The approach since the inception has been capacity building of the stakeholders and communities, investment in nature based and value addition micro-projects (i.e. alternative livelihoods), peace building and Conflict Management (Natural resource use and socio-cultural related conflicts).
The whole idea in NRM is thus to plan and implement a coordinated set of activities to make the most beneficial and sustainable long-term use of soils, landscape, water, vegetation, livestock, agriculture, wildlife and human in order to achieve sustainable development.
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