In the last two decades a major crisis that has plagued mankind is desertification. The creeping desert is threatening about 35 percent of the African continent, mostly Mediterranean Africa, the Sudano-Sahelian region, and Africa south of the Sudano-Sahel. This paper contends that man is at the very heart of the desertification problem. Man’s part in causing desertification is revealed in the way the latter advances through the avenues of land misuse and overexploitation of natural resources, such as overcultivation, overgrazing, poor irrigation practices, and deforestation, with resulting soil erosion, sedimentation, and salinization. The cases in North Africa, West Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa reviewed in this paper appear to emphasize that man’s exploitative land use which serves as a ‘primum mobile’ for desertification is itself a short-term response to socioeconomic and other pressures, such as rural poverty and balance of payment problems. The paper further contends that desertification in Africa is not a mysterious or detached technological problem; it is the ecological dimension of a maladjusted development process that has failed to provide people with a rational way of making a living. The conclusion reached is that the fight against desertification in Africa can only succeed as a part of a more comprehensive and concerted assault on poverty and underdevelopment. Bibliogr., note, ref.
