Introduction, scope and main objectives
Environmental degradation and the effects of climate change have a particularly strong impact on poorer countries. Resource poor people struggle to adapt to changing climatic conditions and poverty can exacerbate the decline of natural resources. This also relates to the state of soils. While declining soil fertility and top soil erosion are not caused by poverty “soil degradation is accentuated by poverty” (Lal, 2001). In contexts with limited state capacities, comprehensive approaches to tackle the challenge of degrading soil are often missing. The rural poor are commonly the first to suffer from dwindling resources. There are indications that resource degradation can be the consequence of weak, inadequate or eroding land tenure rights, making this link a point of concern for international development actors (see: USAID, 2007). Smallholder farmers with weak land rights are prone to lose access to land if pressure on natural resources builds up. In countries with high population growth and small surface area, such pressure builds quickly. Small, landlocked countries like Rwanda and Burundi experience growing scarcity of arable land. While Rwanda’s government maintains strong control of governance in general and land governance in particular, the political turmoil of the recent past in Burundi also meant that land and environmental governance have suffered. Farmers struggle to make a living while support by the government remains limited and donor support decreased.
Burundi is globally among the twenty most vulnerable countries to climate change and natural hazards and has recently experienced massive rains and flooding, including devastating mudslides (UNOCHA, 2019). Soil erosion is one of a number of serious challenges that Burundian farmers face. Generally, “agriculture in Burundi is characterized by low food production due to the shortage of arable land, minimal use of improved seeds, a financial market with very limited access for farmers, the depletion of soil fertility by erosion, and suboptimal fertilizer use” (Ndagijimana et al, 2018). The country has very high population density (reported at 423 p. sq. km in 2017, see: World Bank, 2019) which puts additional pressure on natural resources. Moreover, the land governance system is of limited functionality, and the influx of large numbers of returnees from neighbouring countries led to a strong increase in land-related conflicts over the past years. Among other challenges, these factors have contributed to a lack of investment in the protection of natural resources.
Other countries in the region and around the world are also trapped in vicious cycles of weak land governance, insufficient protection of smallholder’s land rights and rural poverty. This paper argues that such contexts of weak land governance hamper global efforts to combat soil degradation as formulated in the Sustainable Development Goals and the Voluntary Guidelines on Sustainable Soil Management (FAO, 2017). While land tenure and land governance might have a more indirect impact on land management, land tenure and land governance should nevertheless be key factors in strategies to tackle soil erosion.
It has long been realized that there are a range of factors that determine if and how much people invest in the conservation and restoration of resources (FAO, n.d.). People are more likely to invest in land to which they have a strong claim and the access to which they consider to be safe. Local institutions play a key role in facilitating conservation and improving farming approaches and other environmental practices. Both, individual and collective land rights as well as local institutions need to be strengthened in order to support sustainable and effective conservation practices to combat soil erosion. This paper lays out two approaches that have been applied in the Burundian context and that can lead to “wise governance of land resources in coupled human-environment systems” which is needed to combat environmental degradation (Briassoulis 2019: 2).
This paper sketches out one approach that facilitates the establishment of functional local land administration systems, and a second one that creates a system of peer-learning and support for increased agricultural production and the application of conservation agriculture for soil protection. Furthermore, the paper explains how these two approaches can be combined to facilitate an integrated approach, which will provide for a holistic way to combat soil erosion, improve land governance and land use.