ENVIRONMENT
From water planet we have nothing else. He is turning into a huge desert ...

Thulio Pompeu





Planet sand
Desertification is the environmental the time they silently and slowly spread throughout the world



The scarcity of water and earth creates a kind of flow of exile, so that people become environmental refugees migrating to neighbouring regions. This phenomenon may be spreading around the planet. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), more than 100 million people worldwide are at risk of forced migration because of desertification.
In a quick tour the globe is possible to see that in Africa the situation is more serious. Around 20 to 50% of all areas are already degraded, damaging more than 200 million people. In Asia, northern India presents vast areas affected by the phenomenon. Approximately 1 / 4 of the territory of Latin America and the Caribbean is composed of deserts and drylands, the largest range extends from southern Ecuador to northern Chile (de Atacama desert).
The lush forests of Brazil also has many steps to expand the areas desertificadas, today present in about nine states. The highest concentrations are in the Northeast region, and in the vicinity of the city of Juazeiro, Bahia, which has more than 500 miles of desert. Another worrying feature of Brazil is that it has the areas susceptible to this phenomenon more populated the planet. They are 1,492 municipalities and correspond to 15.7% of the national territory, home to approximately 32 million people.
Desertification concern to the United Nations (UN) for a long time. In June 1994 was held in Paris a convention to combat desertification that elevated the issue to the level of global challenge, bringing together partners and trying to warn the international community to the seriousness of the problem. However, little attention being given to the phenomenon continued in the years that followed, leading the United Nations to declare 2006 the International Year of Deserts and Desertification. The fenônemo became the villain of the environmental time, but spent more than half a year, the campaign has gained little visibility in the media and the practical actions in 2006 were very timid.
The main objective of the UN is aware government agencies and civil society about the risks of desertification to humanity, but there is hope that some countries announce measures to counteract this process later this year.
Brazil participates in this campaign by the National Programme of Action to Combat Desertification and Mitigation of the Effects of Drought (NAP). So far only a few meetings were held to set the guidelines and the main actions and prevention.
One of the main causes of desertification which already occurs in more than 1 / 3 of the planet are the techniques that stimulate agricultural production on a large scale. The problem is difficult solution whereas the world population is around six billion people, and continues to grow the average of 2% per year. With the population explosion is necessary to produce a series of products, mainly food, ever on a larger scale.
Joseph Conti, Professor of the department of geography at the University of Sao Paulo and author of the thesis Desertification in tropical areas, says that this fight goes mainly by streamlining the operation of the soil and by efficient and effective measures to prevent the predatory deforestation, which until today Brazil has failed to implement.
Corrective measures such as irrigation of areas already desertification seeking to recover soil productivity can not provide the expected result, in addition to require, in most cases, large resources. But not everything is pessimism in the vision of Conti. "The areas can be retrieved through the correct investment."
He cites the example of Israel, which had a large part of its territory covered by vast deserts, but after a heavy investment managed to recover the soil productivity. Israel currently produces and exports citrus fruit for the whole of Europe.