UAE has participated in the UN International meeting

In his opening speech, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said “Drought and land degradation must therefore move to the centre of policy development”. “By refocusing our development agenda to include the potential of drylands, we can break the links between poverty and desertification, drought and land degradation,” he added. UN Secretary General drew attention to the drylands of the Horn of Africa, which are experiencing the most severe food crisis in the world, leaving more than 13 million people in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia in urgent need of humanitarian aid. “Drought does not have to become famine,” he stated. “Too often the international community reacts too late. Too often decisions are taken based on false economies. In the end, we count the cost not just in human lives but in the extra expense of responding to crises that could have been averted for a fraction of the price”. He highlighted that “providing food for the nine billion people predicted to live on Earth in 2050 will require a 70 per cent increase in global food production”. For his part, The President of the General Assembly, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, said that desertification is one of the most complex challenges today, with serious environmental, economic, political and social impacts that affect people, most of whom are poor. “The economic, social and human cost of desertification is tremendous and I call upon the international community to take immediate and decisive action to address its impacts and to take measures for both its prevention and reversal,” said Al-Nasser. Meanwhile, other participants gathered at UN meeting yesterday highlighted the need for stronger action to protect the world’s drylands, which are home to two billion people, stressing that doing so will help reduce poverty and improve development prospects. More than 12 million hectares of productive land are lost due to desertification every year, the equivalent of losing an area the size of South Africa every decade, according to the Secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).