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	We are turning our land to sand by Luc Gnacadja Director, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification   While concerns about food security grab headlines, one of the key drivers of the problem is overlooked. No one seems to notice that good farm land is being lost to the desert winds.   Yesterday was the World Day to Combat Desertification and I suspect the term desertification will conjure up images of expanding deserts or shifting sand dunes. This is what I often hear, followed, almost predictably by the statement, "why should I care since we cannot do much about it."   But what would you say to Yacouba Sawadogo, the humble villager in rural Burkina Faso, whose efforts to keep his small patch of land productive have travelled from village-to-village across three countries. The end result? Over five million hectares of reforestation including through farmer-managed natural regeneration of degraded lands. And what do we say to the Haranne family in Djelfa, Algeria, that now enjoys an income of US$8,000 per year after restoring land that was once buried in sand?   The fight against desertification is a fight to save land productivity and soil fertility in the arid, semi-arid and dry-sub humid areas or drylands, as they are simply called. It is a fight to prevent the creation of man-made deserts in areas that have served us so well in the past.   One of the environmental movement"s best kept secrets is that drylands supply the world"s breadbasket. They account for 44 per cent of all cultivated systems and 50 per cent of the livestock. Common foods like barley, rye, saffron and olives, as well as cotton originated here. More importantly, they still harbour some of their wild relatives. In fact, one in every three plants that we cultivate is from the drylands.   Australia is a prime example of this value. Only six per cent of the land can be farmed without irrigation. Yet, agriculture takes up 60 per cent of the total land area, with livestock grazing as the most extensive use.   To be sure, combatting desertification is not only fighting to ensure future generations can enjoy a bag of potato chips and a salad laced with olives. It is about ensuring there is food on the table, access to clean and safe water and energy to use today, and everyday.   But it cannot be done without ending land and soil degradation. More so, because by 2030, global food needs will grow by 50 per cent, water by 30 per cent and energy demand by 45 per cent, claiming more productive land.   But every year, 12 million hectares of land is lost through desertification and drought alone. This is an area half the size of United Kingdom and could produce 20 million tonnes of grain per year. Globally, about 75 billion tonnes of fertile soil is lost forever each year. Overall, about 1.5 billion people live off degrading land, of whom 74 per cent are the poor.   More significantly, land degradation exceeds its restoration. The 2011 report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations claims that 25 per cent of the land is highly degraded while only 10 per cent is improving. In Australia, soil fertility is declining in 33 per cent of all cropped land.   Continuing with business as usual means that by 2035, global food production could fall by 12 per cent due to land degradation alone. This would increase world food prices by up to 30 per cent. Otherwise, about 120 million hectares of new land must be cleared to meet the expected increase in food demand. Currently, 70 to 80 per cent of deforestation is due to cropland expansion. Is this sustainable?   The alternative is to restore degraded land at a much faster rate than its degradation. There is good reason to do so. Globally, more than two billion hectares of land can be restored through forest and landscape restoration. It could help offset any use of new land.   Of this, 1.5 billion hectares is suitable for mosaic restoration, including through agroforestry and small-holder agriculture. This focus would alleviate poverty and restore degraded land for millions of families that live like the Sawadogo"s and Harranne"s once did.   But three things stand in the way.   First, political will is lacking because drylands and other degraded areas are viewed as marginal land that we can afford to abandon. So, there is little interest to invest in these areas.   Second, there is a very weak link between science and policy at all levels. Since the issue is complex, diagnosis must be site specific. Even so, there is much to gain from having a credible scientific body to guide consensus building on crucial issues like monitoring and assessment.   Lastly, it is often argued that one can only improve what one can measure. So, the lack of an institution to monitor these trends at all levels and across all land ecosystems is a serious policy gap.   To be sure, there is some progress, but it is time that every society, Australians included, began to challenge misperceptions and offer solutions to speed up the change.   Our experience of 20 years tells us that we need to change course by first, agreeing on the goal of sustainable land use for all and by all, with targets to be achieved in a given time. Healthy soil sustains our life, so each of us must do all we can to become land degradation neutral.   * Luc Gnacadja is the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Visit the related web page
	Inequality: How it helped cause the crisis and is now prolonging it by Stewart Lansley Europe''s World   In the post-war era, the developed world embarked on a long march towards greater equality. What came to be known as the ‘great levelling` eventually ran out of steam, and then in most rich countries went into reverse. The reversal began in the United States in the mid-1970s and then in the United Kingdom from the end of that decade. In both countries, the income gap eventually turned full circle, returning the hiked levels last seen in the 1930s. Across most of continental Europe, the reversal of the earlier trend began later. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s, most European nations had succumbed to greater inequality.   This historic reverse has been driven largely by a counter-revolution: the overturning of the governing philosophy of the post-war era based on a model of ‘managed capitalism’. From the 1950s, a small group of pro-market thinkers began arguing that the egalitarian advance was causing economic sclerosis. As the Austrian-American economist, Ludwig von Mises, one of the leading prophets of the superiority of markets, put it in 1955: ‘Inequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses’ well being, not the cause of anybody’s distress…. Where there is a lower degree of inequality, there is necessarily a lower standard of living of the masses.’ It was a view echoed by Sir Keith Joseph, one of Mrs Thatcher’s most trusted advisers, in 1976. ‘Making the rich poorer does not make the poor richer, but it does make the state stronger … The pursuit of income equality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum.’   In 1975, an influential book, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade-Off, by the late American economist Arthur Okun argued that too much equality reduces incentives and leads to a smaller economic pie. The belief that too much equality was a drag on economic progress soon became a new global orthodoxy. One group of converts was Britain’s Labour leadership. As Tony Blair put it in 1997, he wanted a society that encouraged ‘levelling up’ rather than ‘levelling down’. ‘Wealth creation was now more important than wealth distribution’ declared Stephen Byers, trade secretary from December 1998. As a result the rich continued to pull away from the rest under Labour, just as they had under successive Conservative governments.   So is this theory right? Has the rising inequality of the last thirty years brought the promised improvement in economic performance? The answer is no. A recent study – Equality and Efficiency – by two IMF economists, Andrew Berg and Jonathan Ostry, shows that the opposite is the case: ‘that when growth is looked at over the long term, the trade-off may not exist. In fact equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth.   Evidence presented in another new study, The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy, shows that the wealth gap soared under ‘market capitalism` but without the promised pay-off of wider economic progress. On all measures of economic success bar inflation, the post-1980 era of rising inequality has, in most countries, a much poorer record on growth, productivity and unemployment than the egalitarian post-war decades.   The main outcome for the countries that embraced the post-1980 model of market capitalism most fully has been economies that are both much more polarised and much more fragile. So what does this tell us about cause and effect? Has the rise in inequality played any role in creating the present crisis? No according to the only official account of the causes of the 2008-9 crash. The report of the U.S. official Commission, published in January 2011, failed to mention ‘inequality’ once in its mammoth 662 page report.   Yet, again, the evidence suggests otherwise. The two most damaging recessions of the last century – in the 1930s and today – were both preceded by sharp rises in inequality. In the United States in the 1920s, the share of income taken by the top 1% increased from 14 to 24%. From 1990 to 2007, there was a rise from 14.3% to 22.8%. There have been only two occasions over the last 100 years when the richest 1% of Americans have held more than a fifth of the country’s income pool. And both ended in economic disaster.   So why above this limit might excessive concentrations lead to such turmoil? The principal explanation can be found in the shifting way the fruits of economic growth have been shared. Until the mid-1970s, the gains across the developed world were largely evenly divided. Since then, they have gone increasingly to big business and a small elite of corporate executives and financiers. Between 1990 and 2007, real wages in the UK rose by a half of the increase in productivity (the rise in economic capacity). In the United States, where pay has been lagging even further behind output over the last three decades, the gap between pay and productivity has grown even more sharply.   It is a common story across most rich nations. According to a 2008 study by the International Labour Office: ‘In 51 out of the 73 countries for which data are available, the share of wages in total income declined over the past two decades.’ One of the greatest falls in recent years has been in Germany. From 2003 to 2008 the median wage fell by 9% in real terms, despite a 9% rise in national output. With no national minimum wages, one in six workers there is now paid less than 7 euros an hour.   Allowing the gains from growth to be so unevenly divided has profound implications for the way economies work. First, reducing the relative incomes of large sections of the workforce stifles demand, promoted deflation and prevents economic output being sold. Consumer societies end up without the capacity to consume.   In the UK, the equivalent of around 7% of domestic output has been redistributed away from wage-earners over the last 30 years. As a result, consumers in the UK have around £100bn less in their pockets today than if the income gap had not soared. Business and the super-rich in contrast have around £100bn more. In the bigger economy of the United States, the transfer amounts to a figure of around £500bn.   The political solution to this problem was to pump economies full of private debt. Through the deregulation of finance, consumers were encouraged to borrow more to pay for everyday spending. In the UK, levels of personal debt rose from 45% of incomes in 1981 to 157% in 2008. In the U.S., debt also rose sharply to reach a third more than national income by 2008.   It is an identical story in the 1920s. Borrowing also surged to compensate for stagnant wages. Without this the new consumer goods – from cars to radios – rolling off the mass production lines would have been left unsold. Yet swollen levels of personal debt are not a permanent solution to the problem of shrinking demand. In both the 1920s and the post-millennium years, they did not prevent recession, they just delayed it.   Secondly, high levels of inequality eventually lead to asset price bubbles. In 1920s America, a rapid process of enrichment at the top fed years of speculative activity in property and the stock market. In the build-up to 2008, the rising corporate surpluses and burgeoning personal wealth that were the counterpart to rising wage-productivity gap, led to a giant mountain of global footloose capital. Little of this ended up in productive investment. Most of it financed a surge of wealth-diverting hostile takeovers, corporate raids and leveraged buy-outs, business activity which enriched the few but did little to add to economic efficiency.   The deepest economic crises of the last 100 years have occurred when living standards have decoupled from output. In the relatively stable post-war decades up the end of the 1960s, wages and profits moved roughly in line with output. In the run up to the crisis of the 1970s, the wage share soared across the West creating a profits squeeze that threatened the long run sustainability of the capitalist model.   The 1920s and the post-1980s, in contrast, brought a sustained wage-squeeze and a rising profits share that destroyed the natural process of economic equilibrium essential to stability. On both occasions, allowing the richest members of society to accumulate a larger and larger share of the cake merely brought a dangerous mix of demand deflation and asset appreciation which ended in prolonged economic turmoil.   These lessons have yet to be learnt. The same factors that led to the 2008 Crash are now killing the chance of recovery. While real wages are sinking, top personal fortunes have been growing. Capping and reversing the great national income gaps should be made a central goal of global economic policy. Until that happens and the global concentrations of income are broken up, the solutions to the present crisis will continue to prove elusive.   * Stewart Lansley has held a number of academic posts including at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, The Henley Centre and the Universities of Reading and Brunel. He is the author of The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy.
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