How to Make a Desert (Part III)

Continental drift (the tectonic plates of the earth’s crust, floating infinitesimally slowly over the molten matter below) accounts for the fact that the Antarctic is, in parts, a desert of ice, and in others a howling wilderness where only a few lichens — and little else — can survive the intense cold.

The Sahara, once a fertile land, dried up, due, it’s thought, to climate change. The Gobi was robbed of life-giving moisture when the Himalayas rose to force rain-bearing clouds to drop their loads of water ... nor is the Gobi the only desert that owes its existence to Continental Drift and Plate Tectonics. There are, however, deserts and near-deserts that are man-made, places where man, knowingly or otherwise, exhausted the soils, created dust bowls. There are the remains of once-great cities in those deserts, and heaps of salt. Generation after generation of men and, no doubt, women, too, watered the arid land to grow crops to feed people in those cities. Generation after generation the sun and wind blowing across the soil drew salts to the surface until no crops could survive on the saline lands.

There are those who warn that farmers on arid lands in California, irrigating crops with water from aquifers deep underground may be creating another salt desert... In the US less than a hundred years ago, poor farming methods and a natural cycle of years of drought created the dust bowl in Oklahoma that inspired John Steinbeck to write his classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath.

“But — hey! While the land yields abundant crops, who cares what happens in a hundred years’ time?” say the businessmen, the conglomerates who own the farmlands — and farmers.

To a lesser degree that is the attitude of too many landowners and squatting gardeners here in Trinidad – if not Tobago. Landowners don’t like paying taxes any more than the rest of us.

When tree crops were no longer profitable many a landowner was content to allow an old cocoa, coffee or citrus plantation on the slopes of the Northern Range that had been in the family for a hundred years or more to revert to secondary bush. The citrus and trees that sheltered the cocoa and coffee continued to shelter the slopes, to protect the lands from flash flooding, to preserve water resources.

All went well until politicians decided that there was too much idle land in TT.

If land wasn’t producing crops, wasn’t providing an income for the State, landowners would be penalised for letting the land lie idle. Landown-ers, said Government, must be made to pay TT$20 an acre for their idle lands.

Before we go any further, I ask Newsday readers who can do so, to take a look at the steep slopes of the Northern Range. Given the cost of labour these days, world prices for cocoa, coffee and citrus would have to be astronomical to compete with CEPEP to entice workers back to agriculture for the backbreaking work of cleaning the land to bring the trees back into production (and that can’t happen overnight).

So, faced with the annual tax of $20 an acre on land no one wants to buy, what can a landowner do to raise money to pay the tax? The few heroes among the landowning classes pay up and try to look cheerful at the annual drain on the budget. Others rent land to squatting gardeners, gardeners who don’t own the land and don’t, won’t or can’t take the trouble to create terraces to prevent soil erosion on those steep slopes.

Even more disastrous is the fact that squatting gardeners, be they on State or privately-owned land, no longer slash before they burn the bush to clear land for planting.

Once, long ago, gardeners would cut fire traces (slash the trees and bush around their chosen plot to prevent the fire from spreading) before setting fire.

Now they light a match and watch the flames lick up the hillsides, making little or no effort to stop the flames spreading far beyond the patches they’re clearing for their gardens.

Year by year rains wash away the thin layer of topsoil until no amount of fertiliser can persuade the land to yield crops.

Squatting gardeners say the land has “gone bad” not knowing, or caring, that they themselves degraded the land, and leaving the landowner hoisted with his own petard to pay the tax on the ruined land.

To be fair, there are a few, a very few, who listen to Extension Officers in the Agricul-ture Ministry and, using simple tools, and an ancient yet highly efficient technology, terrace the hillside slopes to produce crops in both the wet and the dry seasons with the bare minimum loss of topsoil and, it stands to reason, no flooding in the valleys and plains below.

However, hillside gardeners who love their country and care for their fellow citizens by terracing the land are few and very far between.

The rest, together with unplanned squatting developments, upscale gated communities “Commanding pano-ramic views of the Gulf of Paria” (to quote the real estate ads), the mad, the malicious and the mischievous are deliberately degrading the face of the Northern Range while you are reading this column, a scant week and a half before World Environment Day. annehilton@rave-tt.net