Villages on the Frontline
To mark the UN Year of Desertification in 2006 this eight part series with a local presenter documents the struggle against land degradation and water shortage.
China (with Jennifer Wang)
Since Mao’s Great Leap Forward nearly 50 years ago, China has lost an area the size of Greenland to the desert. Waking up to the scale of the crisis, the government is mobilising people and resources on a mass scale...
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Jordan (with Rula Amin)
Jordan is in the part of the world where farming began. Ninety percent of the country receives less than 25 centimetres of rain a year. Without the farmers it would revert to desert...
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Tanzania (with Kanky Mwaigomile)
In 2006 Tanzania experienced a stubborn drought. For the first time major rivers stopped flowing and there were water shortages even in the capital, Dar es Salaam...
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Morocco (with Ali Sbai)
Today the main threat to the scarce Saharan grazing lands is not drought but tourism. With over nine million tourists per year in Morocco and Tunisia alone, and the craze for rallies brought on by the Paris-Dakar race, hundreds of thousands of vehicles travel all over the Moroccan Sahara each year...
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The Wider Caribbean (with Carlos Lopez Alberto)
This is a film about the contrasting fortunes of two countries, Haiti and Costa Rica, which share the Caribbean. In densely populated Haiti, 30 million tons of arable lands disappear every year, impoverishing the soil and diminishing the possibilities of cultivation...
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Niger (with Larwanou Mahaman and Souleymane Mahaman)
Niger, on the fringes of the Sahel, is in the front-line against an advancing desert. Villages such as Limandi, in the Diffa Department, have been abandoned to the dunes. It is the classic image of desertification...
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Spain (with Alfredo Fernandez)
Desertification is most often considered to be a problem afflicting poor nations. But large areas of developed nations such as the USA, Australia and Spain are also affected on a huge scale. In this film we go to Spain, where half the country is defined as ‘arid’ or ‘semi-arid’...
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India (Padma Damodaran)
In the coastal regions of Gujarat, the human population has increased by 62% in just 20 years, creating an increased need for water for domestic consumption and farming...
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