From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Fri Jun 18 2010 - 13:42:05 EDT
Summit on 'Great Green Wall' opens in Chad
AFP | June 18, 2010
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NDJAMENA (AFP) - Leaders from 11 countries gathered Thursday in Chad for the
first summit on the "Great Green Wall" of Africa which is a proposal to
reforest the continent from west to east to battle desertification.
"The Great Green Wall is a project conceived of by Africans for Africans and
for future generations," said host President Idriss Deby Itno, in his
welcome speech at the presidential palace in Ndjamena.
"It's an African contribution to the battle against global warming," Deby
added.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said in his speech that "the desert is
in a cancerous state. We must fight it. This is why we have decided on this
Titanesque struggle."
The Great Green Wall is aimed at tackling "the degradation of the soil and
poverty in the Sahel-Saharan region," Chad's Minister of the Environment
Hassan Terapun told AFP on Wednesday.
The project was in 2007 "adopted by the African Union, which made it an
African response to the problem of desertification", he added.
Sponsors of the Great Green Wall project envisage a strip of forest about 15
kilometres (nine miles) wide on average that would link Dakar on the
Atlantic coast with Djibouti on the Red Sea in the east. The wall would be
more than 7,100 kilometres (4,400) miles long.
The 11 countries involved in the project are Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti,
Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan.
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