A/HRC/7/5 page 19 to handle complaints of violations by a transnational corporation, and the ILO Tripartite Declaration of Principles concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy. However, their supervisory mechanisms are very weak. An excellent set of new instruments has been proposed to fill this gap: the Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights.48 Unfortunately, they have not yet received the necessary attention by the former Commission on Human Rights and the Human Rights Council. Furthermore, the General Assembly, in the resolution it adopted on the right to food (A/62/439/Add.2, resolution XVII),49 specifically requested private actors to take full account of the need to promote the effective realization of the right to food for all; however, greater attention needs to be given to strengthening supervisory mechanisms in order to hold private actors accountable. E. Desertification 50. Many of the global food crises are the result of the impact of serious drought, desertification and land degradation or destitution and rising conflict over deteriorating resources. Globally, desertification and land degradation now affect nearly 2 billion people in over 100 countries. The vast majority of people living in drylands live in Asia (about 1.4 billion people), another 325 million people live in Africa’s drylands and there are also 140 million people in Europe and 177 million in the Americas.50 The impact of land degradation is most severe in developing countries, particularly in Africa, where millions of people are wholly dependent on land for their livelihoods as farmers or pastoral herders and where there are few alternative livelihoods. Today, in Africa, 46 per cent of the population and approximately 500 million hectares of land are affected by land degradation, including two thirds of the region’s productive agricultural land.51 51. It is estimated that 50 per cent of the world’s 854 million hungry people live in marginal, dry and degraded lands.52 Half of the world’s hungry people therefore depend for their survival on lands which are inherently poor and which may be becoming less fertile and less productive as a result of the impacts of repeated droughts, climate change and unsustainable land use. In Niger for example, close to 95 per cent of productive land is dryland; the population is predominantly rural, chronically poor and subject to repeated food crises.53 In Zimbabwe, the overwhelming majority of the poor live in rural areas and poverty is deepest in the low rainfall 48 E/CN.4/Sub.2/2003/12/Rev.2, see E/CN.4/2004/10. 49 See footnote 8 above. 50 See A/61/306. 51 P.M. Johnson, K. Mayrand, M. Paquin, Governing Global Desertification: Linking environmental degradation, poverty and participation, 2006. 52 Millenium Project, Task Force on Hunger, Halving hunger: it can be done, 2005. 53 See E/CN.4/2006/44.