The UN food agency warned on Monday that a quarter of the world’s landmass is “highly degraded,” making it difficult to meet the food needs of a booming population.
“Humankind can no longer treat these vital resources as if they were infinite,” said Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) based in Rome.
“The time for business as usual is over,” Diouf told reporters, calling the FAO’s assessment of the planet’s resources, a first for the organization, a “wake-up call.”
The survey found that 25 percent of the world’s land is “highly degraded” and 44 percent is “moderately degraded,” while only 10 percent was classified as “improving.”
The categories in the report entitled The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture included classic soil and water degradation, as well as other aspects such as biodiversity loss.
The report said land degradation was worst down the west coast of the Americas, across the Mediterranean region of southern Europe and north Africa, across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa and throughout Asia.
About 40 percent of degraded lands are found in high poverty areas.
The report called for more efficient water use by agriculture as well as innovative farming practices, such as conservation agriculture, agro-forestry and integrated crop-livestock systems.
It said developing countries will need about US$1 trillion in investments between 2007 and 2050 for irrigation. Land protection will require US$160 billion during the same period, it added.
The FAO stressed that erosion, desertification and climate change were endangering key production systems across the world from the Mediterranean and southern Africa to Southeast Asia.
The publication coincided with the start of UN talks on climate change in Durban, South Africa, amid signs of a deepening political rift on how to slow the carbon juggernaut.
Topping the agenda of the talks is the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, the only global pact with targets for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, whose first round of pledges expires at the end of next year.
The FAO said many farming areas “face the risk of progressive breakdown of their productive capacity under a combination of excessive demographic pressure and unsustainable agricultural use and practices.”
It said that between 1961 and 2009, the world’s cropland grew by 12 percent, while farming production expanded 150 percent — mainly thanks to a significant increase in yields of major crops because of scientific advances.
However, rates of productivity are now decreasing in many areas — key “warning signs” for the state of the land, the organization said.
The FAO said production would have to increase above the rate of population growth because of rising incomes and dietary changes, such as growing consumption of dairy and meat products in the developing world.
“These systems at risk may simply not be able to contribute as expected in meeting human demands by 2050. The consequences in terms of hunger and poverty are unacceptable,” Diouf said.
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