News.com Australia reports that the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has completed "State of the World's Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture" - the first-ever global assessment of the state of the planet's land resources.
The report says that a quarter of all farmland is highly degraded and warns that the trend must be reversed if the world's growing population is to be fed. The FAO estimates that farmers will have to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to meet the needs of the world's expected nine billion-strong population, amounting to one billion tons more wheat, rice and other cereals and 200 million more tons of cows and other livestock.
Currently, however, most available farmland is already being farmed, and due to practices that lead to soil erosion and wasting of water, farmland productivity is decreasing. This means that to meet the world's future food needs, a major "sustainable intensification" of agricultural productivity on existing farmland will be necessary, the FAO said, according to News.com. The report was released as delegates from around the world meet in Durban for a two-week UN climate change conference aimed at breaking the deadlock on how to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.
The report found that climate change coupled with poor farming practices had contributed to a decrease in productivity of the world's farmland following the boon years of the Green Revolution, when crop yields soared thanks to new technologies, pesticides and the introduction of high-yield crops. The Green Revolution, contributed to a 12 percent growth in the world's cropland and food productivity increased by 150 percent between 1961 and 2009. But the UN report found that rates of growth have been slowing down in many areas and today 25 percent of the world's farmland is now "highly degraded", with soil erosion, water degradation and biodiversity loss.
Read the full article on www.news.com.au.
For more information, go to www.fao.org.
