Farmer's challenge: produce more food on less land

According to the deputy minister of agriculture, greenhouse gas emissions from farming need to be reduced, News24 reports. "The challenge is... to produce more food on less land with less damage to the atmosphere," Pieter Mulder said at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) meeting of the United Nations' 17th Conference of Parties (COP17) summit in Durban.

Mulder said agriculture needed to be a priority of the COP17, and more research was needed to find solutions to the problems farmers faced, News24 reports. Large-scale polluters - including the USA and China - needed to reduce their emissions or the changes made by less polluting countries would be useless. "Even if South Africa was to succeed by 2020 to reach the Copenhagen emissions goals for only a year, China releases enough greenhouse gasses in 68 hours to neutralise South Africa's success," Mulder said.

Earlier, Business Day reported that an FAO global assessment of the state of the planet's land resources found that a quarter of all land is highly degraded. The organisation estimates that, in order to meet the needs of the world's expected 9-billion-strong population in the year 2050, farmers will have to produce one-billion tons more wheat, rice and other cereals and 200-million more tons of beef and other livestock. The report warns that land degradation must be reversed if the world's growing population is to be fed.

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