According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, at current rates of soil loss, driven largely by poor farming practice, we have just 60 years of harvests left.
Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960, due to growing populations and soil degradation.
Third of Earth’s soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture. Fertile soil is being lost at rate of 24bn tonnes a year through intensive farming.
With our current trends in production, urbanization, and environmental degradation, we are losing and wasting too much land. We are losing our connection with the earth. We are losing far too quickly the water, soil, and biodiversity that support all life. At a time when every asset and every option to deliver benefits to people and the planet should be being harnessed, the availability of good quality land is declining. As Mark Twain jokingly put it “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.”
Yet the Global Land Outlook (UNCCD) keeps up an optimistic spirit - still thinking that global ecological problems can be resolved within capitalism:
We need to think in terms of respect for limits, not limits to growth: we can take immediate action without compromising the quality of life today or our aspirations for the future; informed and responsible decision-making, along with simple changes in our everyday lives, can help promote economic growth while at the same time reverse the current trends in land degradation.
If it only was that easy!
The Global Land Outlook is billed as the most comprehensive study of its type, mapping the interlinked impacts of urbanisation, climate change, erosion and forest loss. But the biggest factor is the expansion of industrial farming.
Heavy tilling, multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled. Over time this diminishes fertility and can lead to abandonment of land and ultimately desertification. Decreasing productivity can be observed on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of rangeland. Industrial agriculture is not sustainable. It’s like an extractive industry
The impacts vary enormously from region to region. Worst affected is sub-Saharan Africa.
High levels of food consumption in wealthy countries are a major driver of soil degradation overseas.
As a Sanskrit text written in about 1500BC noted: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.”
Now, globalisation ensures that this disaster is reproduced everywhere. In its early stages, globalisation enhances resilience: people are no longer dependent on the vagaries of local production. But as it proceeds, spreading the same destructive processes to all corners of the Earth, it undermines resilience, as it threatens to bring down systems everywhere.