Land blog posts

To mitigate risks of ecosystem service degradation, we need to ensure that tradeoffs are managed through informed land use, especially in high potential agricultural areas, such as the Guinea Savanna zone in Africa.

Rumour has it that planting cassava is inherently bad for the soil. But, cassava can apparently grow well in poor, degraded soils with no or very little fertiliser application at all.

Soils should be at the heart of "climate-smart agriculture". No-till agriculture is as good at capturing carbon as planting a rainforest -- and should be treated as a similar "carbon credit" in any future deal to set up a carbon trading system round the world, says Guadagni of the World Bank.

Why are soil scientists around the world, lobbying for a rapid increase in the use of chemical fertilizers in sub-Saharan Africa? Wouldn't that mean repeating the mistakes of the developed world? No, not really...

Worldwide, an estimated 34 million hectares of irrigated farmland are affected by high salinity, representing 11 percent of the total irrigated land. Licorice could be a low-cost land rehabilitation option in Central Asia.

Poor and marginalized populations are usually found to be the most affected by land and soil degradation. How can the scientific community ensure that land and soil degradation are included in the SDGs?

One of the major issues in realizing Africa’s food production potential is the lack of organic materials to adequately enrich the soils, making mineral fertilizers most crucial to replenish soil fertility. While there has been renewed interest in fertilizer subsidies, they remain controversial.

Currently the cost of land degradation reaches about US$490 billion per year, much higher than the cost of action to prevent it. To rectify this we should first get the basics right: credible quantitative information about current status, drivers, indicators, thresholds, and spatial variability.

In the least favored regions of the world, food production per capita remains at the same level as in the 1960s. There are many reasons, from a purely agronomic perspective, for such disparities. New inputs from science can support indigenous knowledge for landscape restoration and ecological intensification.

Land degradation is no longer a local problem. Increasing land scarcity means that smallholder farmers in Africa may find themselves competing for land in a global market that has seen an exponential rise in foreign investment in soil and water or ‘land grabbing’. Conversion of new lands contributes to climate change. What are we doing about it?

For this year's World Food Day, themed “Sustainable Food Systems for Food Security and Nutrition", we're asking you: What do you think a sustainable food system looks like?

Precious little work directly addresses the corporate presence. Those who want effective policies to protect smallholders and promote sustainable landscapes need to do some serious thinking about how to handle agribusiness corporations.