US EditionUkraine Soil Depletion Threatens Global Food Supply
Human activities like deforestation and unsustainable irrigation reduce crop yields by 10% in affected areas, impacting 1.7 billion people and threatening food security, FAO says.
- On Monday, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released its State of Food and Agriculture report in Rome, estimating around 1.7 billion people live where land degradation cuts crop yields by 10 percent.
- FAO notes the causes include natural drivers like soil erosion and salinization alongside human activities such as deforestation, overgrazing and unsustainable irrigation, measured by comparing soil organic carbon, soil erosion and soil water to a no-human baseline using a machine-learning model.
- The FAO report warns that land degradation affects 1.7 billion people, with 47 million children under 5 suffering from stunting, especially in Asian countries.
- FAO highlights that reversing 10 percent of degradation could restore enough production to feed 1.7 billion people, FAO Director-General Dongyu Qu wrote in the report's foreword.
- Land, the report stresses, supports over 95 percent of food production, has been central since the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago, and holds cultural importance for Indigenous peoples and SDGs.
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Depletion of Ukraine’s soils threatens long-term global food security
Beyond the disruption to Ukraine’s food exports, the war is jeopardising the country’s long-term ability to remain the ‘breadbasket of Europe’, because its soils are gradually losing vital crop nutrients. That is the warning issued by researchers from the UK, Ukraine and the Netherlands who say more nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium* are now being removed from soils via harvested crops than added back in. This is due to …
Depletion of Ukraine's soils threatens long-term global food security
Beyond the disruption to Ukraine's food exports, the war is jeopardizing the country's long-term ability to remain the "breadbasket of Europe," because its soils are gradually losing vital crop nutrients.
The United Nations says that land degradation, caused by "deflorisation" and "insistible practices", affects "agricultural productivity, rural livelihoods and food security".
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