WE CAN'T SUPPORT THE 7-8 BILLION PEOPLE HERE IF WE CAN'T SOLVE THE SOIL DEGRADATION PROBLEMS

If you think lack of water is our main problem on our planet, try soil degradation. "Desertification" is land degradation occurring in the arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas of the world. These susceptible dry lands cover 40 percent of the earth's surface and puts at risk more than 1 billion people who are dependent on these lands for survival. Land degradation cancels out gains advanced by improved crop yields and reduced population growth. The causes of land degradation are mainly anthropogenic and mainly agriculture related. The Major Causes: Land clearing and deforestation, Agricultural mining of soil nutrients, Urban conversion, Irrigation Pollution.  The link between a degraded environment and poverty is direct and intimate.

As the land resource base becomes less productive, food security is compromised and competition for dwindling resources increases, the seeds of potential conflict and war are sown. Only about 3% of the global land surface can be considered as prime or Class I land and this is not found in the tropics. Another 8% of land is in Classes II and III. This 11% of land must feed the six billion people today and the 7.6 billion expected in 2020. Desertification is experienced on 33% of the global land surface and affects more than one billion people.
In this country, our effort to study and classify soils began more than 100 years ago through the National Soils Survey. Land degradation is a human-induced or natural process which negatively affects the land to function effectively within an ecosystem by accepting, storing and recycling water, energy, and nutrients. It is estimated that the total annual cost of erosion from agriculture in the USA is about US $44 billion per year, i.e. about US $247 per ha of cropland and pasture. On a global scale the annual loss of 75 billion tons of soil costs the world about US $400 billion per year. There are also serious (20%) productivity losses caused by erosion in Asia (the largest population centers), especially in India, China, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Nepal, and Pakistan.

This is the challenge of the 21st century for which we must be prepared. Land degradation and economic growth or lack of it (poverty) are intractably linked; people living in the lower part of the poverty spiral are in a weak position to provide the stewardship necessary to sustain the resource base. As a consequence, they move further down the poverty spiral—a vicious cycle is set in motion.