A report from the United Nations Agency for Food and Agriculture provides an overwhelming statement of soil and water, subjected to a unpublished level of pressure to feed the population.
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How to feed a growing global population without exhausting the resources of the planet? To nurture reflection in the face of this inextricable challenge, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) publishes, Thursday, December 9, a report on the state of land and water resources. His subtitle, “systems at the edge of the rupture”, does not leave room for doubt: there is “urgency to act”, writes the agency, because “unprecedented pressure” exercises on resources natural, “pushed to the limit of their production capacities”.
The observation of FAO is alarming. “Overexploitation, misuse, degradation, pollution and increasing scarcity”: One-third of our soils is moderately to strongly degraded, according to the UN agency, whose publication complements an already heavy corpus of works and expertise on the state of land and water. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) alerted in 2019 on the intensive exploitation of resources, which undermines our ability to cope with global warming, but also to ensure our living and living conditions .
Desertification of the Aral Sea
According to this new FAO study, South Asia is the region most affected by land degradation related to human activities, with just over 41% of its concerned area (out of desert areas). But by looking at the geographical distribution in absolute value, sub-Saharan Africa alone houses a fifth of the degraded land, followed by South America (17% of these lands).
Water resources are not better: 10% of capacity from watercourses and aquifers are levied, including more than two thirds are for agriculture, mainly for irrigation. “The current agricultural schemes are non-sustainable”, writes FAO. Li Lifeng, Director of the Land and Water Division of the Agency, details these pressures to the world: “Some agricultural practices, such as irrigation, cause erosion and promote the salinization of land. Today, 10 % of arable land is threatened by the accumulation of salts. The intensive use of plastics, chemical inputs and fertilizers also causes perverse effects on soil quality, “says Li. Effects that are cumulative , and to which global warming is added.
As a reminder of the severity of the threat, FAO quotes, among other examples, the dewatering of the Aral Sea: once one of the largest lakes in the world, located between six Central Asian countries, In particular, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, this extent has been the victim of massive water diversion plans in the 1960s to irrigate cotton crops, up to become a quasi-desert. Salinisation and Pesticide Pollution have completed decmating fish species present in upstream watercourses, ending the fishing activities that depends on a part of the population, constrained to exile.
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