UN report: The world’s farms stretched to ‘a breaking point’

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels
Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels

The world’s climate-stressed and pollution-degraded farming and agricultural system must shift quickly to sustainable practices to feed an additional 2 billion mouths expected by 2050, a new United Nations report finds.

By Dana Nuccitelli, Yale Climate Connections (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5)

Almost 10% of the 8 billion people on earth are already undernourished with 3 billion lacking healthy diets, and the land and water resources farmers rely on stressed to “a breaking point.” And by 2050 there will be 2 billion more mouths to feed, warns a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

For now, farmers have been able to boost agricultural productivity by irrigating more land and applying heavier doses of fertilizer and pesticides. But the report says these practices are not sustainable: They have eroded and degraded soil while polluting and depleting water supplies and shrinking the world’s forests. The FAO report discusses some important climate change impacts, such as changing distribution of rainfall, the suitability of land for certain crops, the spread of insects and other pests, and shorter growing seasons in regions affected by more intense droughts. While not the sole source of obstacles facing global agriculture, the report makes clear that climate change is further stressing agricultural systems and amplifying global food production challenges.

The report also offers hope that the problems are solvable: Water degradation can be reversed by turning to smart planning and coordination of sustainable farming practices and by deploying new innovative technologies. More sustainable agriculture can also help fight climate change: For instance, the report notes that wiser use of soils can help sequester some of the greenhouse gasses currently emitted by agricultural activities. 

Drastic changes in climate will require regions to adjust the crops they grow. For example, the report predicts that much cereal production will probably have to move north, to Canada and northern Eurasia. Brazil and northern Africa may have a harder time growing coffee, but it may get easier in eastern Africa. A changing climate “may bring opportunities for multiple rainfed cropping, particularly in the tropics and subtropics.” And for areas “where the climate becomes marginal for current staple and niche crops, there are alternative annual and perennial tree crops, livestock, and soil and water management options available.”

The report recommends seed and germoplasm exchanges globally and among regions, and investments to develop crops that can withstand changes in temperature, salinity, wind, and evaporation.

The changes will not be easy, the report says, but they may be necessary to avoid widespread hunger and other catastrophes.

Extensive land and water degradation

Over the past 20 years, the global population has risen by more than 25% from just over 6 billion to nearly 8 billion people. The amount of land used to grow crops has increased by just 4% over that time, as farmers have been able to meet the growing demand for food by dramatically increasing the productivity per acre of agricultural land. They’ve done so, for example, by increasing use of diesel-fueled machinery, fertilizer, and pesticides.

But these practices have come at a price. “Human-induced degradation affects 34 percent (1,660 million hectares) of agricultural land,” the FAO reports. “The treatment of soils with inorganic fertilizers to increase or sustain yields has had significant adverse effects on soil health, and has contributed to freshwater pollution induced by run-off and drainage.”

This degradation is especially extensive on irrigated farmland. Irrigation has been critical for meeting food demand because it produces two to three times as much food per acre as does rain-fed farmland. But irrigation also increases runoff of fertilizers and pesticides that can contaminate soil and groundwater.

The FAO reports also that globally, agriculture accounts for 72% of all surface and groundwater withdrawals, mainly for irrigation, which is depleting groundwater aquifers in many regions. Global groundwater withdrawals for irrigated agriculture increased by about 20% over the past decade alone.

Similarly, the quality of 13% of global soil, including 34% of agricultural land, has been degraded. This degradation has been caused by factors such as excessive fertilizer use, livestock overgrazing causing soil compaction and erosion, deforestation, and decreasing water availability.


Deforestation trends offer one relatively bright spot in the FAO report. The global forested area has declined by about 1% (47 million hectares) over the past decade, but that is a significant improvement from the nearly 2% decline (78 million hectares) in the 1990s. And in the November 2021 international climate negotiations in Glasgow, 141 countries, covering 91% of global forested area, agreed to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030. It remains to be seen, of course, how many reach those commitments.

Climate change is worsening food system breakdowns

Climate change exacerbates farmers’ challenges by making weather more extreme and less reliable. Extreme heat can stress crops and farm workers while increasing evaporation of water from soil and transpiration from plants, thus amplifying agricultural water demands. Here too, it’s not all bad news: Agricultural productivity is expected to increase in regions that are currently relatively cold, but decrease in places that are hotter and drier, especially as climate change exacerbates droughts.

As with others, farmers will need to adapt to the changing climate, and making those adaptations can be expensive. For example, as the primary or sole producer of many of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts, California effectively acts as America’s garden. But climate change is exacerbating droughts and water shortages in the state, and farmers are struggling to adapt. About 80% of all almonds in the world are grown in California, generating $6 billion in annual revenue, but almonds are a very water-intensive crop. As a result, some farmers have been forced to tear up their lucrative almond orchards. It’s a stark reminder that “adaptation” can sound easy on paper, but in practice can sometimes be painful and costly.

Farmers and planners will need to adapt

Adaptation will nevertheless be necessary in the face of an anticipated 50% increase in food demand by 2050 (including a doubling in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa), extensive land and water quality degradation, and a changing climate. The FAO report recommends four action areas to continue to meet rising global food demand.

  • First, adopting inclusive land and water governance through improved land-use planning to guide land and water allocation and promote sustainable resources management.

  • Second, implementing integrated solutions at scale, for example by helping farmers use available resources more efficiently while minimizing the associated adverse environmental impacts and also building resilience to climate change.

  • Third, embracing innovative technologies and management like remote sensing services; opening access to data and information on crops, natural resources and climatic conditions; and improving rainwater capture and increasing soil moisture retention.

  • Fourth, investing in long-term sustainable land, soil, and water management; in restoring degraded ecosystems; and in data and information management for farmers.

Fortunately, sustainable agricultural practices can also do double duty as climate solutions. The FAO reports that 31% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agri-food systems. Sustainable farming practices like regenerative agriculture can require less diesel-fueled machinery and less reliance on soil- and water-polluting pesticides while increasing the carbon stored in farmed soils.

Solving these multiple problems will require planning and coordination, the FAO writes in the report, and “data collection needs to improve.” Again, a bright side: The technology to improve data collection already exists, and advances in agricultural research have also put other solutions within reach. What is needed now is for policymakers and planners to coordinate work with farmers to adopt more sustainable practices and adapt more quickly to the changing climate. So, while the food system is currently at a “breaking point,” these more sustainable solutions are all within reach.

Natural Resources Necessary to Feed World Are at a ‘Breaking Point,’ Warns FAO

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain.”

By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A United Nations report released Thursday detailing humanity’s degradation of natural resources warns swift and sweeping reforms are needed to keep feeding the growing global population.

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point.”

The new U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report argues that “a sense of urgency needs to prevail over a hitherto neglected area of public policy and human welfare, that of caring for the long-term future of land, soil, and water.”

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils,” the publication explains, “is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain, guaranteeing nature-positive production, advancing equitable livelihoods, and building resilience to shocks and stresses arising from natural disasters and pandemics.”

Entitled The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture: Systems at breaking point (SOLAW 2021), the report declares that “time is of the essence.”

That tone is echoed by FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu in a foreword to the report, which he says provides “evidence of the changing and alarming trends in resource use.”

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point,” Qu writes. “It is clear our future food security will depend on safeguarding our land, soil, and water resources.”

Already, human-induced soil degradation affects 34% of land used for food while water scarcity threatens 3.2 billion people—nearly half the total human population—in agricultural areas, according to SOLAW 2021.

Alongside its broad warning that “the interconnected systems of land, soil, and water are stretched to the limit,” the report emphasizes that “current patterns of agricultural intensification are not proving sustainable,” and “farming systems are becoming polarized,” with an “increasing concentration of land under a relatively small number of large commercial farming enterprises.”

Recognizing the need to better manage and safeguard land and water resources essential for food production, the report offers four key takeaways:

  • Land and water governance has to be more inclusive and adaptive;
  • Integrated solutions need to be planned at all levels if they are to be taken to scale;
  • Technical and managerial innovation can be targeted to address priorities and accelerate transformation; and
  • Agricultural support and investment can be redirected towards social and environmental gains derived from land and water management.

“Current patterns of agrifood production are not proving sustainable,” Qu said Thursday at the report’s launch event. “Yet, agrifood systems can play a major role in alleviating these pressures and contributing positively to climate and development goals.”

In his foreword, Qu notes that “a meaningful engagement with the key stakeholders—farmers, pastoralists, foresters, and smallholders—directly involved in managing soils and conserving water in agricultural landscapes is central.”

“These are nature’s stewards and the best agents of change to adopt, adapt, and embrace the innovation we need to secure a sustainable future,” he adds.

Some of those same stakeholders have been critical of the U.N. agency in recent months.

A coalition of food justice advocates last week sent a letter to Qu calling on the FAO to cut ties with CropLife International, warning that any collaboration with the agrochemical trade association “undercuts your agency’s critical—and urgently needed—support for agroecology, which FAO itself notes ‘can support food production and food security and nutrition while restoring the ecosystem services and biodiversity that are essential for sustainable agriculture.'”

Earlier this year, the FAO leader’s remarks at the U.N. Food Systems Summit were among those flagged by justice campaigners as evidence that the September event was “paving the way for greater control of big corporations over global food systems and misleading the people through corporate-led false solutions.”

Just before the summit, during a counter-mobilization, Razan Zuayter of the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty had said that “food systems can be transformed through the respect of food sovereignty via the will of landless peasants, small farmers, and fishers.”

“We have shown that the people are hungry for real change,” Zuayter added, “and are willing to do whatever it takes to fight for and reclaim their land, their rights, and the future of food systems.”

Creating a new relationship with nature through a ‘stewardship economy’

Small forestry in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Juan Carlos Huayllapuma/CIFOR
Small forestry in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Juan Carlos Huayllapuma/CIFOR

New approach reshapes markets by putting stewards of nature at the center.

By Ravi Prabhu, Steven Lawry, John Colmey, Forests News (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

—Aldo Leopold, American conservationist and forester

On the islands that lie between Alaska and Russia, ancient tradition mandates that the native Aleut people will not pick a blueberry without ceremony or prayer. In 18th century colonial India, 363 Bishnoi men and women died at the hands of foresters while clinging to their trees to save them from being turned into timber, inspiring the term ‘tree hugger.’

While perhaps not the first that comes to mind, one word to describe these acts is, by definition, ‘stewardship’: the conducting, supervising, or managing of something, especially the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.

Echoing Leopold and others who have come before, we at CIFOR-ICRAF, our partners, and the growing global community invested in re-examining the relationship between people and nature are ascribing a contemporary meaning to the concept of ‘stewardship.’ In this understanding, stewardship is the respect we exercise in using nature to produce the goods and services necessary to meet the needs of the world’s 8 billion people as well as those of the environment. It’s clear we must get away from our abusive and purely extractive relationship with nature, and stewardship embodies a responsible and caring relationship with the natural world to ensure collective, planetary well-being and health.

Who are the stewards?

Charles Hugh Stevenson , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Drying Salmon at Unalaska, Alaska. Credit: Charles Hugh Stevenson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As illustrated in the examples at the beginning of this article, the notion of stewardship of nature is as old as human culture. Today, we think of environmental stewardship as inclusive, equitable, place-based, and focused on resilient, prosperous, and sustainable development.

We can think of stewardship of land in particular as a deliberate and informed combination of solicitude, foresight and skill – a marriage of practice and ethics – that has tangible impacts in landscapes. Present-day movements around regenerative agriculture, natural farming and agroecology, buoyed by attention to gender, ethnic and age equality, are examples of the modern embodiment of stewardship practices at forest, farm and community levels.

Land stewards, then, are not simply owners or producers of commodities (food, timber, fiber, etc.), as water stewards are not just those making use of water resources. Yes, stewards are engaged in their landscapes, but in ways that uphold a ‘duty of care’ – an ethos of responsibility for all the ecosystem services the land currently provides, as well as the integrity of its history and, importantly, its future. This, of course, takes hold best when stewards, as individuals or communities, hold rights to their land and waters, giving them the legal assurance to invest in the longevity of their natural resources.

Supporting these directly engaged stewards are larger players, such as governments, businesses, educational and research institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the slew of others that recognize the societal benefit of environmental stewardship, which fuels their relationship with landscapes and their caretakers with the same mindset and approach of stewardship – in whatever form that may be, from policy support and project implementation, to knowledge and site-specific research, to innovative finance. Establishment of national parks, climate negotiations and public awareness campaigns are all forms of stewardship when executed well, but ideally their missions ultimately tie back to advancing the efforts of the people spending their days working to sustainably benefit from and protect our natural resources.

Stewardship also involves fluid, productive dialogues between all these actors to improve the policies, consumption patterns and behavior change needed to realize sustainable benefits from nature for livelihoods.

Market influence

Botanic Garden Meise wild coffee nursery in Yangambi - DRC. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR
Botanic Garden Meise wild coffee nursery in Yangambi – DRC. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR

The market economy and balance sheets require land to be considered as a fixed asset, which in turn implies that market mechanisms can drive sustainable outcomes. But it is this strictly utilitarian view of land and nature that drives their commodification – and the crushing environmental crises that result.

A primary part of the problem is that markets have no realistic way of pricing agricultural commodities so that they bear the full cost of what it takes to ensure land and nature are resilient and able to heal themselves. (Embedded in this is the aforementioned challenge that, in many countries, and especially in forest-reliant communities, insecure or unclear property and tenure rights act as deterrents to investments in stewardship.)

It is no wonder that forests are being replaced by monoculture oil palm, cacao or plantation timber. Even where they exist, the niche markets for high-priced ‘fully costed’ products are far too thin to offer people decent livelihoods and the means to sustain their original landscapes. Farmers in these scenarios are reduced to agricultural factory workers, for lack of a better term.

Over time, the results of these powerful and unsustainable market pressures on direct land users – perhaps would-be stewards under different conditions – result in rapidly degrading land and the ensuing cascade of effects: massive increases in greenhouse gases, disappearing biodiversity, polluted and vanishing water resources, and ever intensifying forms of agriculture that are increasingly dependent on ecologically and economically expensive inputs. This is accelerated by the erosion of social externalities, such as democratic institutions, livelihoods, rights and nutrition.

Turning point

The women of Perigi Village travelled along 500 m of rubber gardens while carrying puruns to get to their place. Photo by Rifky/CIFOR
The women of Perigi Village travelled along 500 m of rubber gardens while carrying puruns to get to their place. Photo by Rifky/CIFOR

We clearly need a change in direction. We believe the answer lies in a shift to a stewardship economy, which would operate both within and outside markets as we know them, supporting, recruiting and connecting stewards, nature and the broader economy through an equitable and affordable system of incentives and rewards that would assure the future of life as we know it. It would aim to fairly reward farmers, forest users and other ‘landscape architects’ for the produce they deliver to markets. It would also see them profit from the services and values they conserve and restore – clean air, removal of greenhouse gases, clean water, biodiversity, and places of spirituality, worship and history.

As for pricing, commodities in a stewardship economy would bear their fair – but not necessarily full – share of the true costs of their production and trade. This means a kilo of rice, wheat or maize would not be priced out of the grasp of poor people. The difference between these fair and full prices would be paid outside market mechanisms, such as through ‘conditional cash transfers’ that are a recognized mechanism for performance-based payments, in this case used for the delivery of services beyond the produced commodities.

In this way, stewards are not forced to commodify their landscapes, as they are rewarded for allowing their lands to continue in health. The two core pillars of the stewardship economy, then, might well be the total income from fair commodity prices and stewardship dividends – delivered through conditional cash transfers, for instance – for service delivery.

A major task, then, is co-designing the mechanisms and building the institutional architecture that help determine both the fair and full costs, translate the fair costs into market prices, and ensure the equitable difference – what could be called the ‘stewardship dividend’ – is efficiently put into the pockets of stewards.

At the same time, the individual rights of stewards and their communities to land and natural resources would need to be taken into account. Innovative finance and investment arrangements, including peer-to-peer finance systems, would have to be mobilized to achieve this.

We believe almost all the tools and elements of a stewardship economy exist already, in one form or the other; what has been missing has been an effort to put the parts together into a greater whole. Our intention is to explore this assembling in the context of the stewardship of farms, forests and terrestrial landscapes.

Modern forms of agriculture, forest and land management have divorced people from nature. People have been turned into laborers and nature into commodities. ‘Stewardship economics’ is the turning point we propose for a more resilient, equitable and optimistic future. Nature is more than products; it also provides immeasurable services. People are not just producers; they are also caretakers. It is high time we recognize and reward this, and we will all benefit as a result.


Stewardship Economy

An equitable system of exchange that rewards those managing nature sustainably for the goods and services derived from those landscapes – which often feed into markets to meet the needs of the global population – while recognizing and promoting the rights of all people to food, water, nutrition, health, voice and a decent livelihood. Coupled with pillars of the landscape approach and democracy, it builds upon classic notions of ‘stewardship’ in a modern context: a deliberate and informed combination of solicitude, foresight and skill – a marriage of practice and ethics – that brings visible and tangible impacts in landscapes and ecosystems. It is underpinned by economic principles and financial mechanisms that will ensure fair and equal benefits and market inclusion of land managers, while meeting consumers’ pricing needs. Shifting fully to a stewardship economy, which exists today in facets and fragments, can swiftly unblock pathways to a more sustainable future for a planet in crisis.This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.