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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Around the Globe, Farmers Losing Ground
  • Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 22:15:55 -0600


This is why we promote specific methods of replenishing soil, conserving
soil moisture, and above all doing it profitably so it's feasible on a
massive scale.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38343
June 28, 2007 by Inter Press Service
Around the Globe, Farmers Losing Ground
By Lester R. Brown
[Lester Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This
article originally appeared on earthpolicy.org.]

WASHINGTON - In 1938, Walter Lowdermilk, a senior official in the Soil
Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, traveled abroad

to look at lands that had been cultivated for thousands of years, seeking
to
learn how these older civilisations had coped with soil erosion.

He found that some had managed their land well, maintaining its fertility
over long stretches of history, and were thriving. Others had failed to do
so and left only remnants of their illustrious pasts.

In a section of his report entitled 'The Hundred Dead Cities,' he described

a site in northern Syria, near Aleppo, where ancient buildings were still
standing in stark isolated relief, but they were on bare rock. During the
seventh century, the thriving region had been invaded, initially by a
Persian army and later by nomads out of the Arabian Desert. In the process,

soil and water conservation practices used for centuries were abandoned.

Lowdermilk noted, 'Here erosion had done its worst- if the soils had
remained, even though the cities were destroyed and the populations
dispersed, the area might be re-peopled again and the cities rebuilt, but
now that the soils are gone, all is gone.'

Now fast forward to a trip in 2002 by a United Nations team to assess the
food situation in Lesotho, a small country of 2 million people imbedded
within South Africa. Their finding was straightforward: 'Agriculture in
Lesotho faces a catastrophic future; crop production is declining and could

cease altogether over large tracts of the country if steps are not taken to

reverse soil erosion, degradation, and the decline in soil fertility.'

Michael Grunwald reports in the Washington Post that nearly half of the
children under five in Lesotho are stunted physically. 'Many,' he says,
'are
too weak to walk to school.'

Whether the land is in northern Syria, Lesotho, or elsewhere, the health of

the people living on it cannot be separated from the health of the land
itself. A large share of the world's 852 million hungry people live on land

with soils worn thin by erosion.

The thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet's land surface is the
foundation of civilisation. This soil, measured in inches over much of the
earth, was formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil
formation exceeded the natural rate of erosion. As soil accumulated over
the
eons, it provided a medium in which plants could grow. In turn, plants
protect the soil from erosion. Human activity is disrupting this
relationship.

Sometime within the last century, soil erosion began to exceed new soil
formation in large areas. Perhaps a third or more of all cropland is losing

topsoil faster than new soil is forming, thereby reducing the land's
inherent productivity. Today the foundation of civilisation is crumbling.
The seeds of collapse of some early civilisations, such as the Mayans, may
have originated in soil erosion that undermined the food supply.

The accelerating soil erosion over the last century can be seen in the dust

bowls that form as vegetation is destroyed and wind erosion soars out of
control. Among those that stand out are the Dust Bowl in the U.S. Great
Plains during the 1930s, the dust bowls in the Soviet Virgin Lands in the
1960s, the huge one that is forming today in northwest China, and the one
taking shape in the Sahelian region of Africa.

Each of these is associated with a familiar pattern of overgrazing,
deforestation, and agricultural expansion onto marginal land, followed by
retrenchment as the soil begins to disappear.

Twentieth-century population growth pushed agriculture onto highly
vulnerable land in many countries. The overplowing of the U.S. Great Plains

during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, led
to the 1930s Dust Bowl. This was a tragic era in U.S. history, one that
forced hundreds of thousands of farm families to leave the Great Plains.
Many migrated to California in search of a new life, a move immortalised in

John Steinbeck's novel 'The Grapes of Wrath'.

Three decades later, history repeated itself in the Soviet Union. The
Virgin
Lands Project between 1954 and 1960 centred on plowing an area of grassland

for wheat that was larger than the wheatland in Canada and Australia
combined. Initially this resulted in an impressive expansion in Soviet
grain
production, but the success was short-lived as a dust bowl developed there
as well.

Kazakhstan, at the centre of this Virgin Lands Project, saw its grainland
area peak at just over 25 million hectares (44 millions acres) around 1980,

then shrink to 14 million hectares today. Even on the remaining land,
however, the average wheat yield is scarcely one tonne per hectare, a far
cry from the nearly eight tonnes per hectare that farmers get in France,
Western Europe's leading wheat producer.

A similar situation exists in Mongolia, where over the last 20 years half
the wheatland has been abandoned and wheat yields have also fallen by half,

shrinking the harvest by three fourths. Mongolia - a country almost three
times the size of France with a population of 2.6 million - is now forced
to
import nearly 60 percent of its wheat.

Dust storms originating in the new dust bowls are now faithfully recorded
in
satellite images. In early January 2005, the National Aeronautics and Space

Administration (NASA) released images of a vast dust storm moving westward
out of central Africa. This vast cloud of tan-coloured dust stretched over
some 5,300 kilometres. NASA noted that if the storm were relocated to the
United States, it would cover the country and extend into the oceans on
both
coasts.

Andrew Goudie, professor of geography at Oxford University, reports that
Saharan dust storms - once rare - are now commonplace. He estimates they
have increased 10-fold during the last half-century. Among the countries in

the region most affected by topsoil loss from wind erosion are Niger, Chad,

Mauritania, northern Nigeria, and Burkino Faso. In Mauritania, in Africa's
far west, the number of dust storms jumped from two a year in the early
1960s to 80 a year today.

The Bodélé Depression in Chad is the source of an estimated 1.3
billion
tons of wind-borne soil a year, up 10-fold from 1947 when measurements
began. The 2 to 3 billion tons of fine soil particles that leave Africa
each
year in dust storms are slowly draining the continent of its fertility and,

hence, its biological productivity. In addition, dust storms leaving Africa

travel westward across the Atlantic, depositing so much dust in the
Caribbean that they cloud the water and damage coral reefs there.

In China, plowing excesses became common in several provinces as
agriculture
pushed northward and westward into the pastoral zone between 1987 and 1996.

In Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol), for example, the cultivated area increased

by 1.1 million hectares, or 22 percent, during this period. Other provinces

that expanded their cultivated area by 3 percent or more during this
nine-year span include Heilongjiang, Hunan, Tibet
(Xizang), Qinghai, and Xinjiang.

Severe wind erosion of soil on this newly plowed land made it clear that
its
only sustainable use was controlled grazing. As a result, Chinese
agriculture is now engaged in a strategic withdrawal in these provinces,
pulling back to land that can sustain crop production.

Water erosion also takes a toll on soils. This can be seen in the silting
of
reservoirs and in muddy, silt-laden rivers flowing into the sea. Pakistan's

two large reservoirs, Mangla and Tarbela, which store Indus River water for

the country's vast irrigation network, are losing roughly 1 percent of
their
storage capacity each year as they fill with silt from deforested
watersheds.

Ethiopia, a mountainous country with highly erodible soils on steeply
sloping land, is losing an estimated 1 billion tons of topsoil a year,
washed away by rain. This is one reason Ethiopia always seems to be on the
verge of famine, never able to accumulate enough grain reserves to provide
a
meaningful measure of food security.

Fortunately there are ways to conserve and rebuild soils. These will be
discussed in the next Earth Policy Institute Book Byte.

[Lester Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This
article originally appeared on earthpolicy.org.]






  • [Livingontheland] Around the Globe, Farmers Losing Ground, TradingPostPaul, 06/29/2007

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