800m undernourished due to declining soil fertility: Ban

UNITED NATIONS: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Friday nearly 800 million people are chronically undernourished as a direct consequence of land degradation, declining soil, fertility, unsustainable water use, drought and biodiversity loss, requiring long-term solutions to help communities increase resilience to climate change,.

“The livelihoods and well-being of hundreds of millions of people are at stake,” the secretary-general said in his message to mark the World Day to Fight Desertification, whose theme this year is ‘Protect Earth. Restore land. Engage people”, according to a press release.

“Over the next 25 years, land degradation could reduce global food productivity by as much as 12 per cent, leading to a 30 per cent increase in world food prices,” he added.

In his message, the secretary-general emphasised that more than 50 per cent of agricultural land is moderately or severely degraded, with 12 million hectares lost to production each year.

“Desertification, land degradation, drought and climate change are interconnected. As a result of land degradation and climate change, the severity and frequency of droughts have been increasing, along with floods and extreme temperatures,” he said.

The secretary-general emphasised that without a long-term solution, desertification and land degradation will not only affect food supply but lead to increased migration and threaten the stability of many nations and regions.

“This is why world leaders made land degradation neutrality one of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs]. That means rehabilitating at least 12 million hectares of degraded land a year.”

In another message to mark the day, Irina Bokova, the Director-General of Unesco, underscored that desertification is a threat to both arid and non-arid regions, where land over-exploitation, including intensive farming, forest exploitation for fuel and timber and overgrazing have turned fertile soils into sterile land.