Land is crucial. In the top few centimetres, most of the interchanges between water, nutrients, minerals and life takes place. This shallow meeting place between soil and atmosphere is where plants thrive and where a balance is maintained between incoming and outgoing energy and between water received and lost.

Degradation

Land degradation is a general word to describe the deterioration of land by encroachment of desert sands, deforestation, increased soil erosion, water logging, and salinisation of productive land. At least six million hectares of valuable crop land is irreversibly lost each year in these ways.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation calculates that developing countries will lose over 500 million hectares of rainfed cropland because of erosion and degradation. This is more than twice the area now planted to rice and wheat in the developing countries. This is three times the size of the USA. And these figures do not account for the degradation taking place in Northern countries, like the Netherlands and the USA.