Emerging global trends provide new opportunities in soil and water conservation

Excerpt

Soil conservation has its roots in historical antiquity, but the institutionalization of the movement began with the major droughts and environmental devastations that occurred in the early part of the 20th century. The approaches to soil conservation that emerged from these experiences focused on prescriptive technological and engineering approaches to prevent or mitigate the impacts of soil erosion on crop yields, farmer income, and food security. However, after almost a century of soil conservation, the world has changed. Agriculture is now less natural resource based and more strongly affected by global events, production subsidies, and other safety nets. Over the past decades, new land management technologies have progressively improved crop yields, and until very recently, the accepted evidence was that food security was no longer a concern (although about 2 million people go hungry every day, due more to problems of internal security and distribution). However, events of the past year bring this into question.

Although the importance of soil conservation to national agricultural gross domestic product varies from country to country, the global importance of soil conservation and the control and mitigation of land degradation are more highly recognized now than at any time in the past. This is…