Arable land

What use for arable land?

As an indicator, the percentage of arable land in each country is not easy to handle. Some countries may interpret present and future potential, without necessarily taking into account constraints (climate, water availability, topography, soils). The most commonly overlooked fact is that increasing arable land area most often implies diminishing other natural areas, especially forests. Moreover, arable land encompasses lands used for both crops and livestock, the latter with varying degrees of biological production.

Concern over soaring oil prices increasingly raises the question of crops for biofuels, namely oil palms, sugarcane, rapeseed, beets, and grains. An ever greater number of experts express reservations that oil worries could cause an agricultural shift towards biofuel crops.

For this reason, changes in agricultural land use since the 1990s are noteworthy. In old industrialised countries, land used for crops has tended to diminish because of limited profits and overproduction, sometimes leading to policies of crop rotation. However, this attitude could reverse. The strong increase in agricultural land in the Middle East and North Africa is not necessarily sustainable, especially in view of the water supply. The drop in agriculture in densely-populated countries such as India and Bangladesh is also a cause for concern. Current debates suggest that after years of relying on food imports, national food self-sufficiency will once again become a key issue.