SOURCE: XinhuaNet (Chinese Media is notoriously unreliable, so read with a grain of salt).
DATE: December 5, 2017
SNIP: The ecosystem services that land provides will have to increase exponentially to sustain the planet, as agricultural production needs to increase by about 70 percent globally to feed the expected population of 9 billion in 2050.
That would mean finding an estimated 6 million hectares of land for agricultural production annually and twice the amount of water by 2050.
The painful fact is that soil degradation is increasing rapidly in spite of fast growing demand, with a quarter of the world’s land highly degraded…more than half of all agricultural land has already degraded.
The problem could lead to the loss of two thirds of all arable land by 2025, plunging millions of farmers into poverty and igniting conflicts and migration, according to the official.