UN food chief: Zero crops left in poorest regions – BBC News

Droughts and floods have become so common in the poorest parts of the world that the land can no longer sustain crops, says the director of the World Food Programme's global office.

Martin Frick told the BBC that some of the most deprived areas are now reaching a tipping point with “zero” crops left, as extreme weather pushes already depleted land out of use.

As a result, parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America are now dependent on humanitarian aid, he said.

Mr. Frick warned that without efforts to halt global land degradation, rich countries would also begin to suffer crop failures.

The Global Environment Facility estimates that 95% of the world's land could be degraded by 2050. The UN says that 40% are already degraded.

When soil degrades, the organic matter that makes it fertile disappears, EU scientists This force means that it is less able to support plant life – reducing crop yields – and absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

Soil is the second largest carbon sink after the ocean, and is Recognized by the United Nations as a key tool for climate change mitigation.

“There is too much carbon in the air and too little carbon in the soil,” Mr Frick said. “With every inch of soil you're growing, you're removing a huge amount of carbon from the atmosphere.

“So healthy soils — carbon-rich soils — are prerequisites for fixing climate change.”

The removal of organic matter from the soil can lead to land degradation by modern agricultural techniques, but also to prolonged droughts with sudden, extreme rainfall.

Many extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense as a result of climate change, scientists say.

While it's difficult to link climate change to specific droughts, scientists say global warming has made certain ones, like the recent one in East Africa, more likely.

Mr Frick said that in Burundi, in East Africa, months of heavy rains and flooding had damaged 10% of his farmland, making it unusable for the upcoming harvest season.

He pointed A UN reportreleased in March, found that grain harvests in Sudan's Darfur region were on average 78% lower than in the previous five years amid civil war and drought.

Meanwhile, flash floods in Afghanistan earlier this year are estimated to have destroyed 24,000 hectares of land already considered highly degraded.

Environmentalists expect that as soils degrade, crop failures will put pressure on global food supplies and increase migration from affected areas.

“It's going to be a disaster for people,” said Praveena Sridhar, chief science officer at the environmental group Save Soil. “It's going to be like Mad Max.”

He added: “There will be no humanity. There will be no charity. There will be no justification… The only thing that allows you to be will be survival.”

Mr Frick said that, as a father of three, he was “not a fan of doomsday scenarios”, but admitted that “what we are seeing is most worrying”.

But he argued that such incidents could be avoided by moving towards local agriculture to revitalize the land.

The head of the food agency said there is currently an “unhealthy dependence” on crops such as wheat, corn and rice, and some countries that are large exporters of them – creating food shortages that particularly affect the developing world when those countries' crops are disrupted.

Mr Frick said that to tackle hunger and land degradation simultaneously, the world's poorest should be encouraged to regenerate degraded land through regenerative practices – including making it eligible for funding from carbon credit schemes.

She cites a WFP project in Niger where local women built micro-dams on dry land to slow down water, then used dung and straw to create a basin in which trees could be planted. Trees provide shade from the sun, allowing women to grow fruits and vegetables.

“Suddenly, within three to five years, the area that was really desert reverts to agricultural production land without artificial irrigation,” he said.

“They don't have to worry about inflation because they can replace what they would otherwise have to buy in their own gardens. And a community garden in Bristol could do exactly the same.”

But Ms Sridar said the longer it takes to implement such regenerative farming techniques, the harder it will be to restore lost soil biodiversity – making people increasingly vulnerable to shocks to food supplies.

At a UN conference in 2015, it was suggested that there are only 60 crops left before the soil is too degraded to support sustainable crops – although experts dispute the strict estimate because degradation rates and soil conditions differ around the world.

Mr Frick said: “How much crop you have left is essentially a function of… how we grow our food in line with the realities of this planet.”