Land is the foundation of our global agrifood systems, supporting over 95 percent of food production while providing essential ecosystem services that sustain life on Earth. As a finite resource, it faces unprecedented pressures from competing demands including urban expansion, biofuel production, and changing consumption patterns driven by rising incomes and shifting diets. This critical resource underpins not only food security but also biodiversity conservation, climate regulation and the livelihoods of 892 million agricultural workers globally.
The expansion of agriculture has fundamentally transformed land-use patterns across the planet over the centuries. In the twenty-first century, between 2001 and 2023, global agricultural area decreased by 78 million hectares (Mha) (−2 percent), with cropland area increasing by 78 Mha and permanent meadows and pastures decreasing by 151 Mha.
These changes exhibit significant regional variations. Sub-Saharan Africa witnessed cropland expansion of 69 Mha accompanied by 72 Mha of forest loss, while Latin America saw 25 Mha of cropland growth alongside 85 Mha of deforestation. Agricultural expansion remains the primary driver of global deforestation, accounting for nearly 90 percent of forest loss. In this century, another important aspect to consider is that approximately 3.6 Mha of croplands are abandoned annually, with land degradation likely playing a significant role in these losses.
Human-induced land degradation represents a growing threat to agricultural productivity and food security. This long-term decline in land’s capacity to provide essential ecosystem functions results from complex interactions between environmental pressures and human activities including deforestation, overgrazing, and unsustainable farming practices leading to nutrient depletion and salinization. Today, this degradation manifests across all agricultural landscapes, creating a spectrum of impacts from subtle productivity declines to complete agricultural abandonment.
This troubling pattern unfolds within a wider context of systemic strain on agricultural production systems. Despite remarkable productivity gains that have quadrupled global agricultural output since 1961 with limited land expansion, worrying trends have emerged. Total factor productivity growth, which reflects technological advancement and efficiency improvements, has declined since the 2000s, particularly in the Global South where some countries show negative growth rates. This decline, coupled with persistent yield gaps between potential and actual production, threatens future food security and may drive further agricultural expansion into fragile ecosystems.
The international community has recognized land degradation as a critical challenge, with over 130 countries committing to Land Degradation Neutrality under the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Achieving this goal requires balancing degradation with restoration to maintain the total stock of healthy land. However, although restoration investments offer returns far exceeding costs, most benefits accrue to wider society well into the future, while costs fall on individual landholders today. This creates a misalignment between private incentives and public goods that necessitates supportive policies and public investment.
Land-use decisions emerge from a complex web of drivers operating at global, national and local levels. Global markets and trade allow countries to draw on resources from exporting nations while transmitting consumption impacts across borders. At national level, policies, infrastructure and institutions shape the context within which farmers operate, while local decisions reflect farmers’ available resources including land size, capital, tenure, and access to inputs and information.
The heterogeneity in land management affects degradation of croplands in major ways. This matters for food security because croplands produce the vast majority of global calories and proteins. However, understanding the true impact of land degradation on food production requires sophisticated analysis. This report presents new evidence establishing a causal relationship between historical land degradation and current yield losses on croplands, isolating the specific impacts of degradation from other factors affecting agricultural productivity.
The human toll of land degradation on croplands is sobering: approximately 1.7 billion people worldwide live in areas experiencing yield gaps linked to human-induced land degradation. The largest affected populations reside in Eastern and Southern Asia regions that have accumulated a substantial degradation debt and also have high population densities. Remarkably, reversing just 10 percent of human-induced degradation on current croplands could restore production sufficient to feed an additional 154 million people annually. However, these figures represent only a fraction of the true cost. First, these estimates overlook the role of degradation in land abandonment. Research suggests that restoring abandoned croplands to productive use could potentially feed between 292 and 476 million people. Second, the estimates exclude impacts on pasturelands and the broader ecosystem services that benefit society at large, making land degradation a challenge requiring collective action for the provision of these public goods.
The relationship between land degradation and agricultural productivity varies dramatically across regions and income levels. In high-income countries with intensive agricultural systems, the per hectare production losses from degradation are particularly severe, though often masked by heavy application of synthetic fertilizers and other inputs. This compensatory strategy creates a troubling paradox: while maintaining high yields in the short term, it generates diminishing returns, increases production costs, and often exacerbates the underlying degradation through soil acidification, nutrient imbalances and pollution. Furthermore, threshold effects associated with land degradation may lead to land abandonment in areas with a long history of intensive agricultural systems.
In stark contrast, most of sub-Saharan Africa exhibits relatively low degradation-induced yield losses, not because soils are healthier, but because other constraints – including limited access to inputs, mechanization, credit and markets – dominate as causes of yield gaps. This finding carries crucial policy implications: while avoiding land degradation remains important, addressing these constraints would have more immediate impact on closing yield gaps in these regions. However, this must be done carefully to avoid repeating the unsustainable intensification pathways that have led to costly degradation in today’s high-input agricultural systems.
The convergence of land degradation, poverty and food insecurity creates particularly concerning vulnerability hotspots. Analysis reveals that the most severe overlaps occur in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where degraded lands coincide with high poverty rates and childhood stunting. Overall, 47 million children under five years of age suffering from stunting live in hotspots where stunting overlaps with significant yield losses from land degradation. These hotspots represent a convergence of environmental degradation and human deprivation that demands urgent and targeted responses.
The path forward requires navigation of complex trade-offs between agricultural intensification and environmental sustainability. Historical debates between land sparing (intensive agriculture on smaller areas) and land sharing (wildlife-friendly farming over larger areas) have evolved towards recognition that both approaches have merit depending on context. Recent research demonstrates that improved crop technologies actually reduced global cropland by 16 Mha between 1961 and 2015 – challenging narratives about the negative environmental impacts of intensification. The most promising solutions combine strategies that enhance productivity while maintaining ecological integrity, requiring careful policy design that aligns economic incentives with environmental goals.
Beyond croplands, degradation affects all agricultural systems, undermining livestock production in rangelands and – through forest loss driven by agricultural expansion – disrupting climate patterns and biodiversity. The interconnectedness of these systems means degradation in one area cascades into other areas, creating feedback loops that amplify impacts. Nearly 90 percent of global deforestation stems from agriculture, with cropland expansion and pasture creation the primary drivers, highlighting the urgent need for integrated landscape management approaches.
The findings underscore that land degradation is not an inevitable consequence of agriculture but rather the result of specific management choices and policy failures. Addressing this requires recognizing the challenges farms face in tackling land degradation and food security, and the underlying drivers. Both the incentive and the ability to invest in reducing, reversing and restoring degradation on croplands – while improving productivity – can differ significantly depending on farm size, land conditions and socioeconomic factors.
Farm size, while not the only factor influencing land management and food production, shapes all other determinants in important ways. Larger farms often have more resources to invest in advanced technologies that optimize input use and productivity – but which can exacerbate land degradation. However, these farms may also have greater incentives to maintain land quality, if it is clearly linked to long-term profitability. Conversely, smaller farms often contend with more vulnerable land conditions, and struggle with limited resources and multiple market constraints. Understanding these dynamics is essential for designing effective policies that enable all farmers to contribute to both food security and environmental sustainability, ensuring that the land that feeds us today remains productive for generations to come.
Of the world’s roughly 570 million farms, 85 percent are smaller than 2 ha yet cultivate only 9 percent of farmland, while the 0.1 percent exceeding 1 000 ha command about half of all agricultural land – a disparity that shapes strategies for land degradation control, food security and long-term resource governance. Regional patterns deepen the contrast: Latin America and the Caribbean host just 3 percent of farms because holdings are generally large; in Asia and Africa, smallholders dominate numerically, but farms of 2 to 50 ha work around half the farmland; and in Europe, the Americas and Oceania, farms exceeding 1 000 ha control the greater part of farmland.
Despite facing persistent constraints including limited access to land, credit, inputs, technology and markets, the world’s 500 million smallholders make remarkable contributions to global food supply. The crops produced by these farmers contribute approximately 16 percent of global dietary energy, 12 percent of proteins, and 9 percent of fats derived from crops. Their contribution is particularly significant for certain crop types: farms smaller than 5 ha produce almost 50 percent of global stimulants, spices and aromatic crops, while contributing between 20 and 30 percent of cereals, fruits and vegetables. This production profile reflects not only their importance to local agrifood systems and dietary diversity but also their role in high-value crops that can enhance rural livelihoods.
The dominance of large-scale operations in globally traded commodities underscores their outsized influence on food availability and their critical responsibility for sustainable land management. Large farms, particularly those exceeding 50 ha, dominate global production of cereals, pulses, sugars and oil crops – commodities that form the backbone of international trade and urban food systems. These operations produce more than 55 percent of global crop-derived nutrients, with the largest category (>1 000 ha) accounting for nearly one-sixth of global food energy from crops. This concentration is most extreme in Northern America, where these mega-farms produce almost half of the region’s crop-derived dietary energy, driven primarily by industrial agriculture in the United States of America.
Farm size patterns are evolving differently across regions, defying simple narratives of consolidation. While average farm sizes have increased in Latin America, Europe and Central Asia over the past two decades, they have decreased in most of Asia and continue to shrink in sub-Saharan Africa. High-income countries show increasing polarization, with both mean and median farm sizes growing but the gap between them widening, indicating greater inequality. In Africa, the persistence of very small farms combined with poor soil fertility creates a double poverty trap: farmers can neither produce enough for household needs nor invest in restoring soil productivity, perpetuating cycles of degradation and food insecurity.
The intersection of farm size with land degradation reveals complex patterns requiring nuanced policy responses. All farm sizes face similar levels of accumulated soil organic carbon debt, yet the impacts and response capacities vary dramatically. Large farms in intensively cultivated regions of Europe and Northern America show the strongest causal relationship between historical degradation and current yield losses; the extent of land degradation is masked by heavy input use that maintains productivity at increasing economic and environmental cost. Conversely, smallholder-dominated regions in sub-Saharan Africa exhibit large yield gaps driven more by resource constraints than by degradation per se; still, degraded soils may respond poorly to inputs when they do become available.
Climate change adds another layer of complexity to these challenges, with differential impacts across farm scales. Under projected warming scenarios, smallholder farms in tropical regions will face disproportionate exposure to heat stress, dry spells and extreme precipitation events. Medium-sized farms may experience the highest exposure to combined stressors, while large farms in temperate regions might benefit from reduced frost days.
Moving forward, policies must navigate the tension between supporting smallholder livelihoods and addressing the global environmental impacts of large-scale agriculture. With large farms controlling most agricultural land, they bear primary responsibility for implementing sustainable land management at scale. Yet the sheer number of smallholders and their vulnerability to both degradation and climate change demand targeted interventions that enhance productivity without repeating the unsustainable intensification pathways observed in high-income countries.
Success requires recognizing farms of all sizes as complementary components of agrifood systems, each facing distinct challenges and opportunities in the quest for land degradation neutrality and food security. Only through differentiated approaches that account for scale-specific constraints and potentials can agriculture meet growing food demands while preserving the land resources upon which future generations depend.
Addressing land degradation requires recognizing that it is not an inevitable consequence of agriculture. With thoughtful stewardship and regenerative approaches, farming can become a force for avoiding, reducing and reversing degradation while maintaining productivity. Tenure security emerges as a fundamental enabler of sustainable land management.
Secure land rights reduce uncertainty and encourage long-term investments in soil conservation and productivity improvements. However, significant gender inequalities persist, with women in 43 out of 49 countries with available data less likely than men to own or have secure rights to agricultural land. When women do have secure land rights, evidence shows increased investment in soil conservation, greater crop diversity and improved household food security, highlighting the critical importance of addressing these disparities.
Enabling environments are the foundation of sustainable land management, not guarantees. Secure and enforceable land tenure, along with transparent and well-functioning land markets, empower land users to make long-term investments in land quality, adopt sustainable practices, and access credit, insurance, and extension services. However, enabling environments alone are not sufficient. Land degradation persists even in contexts with strong enabling environments, underscoring that the alignment of private incentives with public benefits is not automatic.
A range of policy instruments exist, each with distinct strengths, limitations and implementation requirements. Policies are categorized into three broad types – regulatory, incentive-based and cross-compliance (or conditionality).
- Regulatory policies are often the most direct means of addressing land degradation. These include land-use zoning, deforestation bans, and soil conservation mandates. While effective in setting clear behavioural expectations, regulations can be costly to enforce, particularly in areas with many smallholders. Moreover, if poorly designed, they may create perverse incentives, such as regulatory avoidance by fragmenting landholdings.
- Incentive-based policies – such as payments for ecosystem services – offer financial or market-based rewards for sustainable practices. Such schemes are typically voluntary and flexible, making them attractive to land users. However, they often entail high transaction and monitoring costs, and their effectiveness depends on the level of compensation and the ease of participation. Larger farms may find it easier to engage with incentive-based schemes due to economies of scale, while smallholders may require additional support to overcome administrative and financial barriers.
- Cross-compliance policies link government payments to adherence to environmental standards. Widely adopted in high-income countries, conditionality ensures that public funding supports responsible land stewardship. Its success depends on the balance between compliance costs and the value of financial incentives provided, as well as the robustness of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms.
Since the twentieth century, countries have implemented an expanding portfolio of policy approaches related to agriculture, land use and the environment. A notable surge in public policy adoption occurred after 2000. Regulatory instruments have formed the backbone of these efforts, typically preceding the introduction of incentive-based approaches and cross-compliance policies. Over time, the policy landscape has evolved from a predominantly regulatory focus to a more diversified mix that increasingly incorporates both incentive-based mechanisms and cross-compliance schemes.
The ongoing United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration has increased awareness of the public good nature of actions to address land degradation and provided impetus to governments around the world to pledge sizeable investments to accelerate progress towards land degradation neutrality. The growing commitments have contributed to the diversification of policy instruments supporting sustainable land use and management. Despite the increasing adoption of agri-environmental policies globally, their distribution remains highly uneven across regions. A significant concentration is observed in high-income countries. In contrast, low-income countries have implemented fewer agri-environmental measures, highlighting a disparity in priorities and resources that could be allocated to incentive-based schemes.
Given resource constraints, matching interventions to land condition and farm structure is key. Land degradation is not uniform. Even within a single farm, land parcels may vary in condition, requiring differentiated responses. The “avoid > reduce > reverse” hierarchy promoted by the UNCCD as a strategic framework for intervention is a useful way of approaching the challenges of land degradation. The main premise is to pre-emptively avoid degradation on healthy, productive lands, reduce degradation, halting its progression through improved land management practices, and finally, reverse degradation on severely degraded land, which often requires transformative measures such as change in land use, ecological restoration, and long-term investment.
The choice of intervention must reflect both the severity of degradation and the potential for recovery. For example, lands operating near their biophysical yield potential may respond well to incremental improvements, while severely degraded or abandoned lands may require complete shifts in land use.
In terms of impacts on land degradation, land-use regulations consistently emerge as effective instruments for improving land conditions. Agri-environmental payments also show positive impacts, though with greater variability. They are particularly effective in forest conservation and contribute to improved cropland conditions globally. Overall, approaches that combine regulatory and incentive-based instruments offer strong potential to improve land conditions. Their effectiveness depends on careful tailoring to land cover types and local contexts. In croplands, for example, regulations can be complemented by payments supporting biodiversity in non-productive landscape features such as hedgerows. Ultimately, a context-specific approach that strategically combines policy instruments while considering economic and institutional capabilities is crucial for achieving meaningful improvements in land conditions worldwide.
The way forward. The evidence presented in this report underscores the urgency of reversing land degradation to safeguard food security, sustain livelihoods and preserve the ecological functions that underpin agrifood systems. Yet, the path forward must be as diverse and dynamic as the landscapes and land users it seeks to support.
Align global and local action. Land degradation must be understood within the broader context of land-use decisions – shaped by local choices and global drivers such as trade, climate change and demographic transitions. Farmers, as private actors, make decisions primarily based on productivity and profitability. This means that efforts to promote sustainable land management must consider the economic realities they face – including the time, labour and financial costs of implementation – and ensure that these do not outweigh the expected benefits. Land degradation intersects with climate change and biodiversity loss, making it central to the Rio Conventions (UNCCD, UNFCCC, CBD). Translating global commitments into local action requires institutional coherence, political will, and long-term financing.
Recognize the diversity of land users. The diversity of farm sizes and structures must be embraced as a central axis of policy design. Smallholder farmers, who often operate under resource constraints and on marginal lands, need targeted support to sustainably intensify production. Closing yield gaps without further degrading land calls for access to appropriate technologies and extension services, secure land tenure, and inclusive financing mechanisms. In places where accumulated land degradation is not the primary constraint, strengthening enabling environments will be key to breaking path dependencies that have led to unsustainable intensification. At the other end of the spectrum, large-scale commercial farms – though fewer in number – manage most of the world’s agricultural land and have a disproportionate impact on land systems. These farms must play a leading role in achieving land degradation neutrality by complying with environmental regulations, adopting sustainable land management practices, and participating in incentive schemes that reward ecosystem stewardship.
Differentiate restoration strategies. Severely degraded areas may require transformative interventions, including land-use change or long-term fallowing, while land in agricultural production can benefit from improved management practices that enhance productivity and resilience. This calls for a nuanced policy mix that combines regulatory frameworks with incentive-based mechanisms, underpinned by robust monitoring systems and adaptive governance. Tailoring interventions to the specific needs, capacities and responsibilities of different land users is essential for equitable and effective progress.
Strengthening land governance is critical. Well-defined tenure rights – both individual and collective – are non-negotiable for sustainable land management and livelihoods. Inclusive governance structures are also essential to manage trade-offs, which are often unavoidable in land systems. Win–win scenarios are rare; thus, enabling environments must support transparent decision-making and equitable outcomes.
Scale what works. Encouragingly, sustainable land management and land restoration efforts are already underway in many parts of the world, demonstrating that solutions exist and can be scaled. These efforts show that reversing degradation is possible when the right enabling conditions are in place. However, land degradation must still be addressed within the broader context of global sustainability goals. While land is foundational to national food security and development strategies, it is also central to the global challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. Governments and international bodies are increasingly aligning efforts; however, progress is hindered by weak implementation, limited coordination and insecure land tenure. Strengthening institutional coherence and political will is essential to translate global commitments into local action.
Investing in people, policies and practices to respond to land degradation challenges. The costs of inaction are rising, but so too is our capacity to respond. Land degradation is not an inevitable consequence of agriculture. It is the result of specific land use and management choices, policy failures and misaligned incentives. But it is also reversible. With the right mix of policies, institutions and investments, we can transform agriculture into a force for regeneration – restoring degraded lands, enhancing food security and nutrition, and securing the ecological foundations of our agrifood systems. By investing in people, policies and practices that value land, not only as a productive asset but as a cornerstone of human and planetary well-being, we can chart a path towards a more sustainable and equitable future.
