With its central theme, “Addressing land degradation across landholding scales”, this edition of The State of Food and Agriculture contributes to the knowledge needed to achieve multiple SDGs and their targets.
Chapter 2 documents the challenges to agricultural production and food security posed by cropland degradation, establishing a causal link between long-term land degradation and crop yield loss globally. It identifies vulnerability hotspots where yield losses driven by degradation and pervasive yield gaps overlap with population density, food insecurity and poverty.142 By highlighting distinct historical agricultural intensification patterns that have led to long-term accumulation of cropland degradation and sometimes abandonment and extensification, it establishes a basis for identifying policy entry points to decrease pressures on land while ensuring progress towards multiple SDG targets.
Chapter 3 provides an overview of the global distribution of farms, farm sizes and food production. Understanding the distribution of farm types operating croplands is critical to designing policies for sustainable agrifood systems transformation.143, 144 Production structures and incentives of large-scale farms are fundamentally different from those of smaller farms; farms of different sizes interact in complex ways. Combined with the dynamic nature of change in farm size, effective policy design relies on up-to-date information on global farm size distributions. Chapter 3 provides this information, expanding and improving on previous literature using novel data and methodological advancements.
Chapter 3 also provides an up-to-date assessment of the global diversity of agricultural production systems. It documents their contribution to the global production of crops that provide essential dietary energy and macronutrients; this is a first step in identifying policy entry points for safeguarding production and diversity.30, 144, 145 Based on an understanding of who produces what and where, it connects landholding scales to differentiated exposure to global challenges including land degradation, yield gaps and climate change.
Chapter 4 builds on the global insights from earlier chapters by exploring how policies can be tailored to the diverse landholding and degradation patterns documented in this report. It also outlines how different policy instruments – regulatory, incentive-based and cross-compliance approaches – can be applied to avoid, reduce and reverse land degradation, with attention to their suitability across land conditions and farm structures. The chapter draws on evidence on the impacts of more than 4 500 existing agri-environmental policies worldwide in improving the conditions of croplands, grasslands and forests.146 It highlights how, by strategically combining policy instruments and recognizing the fundamental role of economic and institutional capabilities, it is possible to address land degradation and maintain agricultural production.
