Agriculture occupies nearly 40% of Earth's land surface
Shawki Barghouti told EarthSky, Population growth has forced us to become more aware that anything we do affects the way we live and the way we interact with our environment. So whether we deal with water, whether we deal with forestry, whether we deal with agriculture, the impact on the environment is no longer an isolated event. It is part of the dynamic in which we live.
At the present time, agriculture – in the form of cropland and pasture – occupies close to 40% of the total land area on Earth.
Shawki Barghouti is an advisor to the World Bank on Agriculture and Rural Development. He spoke to us about how the way we feed ourselves is changing the Earth.
Shawki Barghouti: What we have done, we’ve gone way too far in relying on inputs in fertilizers, in machinery, in disturbing the soils, in changing the landscape of agriculture. And I think nature is not going to accept that from us. The soils are eroded. You see large tracts of land in Pakistan, in India, in the Middle East, losing their fertility because salt is crusting on the surface. So I think we have to be more aware of the interaction between our agricultural activities and how nature is going to react, not necessarily from season to season, but over the long run.
Dr. Barghouti remains optimistic that scientific knowledge can help us create a better world. But he says it’s important to realize that humans, as a species, are in it together.
Shawki Barghouti: We need to think of ourselves as traveling in a boat. A hole in one place is not just suddenly only affecting that person who is sitting in that section of the boat. We are all sitting in one boat and that is Earth, and one hole in it is going to sink it. So whether the damage is in Amazonia, whether it is in the Middle East, we are all affected.
More from Shawki Barghouti:
I think we are now more aware of what is happening as a result of human activities because population growth has forced us to become more aware that anything we do is part of the dynamics that are affecting the way we live and the way we interact with our environment. So whether we deal with water, whether we deal with forestry, whether we deal with agriculture, the impact on the environment is no longer an isolated event; it is part of the dynamics in which we live.
Our thanks to:
Dr. Shawki M. Barghouti
Advisor
Agriculture and Rural Development Dept.
World Bank
Washington D.C.
