Soil Degradation Is Undermining Food Security In The Caribbean

Soil Degradation Is Undermining Food Security In The Caribbean

Share to Linkedin Curbing soil degradation is critical to the food security and ecological sustainability of the Caribbean— yet unsustainable land management practices, coupled with the pressures of climate change continue to impact soil health and threaten to rob the region of its prospects for a food secure future. According to a 2018 report from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) 30% of degraded land in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) worldwide and more than 14% of the two billion hectares of degraded land in the world can be found in the Caribbean region. The primary cause of soil degradation in the arid, semi-arid, sub-humid and dry regions of the Latin America and Caribbean region is desertification, the process by which fertile land becomes desert, typically due to drought, deforestation, or inappropriate agriculture, which affects 35% of the Caribbean region's surface area. (Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), 2020) Soil is quite literally at the root of food production and according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), soil degradation is one of the primary causes of declining agricultural productivity. The impact of human actions and climate change on soil health has direct implications on arable land,