Farmers are abandoning land worldwide. What should happen to it?
By Dan Charles, Science.
Excerpt: ...“This is a worldwide phenomenon,” says Peter Verburg, a land use researcher at the Free University Amsterdam. Global trade in food has fueled the clearing of forests in Brazil and Bolivia for agriculture, but elsewhere it has sidelined small farms with rocky soil, steep hills, or scarce water. “People give up because they cannot compete,” Verburg says. ...Farmers, or their children, are walking away from land in Eastern Europe, southern France, South Korea, Japan, and mountainous parts of India. It’s difficult to measure the exact extent of the trend. Land is often abandoned, then reclaimed and farmed again. But an estimated 120 million hectares have been left fallow in Europe alone since 1990. Globally, the figure since 1950 could be as high as 400 million hectares—half the area of Australia. “Abandonment will continue, I think there’s no doubt,” Verburg says. In fact, climate change is likely to accelerate it as droughts afflict more farming areas. The phenomenon raises thorny questions that ecologists and policymakers are now debating. What sort of nature will reclaim this land? Does it add up to environmental restoration or degradation? Should policymakers step in to steer the fate of the land or even stop it from being abandoned?....