A staggering 1.7 billion people worldwide are living in areas where agricultural productivity is declining due to human-caused land degradation, according to a new report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) 2025 report, unveiled at FAO headquarters in Rome, describes land degradation as a "pervasive and silent crisis" that is undermining farming productivity and threatening ecosystem health across the globe.
Report estimates that due to land degradation, crop yields in affected areas are about 10 percent lower due to human-induced land degradation. Of the 1.7 billion affected population, 47 million are children under the age of five suffering from stunting and malnutrition.
A Crisis Beyond the Environment
The report makes clear that land degradation extends far beyond environmental concerns, directly impacting agricultural output, rural livelihoods, and food security for billions of people.
Asian countries face the most severe impact in absolute numbers, both due to accumulated degradation and high population densities. The report represents the most comprehensive analysis to date examining how human-driven land degradation affects crop yields globally.
Understanding the Problem
FAO defines land degradation as a long-term decline in land's capacity to provide essential ecosystem functions and services. The phenomenon typically results from multiple factors, including natural processes like soil erosion and salinization, combined with increasingly dominant human pressures.
The report employs a debt-based approach to measure degradation, comparing current conditions of soil organic carbon, soil erosion, and soil water against what would exist without human interference. A machine-learning model integrates environmental and socio-economic factors to estimate baseline conditions.
A Path Forward
Despite the sobering statistics, SOFA 2025 offers an optimistic outlook: reversing just 10 percent of human-induced degradation on existing croplands could restore enough agricultural production to feed an additional 154 million people annually.
Such restoration could be achieved through sustainable land management practices including crop rotations, cover cropping to preserve soil health, erosion reduction measures, and biodiversity conservation efforts.
The report outlines actionable opportunities for integrated sustainable land-use and management practices, alongside tailored policies. These measures aim to avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation while improving food production and farmers livelihood.
"To seize these opportunities, we must act decisively. Sustainable land management requires enabling environments that support long-term investment, innovation and stewardship," FAO Director-General QU Dongyu wrote in the report's foreword.
Tailored Solutions
The report emphasizes that while land degradation affects farms of all sizes, policy interventions must be customized to address specific farm structures. Smallholder farmers face distinct financial constraints compared to larger operations, which manage most agricultural land and possess greater capacity for implementing large-scale solutions.
SOFA 2025 calls for integrated land-use strategies and policy interventions - including regulatory measures like deforestation controls, incentive-based programs, and cross-compliance mechanisms that link subsidies to environmental outcomes.