This could mean less fish in the sea for food and
less arable land for crops, as well as many more conflicts in the world to control dwindling resources.
At the conclusion of their book, For the Common Good, Herman Daly and John B. Cobb Jr. find hope in thinking that «on a hotter planet, with lost deltas and shrunken coastlines, under a more dangerous sun, with
less arable land, more people, fewer species of living things, a legacy of poisonous wastes, and much beauty irrevocably lost, there will still be the possibility that our children's children will learn at last to live as a community among communities.»
«This forecast is in line with medium - term supply demand fundamentals including the transition to more balanced diets, urbanization and a push to increase crop yields due to
less arable land,» TD economist Sonya Gulati said.
Not exact matches
Fisheries are crashing, deforestation is causing a whole complex of problems, the weather is becoming
less favorable because of global warming, fresh water is becoming scarce, species are disappering,
arable land is deteriorating.
The need to produce more agricultural products with
less water and
arable land will tempt a modernizing China to engage in crash programs of high tech farming that will prove radically unsustainable.
In a European context, the labour input is higher on organic
arable and mixed farms, while organic dairy farms use the same amount of labour, or
less, than comparable conventional farms.
Less than half of the global 18 million hectares of certified organic land is dedicated to
arable agriculture.
With
less than 2 % of European
arable land currently used to grow grain legumes, Reckling and co-workers created a model to determine the effects of integrating legumes into cropping systems.
«The average efficiency of livestock converting plant feed to meat is
less than 3 %, and as we eat more meat, more
arable cultivation is turned over to producing feedstock for animals that provide meat for humans.
The need is dire: Dependence on wood for cooking and heating has reduced the amount of forest cover from a healthy 25 percent at the beginning of the 1900s to
less than 8 percent today, causing flooding, erosion, and landslides that have destroyed homes and
arable land.
Critics of organic agriculture argue that society can not justify being
less efficient with
arable land in the face of a rapidly growing human population.
Bailey said that Brazil's biofuel programme would be
less controversial than America's, as the price of sugarcane is not strongly correlated to the world prices of staple foods and Brazil had extensive
arable land not being used to full capacity.
To take just one fairly representative example, in the classic Rothampstead experiments in England where
arable land was allowed to revert to deciduous temperate woodland, soil organic carbon increased 300 - 400 % from around 20 t / ha to 60 - 80 t / ha (or about 20 - 40 tons per acre) in
less than a century (Jenkinson & Rayner 1977).