“Erosion rates from ploughed fields average 10-100 times greater than rates of soil formation and nearly 33 per cent of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion or pollution in the last 40 years," Duncan Cameron, a professor of plant and soil biology at the University, said commenting on the report.
The research urged governments and non-governmental organizations all over the world to take prompt and effective action to curb soil degradation amid increasing world’s demand for food due to growing population.
According to the report, only excessive use of fertilizers maintains current crop productions, consuming high energy inputs that spend 5 percent of the global natural gas production and 2 percent of the global annual energy supply.
