REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA -- Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon has urged the world community to overcome the degradation of land and immediately better-manage fertile lands to assure secure food supplies in the future.
"Land degradation weakens the human right to food," Ban Ki-moon said in a statement received by Antara here Saturday.
He noted that nearly 1 billion people worldwide currently lack adequate nutrition, and those living in degraded areas suffer the most severe impact.
That situation, he said, could be compounded if degraded land reduces global food production by 12 percent by 2035. It also could be responsible for decreases in water resources.
"Within 10 years, two out of three people in the world could lack water," he said.
The UN secretary general also noted that land degradation and improper land use results in increasing greenhouse gas effects.
Climate change and unsustainable land use, particularly in agriculture, contributes to the decrease of water resources in all regions of the world, projecting global food production would decline by 2 percent every decade.
To that end, he said, the world must also change its direction and begin securing every hectare of land that can be used to provide food and fresh water.
"We must avoid degrading more land and, at the same time, rehabilitate all degraded land as best we can," Ban Ki-moon said.
Earlier, Agrarian and Spatial Planning Minister Ferry Musyidan Baldan prepared a regulation to carry out preventive measures in tackling the burning of land by companies.
"If there is a company that has 40,000 hectares of land and they burn 15,000 hectares, then the burned land will be confiscated by the government," Baldan said recently.
Meanwhile, Head of Disaster Study Center of Bogor Agricultural Institute (IPB) Prof Euis Sunarti mentioned recently that the conversion of agricultural land triggers natural disasters, causing losses in the community.
"The transformation of agricultural land is related to disasters. Annexation of agricultural land is a disaster, itself," she said.
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