Agriculture is a vital part of human development. However, global warming is impacting crop yields, and land conversion for food production is one of the most important drivers of nature loss. Smart planning, adaptation, and optimisation of agricultural practices are therefore crucial to ensuring a sustainable future for both people and the planet.
Which crops are grown where depends on many environmental, historical, socio-economic, cultural and technological factors, including the areas of origin of crop species, climatic, topographic, and soil conditions, access to fertilizers and irrigation, and human migrations and trade. But to what extent are agricultural systems and crop distributions optimised around the world?
A new studyled by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, with the participation of experts at UNEP-WCMC, has analysed the relationship between the global distribution of major food crops and the climate suitability of where they are grown to ensure good yields.
The analysis focused on twelve of the most important global crops: maize, rice, barley, cassava, peanut, wheat, sunflower, sugar beet, soybean, sorghum, potato, and rapeseed. Combining a wide range of environmental, agricultural, and socio-economic data with a statistical modelling framework, they compared the distribution and yield of each of these crops across different climatic conditions.
Overall, crop distribution matches climate suitability for good crop yield across high-income world regions, although the relationship between the locations where each crop species is grown and the suitability of these locations to maximise their production is tremendously variable. Mismatches arise across large areas, especially in low-income regions. The analysis shows regions where climatic suitability is high for productivity, but small fractions of the land are cultivated. In these areas, the sustainable expansion of certain crops could result in an increase in their harvests at a global level. On the other hand, it also identifies cases where the number of hectares harvested is disproportionately large in relation to the climatic suitability of the site for that crop, and therefore changes in agricultural planning could result in increased and more sustainable production.
Click here to see more...