04 Jul Strategies for Mitigating and Reversing Soil Degradation: Role of Agroforestry
मृदा खराब होने की अवस्था को धीमा करने तथा पलटनेे की रणनीतियॉं: एग्रोफोरेस्ट्री की भूमिका Soil degradation implies decline in the quality and capacity of soil through natural or anthropogenic perturbations. Degradation processes include erosion, compaction and hard setting, acidification, declining soil organic matter (SOM), soil fertility depletion, biological degradation, and soil pollution. Soils are the basis for more than 90% of worldwide food production. However, about 25% of the world’s arable land is degraded. Without fertile soils, world food security is at risk. Very limited degree of agriculturally usable soil (about 12% of the total land area) is available on the earth’s surface. The degraded soils cannot be restored within a human generation. The formation of an inch-thick (2.5 cm) layer of fertile humus soil takes approximately 500 years. With increasing population growth, the amount of agriculturally usable land especially available to us per capita is continually dropping. Agroforestry is a collective name for land-use systems and technologies where woody perennials (trees, shrubs, palms, bamboos, etc.) are deliberately used on the same land management units as agricultural crops and/or animals, in some form of spatial arrangement or temporal sequence. In agroforestry systems there are both ecological and economical interactions between the different components. As soil resources are essentially non-renewable, it is necessary to adopt a...