Soils, Land and Food: Managing the Land During the Twenty-First Century

A major challenge of the twenty-first century is to ensure sufficient global food production to cope with the burgeoning world population. This book follows the development of techniques of land management and discusses reasons why some agricultural projects have succeeded while others have failed. Alan Wild shows how surveying and protecting soils before new land is brought into cultivation, raising soil fertility, increasing inputs, and improving economic conditions all help to increase food production. He emphasizes the need for both economic change and technological intervention in developing countries where, in many cases, food production will need to more than double in the next fifty years.