There is only so much land: Land is a finite resource. The amount of land on Earth does not grow, but the number of people who need feeding does.
The points to remember
- About 70% of the world's ice-free land is already used for farming and forestry.
- About half of all habitable land is farmed.
- Only about one-eighth of the land surface grows crops; most farmland is grazing.
- The rest is forest, shrubs, wild grassland, towns, lakes and rivers.
- So new farmland can only come from natural ecosystems or from other uses.
Example (SL): Bangladesh. About 170 million people live in a country a little larger than England. About 1,150 people share each square kilometre, and most of the flat, fertile land of the river delta is already farmed, so there is almost no spare land for new fields.
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Not every piece of land can grow arable crops. Where crops fail, people usually keep livestock instead, because animals can eat grass on land that cannot be ploughed.
The points to remember
- Too steep: machines cannot work, and ploughed slopes lose their soil to erosion.
- Too nutrient-poor or thin: the soil cannot feed a crop.
- Too dry: no crops without water for irrigation.
- Too cold or too high: the growing season is too short.
- Waterlogged or salty: roots rot or cannot take up water.
- This land is often used for livestock, which graze it.
Remember it as: Steep, poor, dry, cold: graze it, don't plough it.
Example (SL): the Scottish Highlands. The hills are steep, wet and cold, and the soils are thin and acid. Very little of the land can be ploughed, so most of it is rough grazing for sheep and red deer, and crops are grown only on the flatter land of the east coast.
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The world's population passed 8 billion in 2022 and is still growing. Every extra person needs food from a fixed amount of land.
The points to remember
- The population is expected to reach about 9.7 billion by 2050.
- Farmland per person has halved: about 0.37 hectares in 1961, under 0.2 now.
- Extra food comes from higher yields on the same land, or from new farmland.
- New cropland is usually taken from pasture, grassland or forest.
- Towns and roads also spread onto good farmland, so some is lost.
Example (SL): Brazil's Cerrado. About half of the natural savanna of the Cerrado has been cleared since the 1970s, much of it for soya fields and cattle pasture, to feed people in Brazil and abroad.
Most farmland feeds animals, not people directly. Livestock and the crops grown to feed them use about three-quarters of the world's farmland, but give much less of its food.
The points to remember
- Livestock's biomass is far bigger than wild mammals'.
- More meat is eaten as incomes rise and countries develop.
- Breeding and technology (feed, vaccines) make animals grow faster.
- Farmers invest in livestock: it is a big source of income.
- Wild habitat is turned into pasture, and wild animals are hunted.
- Population growth on its own is not a reason: say how it raises demand for meat.
Example (SL): China. As incomes rose, the meat eaten per person in China grew from about 15 kg a year in 1980 to over 60 kg today. Pig farms grew, and so did the land used to grow their feed, much of it soya bought from Brazil.
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How this comes up: Paper 1 gives a chart or a fact file about land and people and asks you to identify [1] or outline [2]; Paper 2 can ask why land for crops is limited.
The fact file describes land and people in Egypt.
Outline two reasons why it is becoming harder for Egypt to feed its population from its own land.
Model answer plan
See the mark-by-mark plan — for / against / judgement, with marking guidance — in study mode.