Agricultural intensification and changes in cultivated areas, 1970–2005

By T. Rudel, Laura Schneider, María Uriarte, B. L. Turner, Ruth S. DeFries, Deborah Lawrence, J. Geoghegan, S. Hecht, A. Ickowitz, Eric F. Lambin and 3 more. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009

604 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Does the intensification of agriculture reduce cultivated areas and, in so doing, spare some lands by concentrating production on other lands? Such sparing is important for many reasons, among them the enhanced abilities of released lands to sequester carbon and provide other environmental services. Difficulties measuring the extent of spared land make it impossible to investigate fully the hypothesized causal chain from agricultural intensification to declines in cultivated areas and then to increases in spared land. We analyze the historical circumstances in which rising yields have been accompanied by declines in cultivated areas, thereby leading to land-sparing. We use national-level United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization data on trends in cropland from 1970–2005, with particular emphasis on the 1990–2005 period, for 10 major crop types. Cropland has increased more slowly than population during this period, but paired increases in yields and declines in cropland occurred infrequently, both globally and nationally. Agricultural intensification was not generally accompanied by decline or stasis in cropland area at a national scale during this time period, except in countries with grain imports and conservation set-aside programs. Future projections of cropland abandonment and ensuing environmental services cannot be assumed without explicit policy intervention.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3a5cf8ce44d258388a426c4006e82bad34c9b81

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Citations in the corpus

Middle-range theories of land system change (2018, background): “3, Place A), and when there are strong biophysical, institutional, or other restrictions on accessing land, or high demand for environmental amenities (Rudel et al., 2009; Meyfroidt and Lambin, 2011; Phalan et al., 2016).”
Trade-offs between environment and livelihoods: Bridging the global land use and food security discussions (2017, neutral): “…has been rather stable over the recent decades at global level, but this hides significant gross changes, with contraction of farmland in developed countries (Rudel et al. 2009), as well as massive abandonment of cereal croplands with the collapse of the Soviet Union (Schierhorn et al. 2013).”
Designing and Implementing Effective REDD + Policies: A Forest Transition Approach (2013, background): “A study across 10 crops and approximately 130 countries by Rudel et al. (2009) found no correlation between changes in yields and cultivated areas.”
Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity (2011, neutral): “5% increase for countries that did not enact such policies (37).”
Drivers of changes in agricultural intensity in Europe (2016, background): “Global agricultural intensification between 1990 and 2005, measured as the ratio between yields and cultivated area, was positively related to conservation programs, crop cover, and cereal imports, and negatively related to agricultural production and agricultural workforce (Rudel et al., 2009).”
Scarcity amidst abundance? Reassessing the potential for cropland expansion in Africa (2014, background): “…growth will create economic incentives to bring additional land under cultivation (an idea sometimes referred to as the Jevons paradox; see Rudel et al., 2009 for a recent empirical exploration of this), unless the productivity response leads to a corresponding reduction in output prices…”
Mapping cropland-use intensity across Europe using MODIS NDVI time series (2016, background): “Agricultural expansion and intensification have led to marked increases in agricultural production since World War II (Rudel et al 2009, Tilman et al 2002), albeit at substantial environmental costs (Tscharntke et al 2012).”
Global patterns of agricultural land‐use intensity and vertebrate diversity (2015, background): “However, intensification has been a major mode of land-use change historically (Rudel et al., 2009) and is likely to continue due to economic pressure and government policies to intensify agriculture in less developed, yet highly biodiverse areas (van Vliet et al., 2012).”
Decoupling of deforestation and soy production in the southern Amazon during the late 2000s (2012, background): “Others conclude that intensification itself does not reduce pressure on forests and that, in the absence of effective conservation policies, increased yields can stimulate additional deforestation (8, 9) via direct agricultural encroachment or displacement of other land uses (3, 10).”
Saline agriculture in the 21st century: using salt contaminated resources to cope food requirements. (2012, neutral): “The duality faced by mankind concerning food supply was summarized by Rudel [4] stating “our ability to supply the growing global demand for food, fiber, and fuel, while maintaining a landscape able to provide a full suite of environmental services, hinges on our ability to produce more on less land”