Spinning Good News as Bad News

Did you know world cropland is in decline? Leave it to the spin masters at the United Nations to sound the alarm when they should instead celebrate innovation.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) reported last year that at least 100 million hectares of healthy and productive land are now lost every year: “Land is degrading faster than we can restore”.

As usual with this kind of alarmist climate-related reporting, no context is given, and there is no explanation as to why this is happening. The usual assumption with this writing is that climate change is the catch all for all our ills.

A little context: as per OurWorldInData and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), currently 4-5 billion hectares are used for agriculture. So, 100 million hectares represents about a 2% reduction per year.

Why is this happening? It is due to innovation. Humanity does not need as much land to feed its growing population. A paper by Taylor and Rising (2021), explains this in more detail: “Our findings generally support the Borlaug hypothesis: cropland area has plateaued globally and across income group while crop production has continued to rise”.

In other words, Taylor and Rising simply state that, as societies get richer, and move in development time to the right in Figure 3 (shown below) of their paper, there is a peak in land use for agriculture. After that, more land is protected, for example as national parks (blue area on top) and less land is needed to feed their population. The authors call this last stage “greening”.

When you dig a little deeper, bad news is actually good news. Mind you, this is from the same UN that is actively lobbying to silence anyone who is spreading mis- and disinformation.

Is the UN spinning negativity to attract more eyeballs, or is there something more sinister at work?