Synthesis of dialogues and evidence presented at the International Conference on Food Security in Dry Lands, Doha, Qatar, November, 2012

In Moroccan oases, date palm agricultural operations are mainly
manual and seldom implemented, contributing to palm grove
degradation.
The introduction of small mechanization may reduce
drudgery, encourage/attract youths, increase labor
productivity and safety.

With current rates of land degradation reaching
ten to twelve million ha per year, there is an
urgent need to scale up and out successful,
profitable and resource-efficient sustainable
land management practices to maintain the
health and resilience of the land that humans
depend on. As much as 500 million out of
two billion ha of degraded land, mainly in
developing countries, have restoration potential,
offering an immediate target for restoration
and rehabilitation initiatives.1 In the past,

This publication is a baseline assessment reviewing the current knowledge of land degradation in the rangelands of Jordan - known as Badia - with a special focus on its causes. It includes a review of current legislation and on-going initiatives to combat land degradation, along with an analysis of the main constraints limiting their effectiveness.

It is no doubt that water resource is considered as main determining factor for agriculture and the adoption of modern irrigation technique would preserve this important resource. The shortage of rain in middle and southern Iraq pushes farmers to depend on irrigated agriculture especially from its main resource Euphrates and Tigris and their tributaries.

Paddy rice agriculture affects food supply, climate, water, biodiversity, and ecosystems. It varies substantially over time and space, for example, continuous expansion in northeastern China and rapid loss in southern China in the past decades. However, no maps at fine spatial resolution (e.g., 30-m) are available to document and illustrate the spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of paddy rice planting areas in China.

A system dynamics approach was used to determine the sustainable stocking rate of the Menz sheep population in the Ethiopian highland. A model was developed to simulate stocking rate based on communal grazing land. The model is weather and resource (feed supply) driven. Pasture growth and dynamics was modeled using rainfall and temperature data. Herd dynamics was based on age groups of male and female animals from birth to herd exit, taking production and reproduction parameters into account.

The local cost-effective, raised-bed machine for small-scale farmers has been developed by ICARDA and its national partners to promote the adoption of raised-bed technology at a larger scale.

Brief on Mechanized Raised Bed Farming System (MRBFS) to Drive a Process for Fertilizer Subsidy Reform in Egypt

This explanatory video illustrates the higher crop yields and increased water efficiency as a result of the raised-bed agriculture component of the project.

Neighbourhood effects on land use change are very common. Therefore, they are often
included in spatially explicit models of land use change and other spatial analyses. Neighbourhood
indices, however, depend strongly on the spatial extent set for calculating them. So far, most of the
existing land-use change analyses or models using neighbourhood indices assumed some predefined
neighbourhood extents without proving whether the selected extents are optimal for the analysis of the

The purpose of this document is to review the current land characteristics and use status in Yemen as well as agricultural policies and institutional efforts to combat land degradation in the country.