Source
doi:10.4060/cd7488en — original publication (opens in a new tab; the file is not redistributed)
Summary
FAO’s State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture 2025 (SOLAW 2025) is the third edition of FAO’s global assessment of the land, soil and water base underpinning food production, and the first to appear in FAO’s flagship State of the World series. Its central message is that agriculture must produce roughly 50 percent more food, feed and fibre by 2050 than in 2012 while its resource base is already overstretched: agriculture covers about one-third of the Earth’s land surface and accounts for 72 percent of global freshwater withdrawals, more than 1.66 billion hectares of land are degraded, and the potential to expand cropland is very limited. For the thesis it is an authoritative, up-to-date backdrop that quantifies the global land and water pressures which make community-scale self-sufficiency salient, and it explicitly frames the response around the Water–Energy–Food–Ecosystems (WEFE) nexus and integrated land-and-water management, corroborating the project’s FEW-nexus framing.
Key thesis insights
- The “produce more and better” pressure, on an already overstretched base. To feed a population projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and peak near 10.3 billion around 2085, agriculture must produce about 50 percent more food, feed and fibre by 2050 than in 2012; yet agriculture already extends over 4.8 billion ha (about one-third of the Earth’s land surface), accounts for 72 percent of global freshwater withdrawals, and more than 1.66 billion ha of land (over 10 percent of the world’s land area) has been degraded, with over 60 percent of that degradation on agricultural land (Executive Summary, pp. xvi–xviii; Core Messages, p. xiv). This is the authoritative global backdrop that makes community-scale self-sufficiency salient. OT_197
- The WEFE / FEW nexus is FAO’s own organising frame. SOLAW 2025 names integrated land-use planning, integrated landscape management, integrated water resources management, the Water–Energy–Food–Ecosystems (WEFE) nexus, agroecology and the agrifood-systems approach as the essential integrated approaches to the joint climate, land, soil, water and biodiversity crises, stressing there is “no one-size-fits-all solution” (Core Messages, p. xv). This directly corroborates the thesis’s central FEW-nexus framing with a flagship FAO source. OT_197
- Future gains must come from intensification and yield-gap closure, not new land. Over 1964–2023 almost all the increase in agricultural output came from intensification, with agricultural-land expansion limited to just 8 percent; FAO judges further expansion “very limited” because converting more land would hit forests, grasslands and wetlands, so additional production must come from closing yield gaps and from locally-adapted, resource-efficient practices (Core Messages, p. xiv; Foreword, p. vi; Executive Summary, p. xvii–xviii). This supports the thesis’s case for intensive, regenerative, resource-efficient community production over land extensification. OT_197
- Water is the binding constraint on food self-sufficiency. Agriculture accounts for 72 percent of global freshwater withdrawals (predicted to rise); an estimated 1.2 billion people, about one-sixth of the global population, live in agricultural areas with severe water constraints; and irrigated cropland, though only 23 percent of the total, produces 48 percent of crops by value, making irrigated land about 3.2 times more productive than rainfed land in value terms (Executive Summary, pp. xvii–xviii). This grounds the water dimension of the FEW nexus and of community food self-sufficiency. OT_197
- Low-input, locally-adapted community-scale practices are endorsed as significant. FAO states that conservation agriculture, drought-tolerant crop varieties, soil-moisture conservation, crop diversification and organic composting “have the potential to make a significant contribution to the food security of millions of smallholder producers”, alongside integrated approaches such as agroforestry, rotational grazing and rice–fish farming; and it identifies the enabling conditions needed to scale them, policy coherence, natural-resource governance, data/information/technology, risk-management and early-warning systems, sustainable financing, innovation and capacity development (Core Messages, p. xv). This is an authoritative endorsement of the kind of low-input, locally-adapted practices and enabling environment the thesis considers. OT_197
Research targets
None opened and none resolved. This is an authoritative backdrop source; it corroborates the existing FEW/WEFE-nexus framing (already carried by LIT_099 / OT_194 / LIT_049) rather than filling a specific backlog gap, so no target is added.
Notes
- Open access, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0); downloaded directly from FAO (
https://doi.org/10.4060/cd7488en), so it is an authoritative primary download, not AI-prepared. - Coverage. Read verbatim: Foreword (p. vi), Methodology (p. vii), Core Messages (pp. xiv–xv) and Executive Summary (pp. xvi–xviii). The six body chapters (148 pp total) were not read; every figure quoted above sits in those front-matter sections.
- Scope. Global assessment. No NZ-specific data and nothing that feeds an NI calculation cell.
data_quality: high(authoritative FAO flagship, single-source; notverified, which the project reserves for figures corroborated by an independent source). - Companion source. Its companion is OT_198 (FAO SOFA 2025, land degradation across landholding scales); the two FAO 2025 flagships are complementary global backdrops — SOLAW = land and water resources, SOFA = land degradation across landholding scales.
- The report’s crop-potential analysis draws on version 5 of the Global Agro-Ecological Zoning (GAEZ) assessment, co-led by FAO and IIASA; a possible future retrieval if land-suitability methodology is needed, but not opened as an RT now.
Connections
Links to
Sources (1): OT_198
Referenced by
Sources (1): OT_198