ABSTRACT
A land quality and population-carrying capacity based assessment of food security for six management and population scenarios is presented for 24 Asian countries. Two databases were used: the 1:5,000,000 FAO/Unesco Soil Map of the World, converted to Soil Taxonomy, and climatic records for about 4,000 stations in Asia. This information and 25 stress factors derived from it were used to group the units of the soil map in one of nine land quality classes. The land area of each class was partitioned for different agricultural and non-agricultural uses. Each land quality class was empirically assigned an optimal population-carrying capacity (persons ha−1) for each of three levels of management inputs. The ratio of (i) the 1995 population and (ii) the 2025 population to the optimal population-carrying capacity was used to group the countries in three risk categories for the three management input levels and two population levels, resulting in six scenarios of food security for each country. Although the assessments inevitably lack precision, they are nevertheless considered an improvement over previous and more intuitive estimates. The analysis shows that, for Asia as a whole, food insecurity is an acute problem. In fact, for some countries the Malthusian prophecy is rapidly becoming a reality. The study also quantified the relative scarcity of prime agricultural land in Asia and the resulting imperative to preserve these areas for food production and optimize the land use of the remaining areas.
