ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on agricultural land resources. Since humans acquired knowledge of agriculture, more and more of the potential cropland resource base has become an actual resource. When rice self-sufficiency was achieved, government attention began to turn towards environmental and resource-efficiency issues. The significance of population growth in relation to food production in particular and to environmental resources in general can scarcely be exaggerated. Population may have grown rapidly, but food production has apparently increased even more rapidly, and has done so in the developed and developing worlds alike. Unprecedented rates of global population growth in the second half of the twentieth century have sustained a continuing interest in Malthusian ideas. The biological productivity that results from the interaction of plants, soil and solar energy provides the supplies of wood and most of the food that humankind demands.
