# The world's farmland, and why our survival depends on it > A tenth of the planet's land grows almost everything we eat. It took millennia to form, it is leaving at a football pitch every five seconds, and a third of it is already degraded. - **Publisher:** VOTVS (Fair coverage for everyone) — https://votvs.com - **Author:** VOTVS - **Published:** 2026-09-09 - **Language:** en - **Topic:** Earth - **Canonical URL:** https://votvs.com/en/articles/soil-takes-a-thousand-years - **Tags:** soil, agriculture, food security, earth - **Facts last verified:** 9 September 2026 --- Almost everything you have ever eaten grew in a layer of material a few tens of centimetres thick, sitting on top of rock that cannot feed anything. About a tenth of the planet's land surface is under crops, and that tenth is doing nearly all of the work. It is not evenly spread, it is not being replaced at the speed it is leaving, and on any timescale that matters to a person it is not renewable at all. ## The arithmetic that makes soil different from other resources FAO's own summary of the problem, from its global symposium on soil erosion, contains the sentence that reframes everything else: > It can take up to 1 000 years to produce just 2-3 cm of soil. Set that against the rate it leaves. **Figure (StatRow):** The arithmetic of topsoil — Figures from FAO, Global Symposium on Soil Erosion key messages, and FAO SOLAW 2021 facts and figures. A third of the world's soil is already moderately to highly degraded, according to FAO, and the same body warns that over 90 per cent could be degraded by 2050. Erosion alone, FAO says, can cost up to 50 per cent of crop yields on affected land. Degrading soil does not only cost you food. FAO's Director-General put the climate side of it plainly in 2022: the degradation of the world's soils has already released up to 78 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. ## The good land is already being farmed High-quality agricultural soil is not evenly distributed, and it never was — it is the product of parent rock, glaciation, river deposition and thousands of years of climate, none of which humans arranged and none of which they can quickly repeat. FAO's assessment of global land and water resources found that some **1.6 billion hectares of the world's best, most productive land is already used to grow crops**. The expansion room is not where the good soil is. This is a measure of land use, not soil quality. A low share can mean desert, mountain or forest as easily as poor ground — Suriname is near the bottom because it is rainforest. About a tenth of the planet's land surface is under crops. Which is why the yield story of the last century is not a story about new land: **Figure (BarSet):** Cropland versus production, 1961 to 2009 — FAO, State of the World's Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture, as reported by FAO newsroom, 2011. Percentage growth over the period. Twelve per cent more land, a hundred and fifty per cent more output. That gap is fertiliser, irrigation, breeding and machinery — and much of it was drawn against the soil rather than added to it. ## Good soil without water is not good farmland One more distribution, from FAO's 2021 land and water report, that decides as much as the soil does: **Figure (BarSet):** Rainfed and irrigated farming: land used and food produced — FAO, SOLAW 2021 facts and figures. A fifth of the cultivated land produces two fifths of the food, because it has water on demand. Agriculture already accounts for 72 per cent of all surface and groundwater withdrawals. Soil and water are not two separate questions; they multiply. ## What happens to the countries that cannot grow it Soil decides who has to buy. A country short of arable land does not simply eat less bread — it goes to the world market, and the world market for wheat is not a crowd of sellers. Russia alone is forecast to export **46 million tonnes** of wheat in 2026/27, out of a world total of about **214 million tonnes**, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The European Union, Canada and Australia follow. A handful of suppliers, in other words, stand behind the bread of everyone who cannot grow their own. Five countries take the largest share of what those sellers ship. **Figure (BarSet):** The largest wheat importers — USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Grain: World Markets and Trade, August 2026, forecast for marketing year 2026/27. The European Union imports at a comparable scale but is a bloc, not a country, and is left out here. Look at that list against the map further up and two different stories fall out of it. **Egypt and Algeria are there because of the soil.** They have among the smallest shares of cropland in the world — **3.1 per cent** of Egypt is arable, **3.2 per cent** of Algeria. Both are mostly desert. Neither can grow its way out, at any price, with any policy. **Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines are there for a different reason.** They are not short of farmland — Brazil is one of the world's agricultural giants, and the Philippines has nearly a fifth of its territory under crops. They are there because wheat is a temperate crop and they are tropical countries whose populations now eat bread and noodles. Brazil can grow soy at a scale that moves world prices and still has to buy its flour. So the same queue at the same sellers contains countries that cannot grow wheat and countries that simply do not. Only one of those problems has a solution. **Egypt is first in that queue.** The USDA forecasts imports of **13 million tonnes** for 2025/26 against domestic production of 9.3 million tonnes and total consumption of 20.4 million. Where it comes from is the second half of the exposure. Over the past five years Egypt's largest suppliers were Russia, Ukraine and the EU — three origins clustered around one sea. **Figure (BarSet):** Egypt wheat imports by origin, five-year total — USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Grain and Feed Annual, Egypt, 2025. Volumes over the preceding five years. And the bread is not a market good. Egypt runs one of the world's largest food subsidy programmes: the USDA reports that around **66.7 per cent of Egyptians are eligible**, each entitled to **five subsidised loaves a day**, at a cost of roughly **98 billion Egyptian pounds — about $2.03 billion — for the bread subsidy alone** in financial year 2024/25. Two thirds of a country of over a hundred million people, eating bread whose wheat is mostly grown somewhere else, on land somebody else owns, shipped through one sea. That is what a soil map means when you follow it far enough. It is not a ranking of countries. It is a map of who has to trust a stranger for dinner. ## Where the real data lives, if you want to check any of this Two datasets sit behind most global soil maps you will ever see, and both are public. The **FAO/UNESCO Soil Map of the World** is the landmark. FAO and UNESCO decided to make it in 1961, and by FAO's own account it was completed over a span of twenty years at a scale of 1:5,000,000. FAO's page for it says it "remained until recently the only global overview of soil resources." It is a monumental piece of work and it is also, now, a historical document. The current one is the **Harmonized World Soil Database**, whose version 2.0 was revised and released in September 2023 at 1 km resolution. If you see a soil map published today, that is what it should be built from. Both are free to download. Which matters, because soil maps travel well and get simplified badly on the way — a global soil classification is a description of soil *types*, not a score for farmland, and any map that turns one into the other is making a judgement it needs to show its working for. ## What to take from it Soil quality is inherited. It is the product of parent rock, ice, rivers and climate acting over periods that make agriculture look like a recent hobby, and no country chose its own allocation. That part is nobody's fault. The rest is a policy question, and it has numbers attached: a third of what exists is already degraded, it takes up to ten centuries to make three centimetres more, and it is currently leaving at one football pitch every five seconds. ## Questions people ask ### How long does it take for soil to form? FAO states that it can take up to 1,000 years to produce just 2 to 3 centimetres of soil. On any human timescale, topsoil is not a renewable resource. ### How much of the world's soil is degraded? FAO puts it at 33 per cent — a third of the world's soil is moderately to highly degraded — and warns that over 90 per cent could be degraded by 2050. ### How much of our food depends on soil? FAO says 95 per cent of the food we eat comes from the soil. ### Which country imports the most wheat? Egypt. The USDA forecasts Egyptian wheat imports of 13 million tonnes in 2025/26, against domestic production of 9.3 million tonnes and consumption of 20.4 million — so most of the wheat Egypt eats is grown somewhere else. Indonesia is second at about 12.5 million tonnes, followed by Algeria, Brazil and the Philippines. ### Why does Brazil import wheat when it is an agricultural giant? Because wheat is a temperate crop and most of Brazil is not. Having excellent land for soy, maize and coffee does not make a country able to grow wheat, which is why several large agricultural exporters are also large flour importers. ### Which datasets do global soil maps come from? Most trace back to the FAO/UNESCO Soil Map of the World, begun in 1961 and completed over twenty years, or to its modern successor the Harmonized World Soil Database, whose version 2.0 was released in September 2023 at 1 km resolution. Both are published by FAO and free to download. ## Sources - Global Symposium on Soil Erosion — key messages — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. https://www.fao.org/about/meetings/soil-erosion-symposium/key-messages/en/ - The State of the World's Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture — facts and figures — FAO, SOLAW 2021. https://www.fao.org/land-water/solaw2021/facts/en/ - Healthy soils for a healthy people and planet: FAO calls for reversal of soil degradation — FAO newsroom, 2022. https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/agriculture-soils-degradation-fao-gffa-2022/en - Scarcity and degradation of land and water: growing threat to food security — FAO newsroom, on the State of the World's Land and Water Resources report, 2011. https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/Scarcity-and-degradation-of-land-and-water-growing-threat-to-food-security/en - Grain and Feed Annual, Egypt — USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, GAIN report EG2025-0009, 2025. https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=Grain+and+Feed+Annual_Cairo_Egypt_EG2025-0009.pdf - Grain: World Markets and Trade — USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, August 2026. https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/circulars/grain.pdf - FAO/UNESCO Soil Map of the World — FAO Soils Portal. https://www.fao.org/soils-portal/data-hub/soil-maps-and-databases/faounesco-soil-map-of-the-world/en/ - Harmonized World Soil Database v2.0 — FAO Soils Portal. https://www.fao.org/soils-portal/data-hub/soil-maps-and-databases/harmonized-world-soil-database-v20/en/ --- Published by VOTVS. 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