10. Managing Degraded Lands for Realizing Sustainable Agriculture Through Environmental Friendly Technologies

Ever increasing population and shrinking fertile and productive agricultural land resources are viewed as the biggest threats to sustainability of world’s resources. To feed more mouths, and reverse land degradation, many biological, engineering, and chemical strategies have been tried; unfortunately these have met partial success. Land and environmental degradation is on the increase, declining the productive capacities of the fertile soils. The land issues like soil erosion (water and wind), salinity and waterlogging; and desertification are hammering crop yields and have severely disturbed the ecosystems in Pakistan. In this chapter attempts have been made to enlist factors and causes responsible for land degradation and resultant lower crop-yields. The prime causes of land degradation and low crops yields in Pakistan are: poor irrigation and drainage practices, deforestation, over-grazing, loss of biodiversity, water scarcity, frequent droughts, migration and unending new residential areas, mass-scale agriculture, flash floods, rising populations, prevailing poverty, and weak link between research-extension-farmers. Degraded lands can be rehabilitated by employing an integrated approach comprising physical, chemical, hydrological, and biological methods. However, it would require scientific diagnostics of the degradation level and to be able to make informed decisions to combat the issues in a holistic way. It is imperative that technical programs must be intervened/interwoven with the extension education components aiming at creating awareness, capacity building, and the active participation of farming community including civil society, NGOs, women groups and youth folks.