Soil Erosion Essay

924 Words4 Pages
Nowadays one of the major problems on global scale is the rapidly increasing demand for food. This demand is of course caused by high population growth. Even more land is used for agricultural purposes day by day. Cultivation without using specific control techniques, unplanned land use, such as establishing industrial facilities on the agriculture land, uncontrolled urban development and also destroying forests are fundamental factors of soil erosion (Biard & Baret, 1997). The major factor which damages and reduces the productivity of our soils is soil erosion. Soil erosion causes serious financial losses in countries whose economies are dependent to efficiency and workability of soils. A conservative estimate is that the annual on-site loss of agricultural productivity as a result of soil degradation was MK7.5 billion in 2007 (Ministry of Finance and development Planning, 2011). Soil erosion is a natural geomorphological process resulting from water and land interactions but accelerated to become an environmental hazard by human activities (Richter & Negendank, 1977; Valentin, Poesen, & Yong, 2005). These activities include clearing of forests for other uses, poor farming practices and encroachment into marginal lands. Soil erosion by water is a major threat to sustained land and crop production and causes degradation of water resources. Soil erosion is regarded as one of the major and most widespread form of land degradation, and, as such, poses severe limitations to sustainable agricultural land use. Erosion reduces on-farm soil productivity and contributes to water quality problems as it causes the accumulation of sediments and agro-chemicals in waterways. The fundamental on-site impacts of soil erosion include loss of agricultural land and loss of topsoil leading to reduction in food production (Pathak, Wani, & Sudi, 2005), while off-site effects include
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