Statistics taken from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2007, the Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN) and mongabay.com.

Global

It is now being acknowledged that human activity has altered ecosystems more rapidly and extensively in the last 50 years than in any comparable period in history. The UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment estimates that about 60 percent of the "ecosystem services" evaluated by the UN are being degraded or used unsustainably, and that degradation could worsen during the first half of this century.

Agriculture has been identified as playing a central role and there are four crucial environmental challenges in the agriculture sector: conservation of biodiversity, mitigation of climate change, water scarcity and the global shift towards bio-energy.

India

India is rich in flora and fauna with more than 45,000 flowering plants and 81,000 animal species. With 26 constituent states and 7 union territories and with more than 1100 million people it is home to 18% of the world live stock population. Agricultural land occupies 47% of the total land area with the uncultivated, non-agricultural and barren land accounting for 30% of the land and forests and woodlands occupying 19.4%.

In India, the problem of land degradation is particularly acute. Around one-third of India's geographical area is affected by various forms of land degradation. Estimates of the total area of degraded land range from 75.5 to 107.43 million hectares, most of which is located in the semi-arid and arid areas of the country that are at the mercy of seasonal rainfall. Large chunks of land have become saline and water logged because of irrigation projects. Development induced land degradation is a major threat to the sustainability of the natural resource base of Indian agriculture.

Droughts and land degradation are not, however, purely natural calamities. They are proven to be the result of a process of systematic neglect of the rain-fed lands and people depending on them, their indigenous knowledge systems and their livelihood needs. The continued erosion of the productive capacity of the natural resources in the rain-fed regions has made these sections of the population much more vulnerable to the vagaries of current climate change.

Close to 150,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in the nine years from 1997 to 2005, with nearly two thirds of these deaths concentrated in the five states where just a third of the country's population lives. It is estimated that, on average, one Indian farmer committed suicide every 32 minutes between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that figure has become one suicide every 30 minutes.