Land Evaluation for Agricultural Development [antikvár]

FOREWORD During the last three decades great progress has been made in identifying and characterizing the world's major soils. The use being made of resource data for development projects, however, has been lagging far behind. The reasons for this situation are that these data are often presented in a form which is not readily accessible to the potential user, or that land use planners firid/it mo'relGonvenient to handle economic parameters without taking physical variables'ii^tp acequnt., . The increasing and competitive demand fo-r. laifd, hoth for agricultural production and for other purposes, requires that decisions-be ma.de on the most beneficial use of limited land resources, whilst at the same time'conserving these resources for the future. It is a function of land evaluation to bring about an understanding of the relationships between the conditions of the land and the uses to which it is put, and to present planners with comparisons and options of promising alternatives. By 1970 many countries had developed systems of land evaluation. Some were very general in scope and were limitedito'.'assessing areas of land suitable for cultivation, forestry or grassland. Other s^^tems were concerned with single forms of land use, e.g. irrigated agriculture. There Wa.s-a clear need for international standardization and especially for the development of a classification which allowed a comparative evaluation of the different uses that can be made of the same land. The general principles which are fundamental to this approach are that land is evaluated with respect to specific types of land use and in terms relevant to the physical, economic and social conditions of the area concerned. Through an international cooperative effort, FAO developed a framework for land evaluation by which land can be assessed, with regard to its soil and climatic conditions, in terms of requirements for successful growth of different crops, or for alternative types of land use. Since the early days Dr. Klaas Jan Beek has been closely associated with this effort. The field work which he has been carrying out with FAO since 1963 contributed considerably towards establishing relationships between land qualities and crop requirements. Dr. Beek was instrumental in defining different types of land utilization which express the use of land in terms of produce, labour, capital, management, technology and scale of operations. The principal objective of his book is to strengthen the foundation of land evaluation by consolidating the 'land utilization type' concept. The rapidly increasing number of land use systems and the great variety of the related land requirements and management alternatives, called indeed for an in-depth study of the land utilization type itself, including the application of statistical methods and modelling. Dr. Beek's intensive work in Latin America has led towards new methods of land