BAKU, Azerbaijan, May 2. Agriculture is a strategically important sector that meets the basic needs of people, said Mukhtar Babayev, the Representative of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan on Climate Issues, at the IV Agrobusiness Development Forum in Baku, Trend reports.
"Today, the capacity of global water and land resources is barely enough to meet existing needs. At the same time, growing demand for food further increases pressure on these resources.
Citing data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), around 1.7 billion hectares of land worldwide have been degraded due to human activity. More than 60 percent of this degraded land consists of arable fields and pastures.
We are now witnessing more intense heat waves, powerful storms, and destructive floods. In the 1970s, around one hundred disasters occurred annually. Today, that number has risen to four hundred. This poses a serious threat to food security and weakens the resilience of agriculture," Babayev said.
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