The pie chart illustrates major sources of soil degradation in farming lands all over the world, while the table provides information on this effect in North Amrican, Europeon, and Oceania regions, during 1990s.
Overall, over-grazing is the dominant reason for deterioration of agricultural land productivity, whereas deforestration and over-cultivation being the second and third largest causes, respectively. Moreover, Europe region accounted for a significant propotion of worldwide land degradation, deforstation being the main cause for this.
In detail, as the predominant reason, excessive livestock feeding caused 35% of degrading worldwide of the decade. Deforesting and over-farming accounted for 30% and 28% of soil erosion, respectively.
Considering the regional effect, Europe casued 23% of worldwide land degrading, 9.8% by deforestation, 7.7% by over-farming, and 5.5% by over-grazing. Conversely, excessive cattle feeding was the major source in oceania region, being at 11.3%, while clearing the wood cover, served as a reason for 1.7% of degrading. However, over-cultivation has not displayed a visible effect on oceania region’s soil erosion. North American region, being the lowest contributor among the three regions, recorded 0.2% from deforestation, 3.3% from over-cultivation and 1.5% from over-grazing, totalling upto a 5% of total land quality deterioration worldwide.