Shifting Ground: The Changing Agricultural Soils of China and Indonesia

Rating:
Summary: Shifting Ground uses doubtful methodology
Review: I wrote a rather critical review, but it disappeared from the screen. Please recover it.

Rating:
Summary: Innovative use of archival data for soil degradation trends
Review: The title of the book is an allusion to the widely known and influential Losing Ground by Eckholm (1976), one of the early doom-sayers, who like several writers after him warned of the dangers of soil erosion and the impending calamity in food security. Lindert came, with respect to China and Indonesia, to a different conclusion which is partly unconvincing. He deals with arable soils only, representing a small percentage of the total area. His methodology of using archival soil analyses is innovative, but using data for total P and total K and an uncommon statistical analysis, makes the findings very doubtful and unconvincing. The overall picture is more complicated, with patchy improvements as concluded here, but also with well documented severe local erosion and desertification examples, disregarded in this treatment. Recommended for a serious evaluation and as a challenge for obtaining better data for such trend analyses.