Productive Landscapes: Restoring Abandoned Degraded Land for Agriculture: A Synthesis of the Evidence and a Case Study from Indonesia

Increasing agricultural production and reducing deforestation are top priorities of the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda and USAID’s development assistance. Unfortunately, decades of unsustainable economic and agricultural policies and practices have undermined efforts to achieve these goals. Overexploitation of natural resources, especially soil and water, have caused close to one-quarter of the world’s agricultural land to become degraded and unproductive. Such widespread degradation of agricultural land also undermines efforts to protect forests in many developing countries because farmers and large agricultural firms frequently respond by simply abandoning degraded land and moving to more productive forestland, which they clear and use for agriculture.

In this paper we consider a frequently recommended strategy to address these problems, namely, restoring abandoned degraded land and using it for agriculture. Evidence suggests that this strategy can produce numerous benefits for people and the environment, including sparing forests from agricultural conversion, but the benefits associated with restoring abandoned degraded land for agriculture will also be limited by constraints and tradeoffs. We synthesize evidence from the scientific literature, and we illustrate key issues associated with this strategy by discussing a frequently proposed opportunity in Indonesia: restoring the degraded Imperata grasslands to grow oil palm. We also discuss resources and decision tools that practitioners can use to determine the suitability of the strategy, and to evaluate prospects for success, in different development contexts.