The World Soil Erosion Threat

Blouin News looks at one of the biggest threats to the world's ability to feed itself, soil erosion:

Today two giant new dust bowls have formed. One is centered in the Asian heartland in northwestern China and western Mongolia. The other is in the African Sahel — the savannah-like ecosystem that stretches across Africa from Somalia and Ethiopia in the east to Senegal and Mauritania in the west. It separates the Sahara Desert from the tropical rainforests to the south. Both of these newer dust bowls are massive in scale, dwarfing anything the world has seen before.
China may face the biggest challenge of all. After the economic reforms in 1978 that shifted the responsibility for farming from large state-organized production teams to individual farm families, China’s cattle, sheep, and goat numbers spiraled upward. A classic tragedy of the commons was unfolding. The U.S., a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 94 million cattle, a somewhat larger herd than China’s 84 million. But when it comes to sheep and goats, the U.S. has a combined population of only 9 million, whereas China has 285 million. Concentrated in China’s western and northern provinces, these animals are stripping the land of its protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and converting rangeland into desert.
Wang Tao, one of the world’s leading desert scholars, reports that from 1950 to 1975 an average of 600 square miles of land turned to desert each year. Between 1975 and 1987, this climbed to 810 square miles a year. From then until the century’s end, it jumped to 1,390 square miles of land going to desert annually.

Jared Diamond's Collapse was particularly bleak in discussing the damage in China and Mongolia.  Throughout the world, we are mining the topsoil.  That won't end well.