Soil structure of farmland in South Asia is deteriorating as a result of the switch to inorganic fertilizers and more intensive cropping. Unbalanced use of fertilizers has led to micronutrient deficiencies. Soil erosion is depleting yields now and poses a long-term threat to sustainability. As industrialization and urbanization increase, more water will have to be diverted to industries and cities, and the use of water for irrigation will therefore have to become more efficient. At present, wasteful flood irrigation is the norm, often encouraged by subsidies.
Application is excessive, and evaporation and seepage losses from both canals and fields are high.
Often the plants cannot use more than a fraction of the water provided. Managing Resources in Unfavored Areas Growing global awareness of the need for environmental protection in unfavored areas has in many cases generated more problems than solutions. Individuals from the developed world often assume that solutions appropriate to their own natural resource problems can be applied globally. The resulting pressures have often led to quick-fix technical approaches to complex social and economic problems. Large-scale government afforestation schemes in South Asia, for example, have failed to solve the problems they were designed to address because the nature of those problems was not well understood beforehand.