Recent estimates indicate that about 7% of the global land
area (Szabolcs, 1994) and 20–50% of the global irrigated farmland
(Tanji, 2002; Hu and Schmidhalter, 2005) are affected by soil
salinisation, one of the major abiotic factors limiting plant growth
and the productivity of traditional crop plants (Choukr-Allah and
Harrouni, 1996). This problem is expected to be aggravated by
global climate change.
Accelerating rates of anthropogenic fossil fuel use and forest
clearing have caused mean concentrations of CO2 in the atmo-