IMPORTANCE OF AEZ IN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL
DEVELOPMENT PLANNING
The ability of the world’s natural resources to provide for the needs of its
growing population is a fundamental issue for the international community.
World’s population is increasing rapidly and at the same time, essential natural
resources, such as land and water, are declining both in quantity and quality
due to such factors as competition with industrial and urban demands. The
basic problem is that limits to the productive capacity of land resources are
set by climate, soil and land forms condition. In this context AEZ can be
regarded as a set of applications, leading to an assessment of land suitability
and potential productivity in terms of climate, soil and land forms condition.
Agro-Ecological Zoning (AEZ) is one of the most important bases of
sustainable agricultural development planning of a region. It is applicable in
micro or local level planning mainly for rainfed agriculture. It assesses basically
the yield potentialities of various crop conditions; evolves future plan of action involving crop diversification; determines suitability of different crops for
optimizing land use, disseminates research results and agro-technology. As a
result sustainable agricultural development planning is increasingly being based
on agro-ecological zones. In this process agro climate zoning has become very
popular (Verma and Partap, 1989). The initial focus of the FAO agro-ecological
zoning system was to assess the suitability of different types of land use for
selected land uses. It is an important starting point for selected land use
planning with an overview of the whole region. It diagnoses the present
situation with regard to farming and land use by categorizing, describing and
analyzing, farming systems components.