In the AT2010 study an attempt was made to project how much new land may be
brought into crop production by the year 3010 (FAO, 1993a). The first step was to
estimate the potential arable land or extent of land with crop potentials. The foundation
of the evaluation consists of FA0 GIS global land resource inventory for the developing
world, based on the FAO/UNESCO Soil Map of the World (scale 1:5,000,000), which
combine information on soil, landform and climate resources (temperature and length of
growing period (LGP)) to characterize land in terms of agro-ecological zones. The land
resource inventory is composed of thousand of agro-ecological cells which are pieces of
land of varying size with homogeneous soil, landform and climate attributes. The
database contains information on land suitability, soil fertility constraints and, to a
limited extent, land cover/land use.