Talk:List of countries by arable land density

Old comments
This is an interesting aspect. I think it will be a better idea to use rural population divided by arable land area or total population divided by total agricultural area (arable land + permanent corps + temporary corps + permanent meadows & pastures). well, anyway. That will be super complicated. This is good enough. I don't think the ranks will change much (maybe except countries like Mongolia or Saudi Arabia with tiny arable land but large pastural area).

I changed the population data to July 2005 est., because the Factbook's estimation on % of arable land was on 2005. This is incomparable to use 2008's population to divide 2005's arable land area, because arable land is not constant; it is shrinking every year due to desertification and urbanization ... etc. The earth suppose to have less arable land area in 2008, higher population, and even higher pop density per arable land area.

I also drop all of digits after decimal point in calculation, those numbers make me dizzy.

--Kerry7374 (talk) 17:27, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Perhaps, but I would think arable land is shrinking much less than the world population is growing. TastyCakes (talk) 21:32, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Burkina Faso listed twice
Burkina Faso is listed twice, with very different values. At first I thought it was just a misnamed country field, but I can't seem to figure out which country the data describes. 129.171.233.77 (talk) 00:37, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Apparently since fixed. -- Beland (talk) 00:00, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Update Sudan for both North & South portions of the country
Sudan should be updated to include north and south parts; this may affect the statistics for each country. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.38.43.30 (talk) 18:32, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Disputed
At least some of the countries with 0% arable land are clearly wrong. For example, Jersey is listed here as 0% arable but Jersey says 57% of the land there is agricultural land. -- Beland (talk) 23:59, 16 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Yeah, this list mystifies me. So first of all, one of the essential categories of data (percentage of agricultural land) is open to dispute, as Beland mentions above, in part because it's not clear where it's coming from. Are these numbers from the World Bank or the CIA World Factbook? Both sources are footnoted; are both figures identical for all countries? The World Factbook cites 66% as the amount of arable land in Jersey, not 0%; I can't find Jersey on the World Bank page. And what countries are we talking about? The list purportedly "adopts definitions of 'country' on a case by case basis. The 'United Kingdom' is considered as a single country while constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands are regarded separately." Forgive me, but this is horsesh*t. We don't get to judge what's a country and what isn't. As Wikipedians, we need to follow some sort of defensible, definable, citable standard (ISO 3166-1 unless there's a good reason to use some different standard). Finally, the article physiological density—which ought to explain what this metric is supposed to mean, why it's valid, its pros and cons, etc.—is a stub with only a single footnote, and that is a dead link. This list needs to be recycled, I'm afraid. Q·L·1968 ☿ 20:30, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Can you improve it? Just scrapping it is imho a bad idea. I for one was explicitly looking for just such a list, because population density is difficult to compare. Still, Australia or Russia with vast tracts of uninhabitable areas (Tundra & Nullarborplain, respectively) are as much up for debate as other countries (SaudiArabia or Dubai's artificial islands & irrigation). Probably a very difficult topic.(2003:D9:BE6:E500:5921:2747:4075:797C (talk)) —Preceding undated comment added 23:29, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Article title
Why is this titled as 'real' population density? Isn't this just a subjective redefinition of something that can objectively be labelled population density (i.e. population per total area)? If it is called 'real' because of its perceived importance, then I would dispute that - countries aren't agriculturally self-sufficient and there's no reason why they ideally need to be. (82.38.205.242 (talk)) 16:42, 20 January 2024‎ (UTC)