I read a newspaper article about this a few years ago: the Italian government is starting some kind of farmland recovery program with the aim of renewing all the farmland that was destroyed by Hannibal during the Second Punic War. Apparently Hannibal destroyed up to half of Italy’s arable land by burning off the vegitation covering the topsoil, which was then washed away by rain, gone forever. I wish I had saved that article. I’d like to know more about it if anyone has more info.
According to G.T. Wrench, in his 1939 The Restoration of the Peasantries, the issue was not quite as clear cut as simply Hannibal destroying fertile land. According to Wrench’s article, the land did not simply go barren; the production of wheat was replaced by the production of olives and grapes. As long as those two crops would have provided a source of income (even after the fall of the Empire), the inhabitants could have found ways to survive by trading for other substance crops, so it is possible that there was no serious need to restore the land (even if they actually had a method to do so), while the value of commodity crops would have meant that the population did not need to abandon the land (as happened throughout much of what had been the Fertile Crescent and is now occurring in the African Sahel).
I did not find the article that prompted the OP, so I do not know what might have prompted a desire on the part of the Italians, (or, at least, their government), to attempt to restore the land to the raising of wheat or similar crops.
2200 years? Wow, sounds like that was a lot more effective than salt.
Salt should effectively cause the same thing as burning, killing all the vegetation. For the topsoil to disappear though, you would need rain and sloped land. So my guess would be that even though the end effect may have been worse from Hannibal’s burning, the intention wasn’t as evil. He probably would have expected the plants to come back, not for the topsoil to slide into the sea.
Thanks for that article, tomndeb.