Year of Soils
Intact soils are an invaluable and irreplaceable resource, one that performs myriad functions in achieving the international community’s main development and environmental goals. And now they are in urgent need of protection.
Healthy soils are crucial to human nutrition and the fight against hunger. We rely on them not only for food production, but also to create new drinking water. They help to regulate Earth’s climate, storing more carbon than all of the world’s forests combined (only the oceans are a larger carbon sink), and are essential to maintaining biodiversity: a handful of fertile soil contains more microorganisms than there are humans on the planet. Two-thirds of Earth’s species live beneath its surface.
But erosion and contamination are placing soils under severe stress. Worldwide, 24 billion tons of fertile soil is lost annually, partly owing to the growth of cities and infrastructure. In Germany alone, construction projects claim an average of more than 75 hectares per day. Inappropriate agricultural practices are also to blame: The liberal use of synthetic fertilizer, for example, decimates organisms inhabiting the soil and changes its structure. It takes millennia for fertile topsoil to form; in many places, a cloudburst is now all it takes to wash it away.
At the same time, global demand for food, fodder, and biomass for fuels is growing, in turn driving up the value of land — a fact that has not escaped international investors’ attention. According to a World Bank estimate, 10-30 percent of arable land worldwide — land that would be used by millions of smallholders, pastoralists, and indigenous people — has been affected by large-scale investment.
The struggle to secure land rights for individuals and communities has thus become a matter of survival in much of the world. Access to land is one of the key determinants of hunger, and it is even more unequally distributed than income. Some 20 percent of households affected by hunger are landless, and 50 percent of food-stressed households are smallholder families.
Protecting soils need not undermine prosperity. On the contrary, sustainable soil-protection practices can actually boost agricultural yields — especially those of smallholders. Crop diversification, recycling, and soil cover can all contribute to living, fertile, and active soil capable of optimal water management.
One approach, so-called agro-ecology, is based on small farmers’ traditional knowledge and experience, making it readily adaptable to local conditions. A study of agro-ecological farming practices by Jules Pretty in 2006 examined 286 sustainable agricultural projects in 57 countries and concluded that yields had increased an average of 79 percent.
Despite the proven success of such methods, the use of synthetic fertilizers has increased by a factor of more than five over the past 50 years, and many African governments spend up to 60 percent of their agricultural budgets to subsidize them. Particularly in tropical environments, such products lead to the destruction of the topsoil and biodiversity loss (and the runoff is transported to the oceans, where it damages marine ecosystems). And, though their main component, nitrogen, could be produced biologically and sustainably, that would run counter to the interests of a handful of powerful fertilizer producers and distributors.
Policymakers must address the following question: How can poor people produce enough food to escape hunger and destitution in a manner that protects soils, mitigates climate change, and preserves biodiversity?
Despite the issue’s urgency, approaches like agro-ecological production are not being promoted to any serious extent anywhere. Events like the International Year of Soils and Global Soil Week offer an opportunity to change that — from the ground up.
©Project Syndicate
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