Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome, warned last week that pressure on the world's soil resources and land degradation are posing a serious threat to global food security. He called for a renewed international effort to assure sufficient fertile and healthy soils are conserved, both for future generations and to maintain productivity now.

Diouf issued the warning while speaking at the start of a three-day meeting to launch a new Global Soil Partnership for Food security and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation. He said, "Soil is an essential component of the world's production systems and ecosystems, but it is also a fragile and non-renewable resource. It is very easily degraded and it is slow, difficult and expensive to regenerate." image expired

He went on to lament the fact that, although the FAO issued a World Soil Charter, which spelled out the basic principles and guidelines for sustainable soil management and soil protection for governments and international organizations, it has not been implemented in many areas. He said, "New efforts to implement [the charter] must be made as soon as possible."

Soil resources across the globe are subject to increased pressure from competing land uses and are affected by extensive degradation processes that rapidly deplete the limited amounts of soils and water available for food production. Besides helping implement the provisions of the World Soil Charter, the new Global Soil Partnership aims to raise awareness and motivate action on the issues, including influencing policy and research to providing technical solutions for soil protection and management.

Figures from Africa show that the continent has lost more than 6.3 million hectares of fertile soil; degraded farmlands have lost their fertility and water-holding capacity and must now be regenerated in order to meet the demand for food of an expanding world population.

UN official slams agriculture’s environmental record

Earlier in the week Asad Naqvi, programme officer for the economics and trade branch of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), speaking at a food and agriculture conference in Paris, said that agricultural operations cost industrial economies like the UK, USA and Germany more in terms of soil degredation, loss of biodiversity and water pollution than they generate in revenue and food production.

Dr Thomas Mayr, head of the National Soil Research Institute (NSRI) at Cranfield University, who attended the formation of the Global Soil Partnership, told Farming Online, "The Global Soil Partnership is needed urgently to address the progressive degradation of global soil resources on which we all depend for food security, and that will need to be managed carefully as the impacts of climate change take hold."

Dr Mayr explained the partnership's relevance to farming in the UK, where in some instances healthy soil is under threat of irreversible damage, "There are excellent soils in England and Wales that need to be protected because they are significant global as well as national resources. Looking after these should be a national priority. Yet there are some disturbing trends; valuable soil is being irreversibly lost due to urban expansion even with the current policy of prioritising development to brownfield sites.

"Prospective changes to the planning regime may accelerate this loss. Overall there has never been such an urgent need to harness scientific, engineering and land management expertise to manage our soil better. By doing this we can look forward to our soil providing more and better food, bio-fuels and timber, while underpinning wildlife conservation and water management."

Dr Mayr concluded that work was being done in the UK to research and attempt to reverse soil degradation, "Cranfield has an international reputation for soil science and soil and water engineering and is working in partnership with UK and international institutions to meet a growing demand for technical solutions."