Researchers from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg have issued a stark warning; society must take care of its soils or risk collapse. According to researchers from the University, great civilisations have fallen because they failed to prevent the degradation of the soils on which they were founded and our global society is no different. 

Professor Mary Scholes and Dr Bob Scholes have published a paper in top scientific journal, Science, which describes how the productivity of many lands has been dramatically reduced as a result of soil erosion, accumulation of salinity, and nutrient depletion.

"Cultivating soil continuously for too long destroys the bacteria which convert the organic matter into nutrients," explained Mary Scholes of Wits University.

She said that through the industrialisation of agriculture and the increasingly technocratic nature of the sector – including modern agriculture's unsustainably high use of fertilisers, reliance on irrigation, and ploughing – humanity has inadvertently created a false sense of security. In fact, about 1 percent of the global land area is degraded every year. In Africa, where much of the future growth in agriculture must take place, erosion has reduced yields by 8 percent already and nutrient depletion is widespread.

Bob Scholes added, "Soil fertility is both a biophysical property and a social property – it is a social property because humankind depends heavily on it for food production."

Soil fertility was a mystery to the ancients. Traditional farmers spoke of soils becoming tired, sick, or cold; the solution was typically to move on until they recovered. By the mid-20th century, soils and plants could be routinely tested to diagnose deficiencies, and a global agrochemical industry set out to fix them. According to the Scholes, soil came to be viewed as little more than an inert supportive matrix, to be flooded with a soup of nutrients.

This narrow approach led to an unprecedented increase in food production, but also contributed to global warming and the pollution of aquifers, rivers, lakes, and coastal ecosystems. Activities associated with agriculture are currently responsible for just under one third of greenhouse gas emissions; more than half of these originate from the soil and the gasses released tend to have a higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide.

Replacing the fertility-sustaining processes in the soil with a dependence on external inputs has also made the soil ecosystem, and humans, vulnerable to interruptions in the supply of those inputs, for instance due to price shocks.

However, the two environmental scientists warned, it is not possible to feed the current and future world population with a dogmatically 'organic' approach to global agriculture, given the large additional area that such an approach would require. Instead they are pushing for an agricultural soil ecosystem based on natural functions, that mirrors the "close and efficient cycling in natural ecosystems," but that is also compatible with more modern technologies and understanding. 

Their counsel and call for a paradigm shift are especially prescient given the uncertain fate of the EU Soils Directive. The European Commission last month announced its intention to revisit and potentially scrap the proposed Soil Framework Directive, a policy that would recognise soil as a valuable and essentially non-renewable resource, but has been blocked at the draft stage for several years by governments including Britain's.   
http://www.farming.co.uk/news/article/8990  

Industrial farm groups including the NFU in the UK welcomed the announcement, despite warnings that Europe's soils are becoming degraded at an alarming rate, and recent EU research that suggests the UK is one of the worst affected regions. 

Frameworks similar to the proposed Soils Directive already exist for other non-renewable resources such as coal.