Dutch Secretary of state Sharon Dijksma has expressed her support for the Save Our Soils campaign. Speaking at organic trade fair BioFach in Nuremberg this week, the Dutch Labour Party politician highlighted the campaign’s work during the UN international year of soil, which began in December 2014.

The Save Our Soils campaign was set up by Dutch organic fruit and vegetable specialist Nature & More, to highlight the plight of soils in the EU and generate consumer awareness within the Netherlands. At the current rate of degradation, the world’s topsoil could be lost within 60 years, according the the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. More worrying still is that scientists class soil as a non-renewable resource; it takes around 1,000 years to build 3cm of topsoil.

Even so, efforts to create an EU soils directive to legally recognise soil’s non-renewable status and accord more protection to the continent’s soil resources have been successfully thwarted by a blocking minority of states, chief among them the UK.

The EU Commission’s Joint research Centre has looked into soil degradation across the EU and found that countries in North-western Europe, including the UK and the Netherlands, are at the greatest risk from soil degradation. However, though the UK government and NFU have claimed a soils directive is unnecessary as UK soils have adequate legal protection, a 2011 report by the Austrian Environment Agency, acting on behalf of the EU Commission, found that “In terms of protection of soils, the UK has few directly targeted laws or policies.”

At BioFach on Wednesday, Dutch agriculture secretary Sharon Dijksma unveiled the logo of the Save Our Soils campaign. She revealed that export figures showed an 11% increase for the Netherlands’ sustainable products for 2014, which she said shows "Consumers want more and more products that are produced with attention to animal welfare, nature and the environment.”

Ms Dijksma added that she was proud of the organic sector not only for displaying economic resilience but also for trying to make the world more beautiful. “With the Save Our Soils campaign, the Netherlands is once more taking the lead,” she said.

Volkert Engelsman, who initiated the Save Our Soils campaign, which has received the backing of the UN FAO, said,”The soil is the limit; soils are the foundation of our existence. We are hitting that limit now… There is plenty of evidence that organic farming preserves and enriches soil, even though there may also be other ways to save soils.“