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Why soils matters
- A european perspective
As special rapporteur I have been promoting
agroecology, but when I met with governments I was
confronted with 4 obstacles, mostly of political nature.
And I don’t think that the obstacles faced at EU level
are much different from those with which we are faced
worldwide:
- We are in a situation where agriculture is asked to
produce not only food but also biomass, particularly
for energy, whereas any biomass we use should
be reinjected into the soil, in order to contribute to
building up the organic matter. E.g in Belgium, you have
very weak soil, with around 1.5 to 2% organic matter in
the soil, whereas a good soil would have normally 4%.
So when we move waste/biomass from the soil, instead
of using it to regenerate the soil, it can no longer help
to rebuild the organic matter that soil needs to become
fertile again and to sink carbon.
- We have increasingly moved towards market-led
agriculture, which does not respond to the ecological
logic of how to respect the soil and how to rebuild
ecosystems, but rather how to cultivate according to
the evolution of market prices. This is typically the case
for export-led agriculture - the sub-part of market-led
agriculture in which large volumes of single products
(coffee, cocoa, sorghum, cardamom...) are produced
for the markets, using monoculture techniques that
are problematic for the soil. Monocultures lead to soil
erosion and rob the soils of the nutrients necessary
to rebuild itself.
Increasingly, agriculture thus
conceived resembles mining, with agriculture as a
sector resembling the extractive industry.
This connects with the debt burden that these countries
have to pay back, and from an ecological point of view it
is a very difficult problem.
-
There is a mismatch between productivity and
competitiveness.
Agroecological methods can be
highly productive if you consider the total output of
various products per hectare. Various studies, including
from the
World Bank ,explain how small farms can be
highly productive thanks to agroecological techniques.
But these farms are generally not competitive in
markets, in part because
the environmental costs
imposed collectively on the tax payer by large
monocultures are not internalised into the price
of food, but are instead billed to the tax payer,
to be compensated for by public money.
So this
mismatch is a major difficulty in making the transition to
agroecology.
- Disbelief amongst elites about the virtues of
agroecological approaches to farming and about
the ability for agroecology to meet the challenges of
tomorrow. This disbelief is to a large extent a self-
fulfilling prophecy: because we don’t believe enough
in the alternative of agroecology, we do not invest
in those techniques, we do not invest in training
farmers in those techniques. We continue to subsidise
access to fossil fuels and energy for farmers, and we
delay the moment when that transition will become
inevitable. As a result we don’t give agroecology the
chance to prove itself and to develop as an alternative
on a large scale. Linked to this disbelief is the power
exercised upon decision-making by large players,
particularly agrochemical companies, who do not have
much interest in promoting this transition towards
agroecology and who sometimes exercise de facto veto
power on political decisions. In the current context
we hear increasingly neo-Malthusian discourses
on the need to increase production by 60 or 70%
by 2050, to meet the need of 9 billion people; this
is not wrong but it oversimplifies the issue.
It
does not take into account the need to examine our
consumption practices and the waste of agricultural
products, nor the need to question our lifestyle and
how we overuse the limited resources of our planet.
Proceedings of the Conference