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Why soils matters
- A european perspective
There is today a debate within the international community
as to how to re-launch agriculture, how to increase the
ability of agriculture to satisfy a growing demand for agricul-
tural products. The first approach is the classic, conventional
approach which insists on using more external inputs.
Agroecology is the other approach, which recognizes the
natural interaction between plants, trees, animals...
Rather than simplifying nature, this means recognising the
complexity of nature and adapting agricultural practices to
this complexity, to play with nature as an ally rather than
reducing it to a chemical formula.’
Olivier de Schutter
- The Green Revolution leads to pollution as a result of nitrogen run-off. The
pollution of waters leads in some cases to algal blooms and, dead zones
(e.g, in the Gulf of Mexico), with fish stocks being depleted as a result.
- This approach leads to a high level of GHG emissions, due to the use of
nitrogen-based fertilisers. It is a very dangerous gas contributing to global
warming.
- Overuse of pesticides and fertilisers may worryingly affect the biological life
in the soil and reduce the ability for the soil to remain fertile without these
additions.
So we are now in a paradoxical situation where we have soil slowly
dying and yet we try to bring them back to life by re-injecting
chemicals. We thereby risk making it even more difficult for the soil
to support biological life.
It is a delicate situation because some soils are simply dead. In order to
re-create biomass you need to inject these chemicals in order then for
agroecological technics to be able to develop.
Proceedings of the Conference