Does soil matter? As 2015 has been chosen by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as the International Year of Soils, we can confidently say yes, it does. The main goal of this initiative, according to the organisation, is to “raise full awareness among civil society and decision makers about the profound importance of soil for human life”.
Working on these premises, the Green/European Free Alliance political group at the European Parliament has organised a public conference entitled “Why Soil Matters? A European Perspective” on Wednesday, 18 November 2015. One of the aims of the conference was to bring the issue back on the European political agenda after the failure of last year, when the proposal for a Soil Framework Directive, which would have provided binding legal protection to soil through instruments such as a mandatory soil status report to be provided by landowners wanting to sell land, was withdrawn by the European Commission.
It is still too early to judge if the organisers succeeded in securing this goal. As one should expect from an event organised and promoted by the Green/EFA group, the presence of an ideological drive behind the various panels is noticeable: this, however, does nothing to detract from their significance and interest, and I personally learned a lot about soil, its importance and the intertwined environmental, economic and political interests around it.
The absence of the keynote speaker, environmental activist and writer Vandana Shiva, was in no way detrimental to the overall quality of the event. She was replaced by Olivier de Schutter, former (2008-2014) United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, who offered a very informative and passionate speech on agroecology, describing its advantages over the current dominant approaches to agriculture and offering suggestions on how to overcome the heavy resistance that corporations and political institutions oppose to its dissemination.
Some of the strengths of the conference were its immediateness and accessibility to the non-specialist (see for example the very effective presentation video) and the wealth of informative material and leaflets available; by far its most successful feature was however the wide array of participants and its well-thought structure: the organisers were able to bring together a variety of different speakers from different backgrounds: politicians, scientists, executives of international organisations, farmers, activists and even artists.
Both of the conference panels, introduced by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), featured communications on a sub-topic followed a response by representatives of the international institutions involved in soil-related decision making. Such a structure allowed the public to be presented with data, experiences and analyses before hearing how the institutions are currently tackling the issues at hand. This combination gave the panel a livelier rhythm, while the mid-conference story-telling performance by artist Barbara Geiger offered a nice moment of reflection to everyone present.
The speakers themselves offered information on how and why soil, and especially agricultural land, is by now severely degraded, why this is a tremendous problem for humanity and the environment, and how we can invert the trend with sound agricultural practices in the years to come. A link was also drawn with the conference to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change and the 2015 Climate Conference, which will take place in Paris from November 30 to December 11 and hopes to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the nations of the world. Attention was focused on the close relationship between soil and climate, showing how land use and agricultural techniques, which now respond almost entirely to market dynamics, have an important role to play in the fight to slow down global warming.
This conference helped us understand why and how soil matters and what should and could be done to protect soil from exploitation and destruction. Anyway we have still in mind an open question: may the European Union show that it really matters by becoming a world leading player on this issue? The ball is now up to the european institutions.
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