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soil through instruments such as a mandatory soil status report to be provided by landowners wanting to sell land, was withdrawn by the European Commission.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.
