*CA-CoP* *CONSERVATION AGRICULTURE COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE*
*for sustainable production intensification*
Dear Subscribers,
Please see herebelow an article in the Guardian "*Ploughing on Regardless*"
by George Monbiot.
Also, the following is the link to his other article in the Guardian "*We’re
treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, as our lives depend on it*".
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life
*Amir Kassam *
*Moderator*
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: www.fao.org/ag/ca
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: George Monbiot <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 7:04 AM
Subject: Ploughing On Regardless - monbiot.com
To: [log in to unmask]
Ploughing On Regardless - monbiot.com <http://www.monbiot.com>
------------------------------
Ploughing On Regardless <http://www.monbiot.com/2015/03/25/3703/>
Posted: 25 Mar 2015 05:58 AM PDT
Almost all other issues are superficial by comparison to soil loss. So why
don’t we talk about it?
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 25th March 2015
Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of climate
breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no obesity
crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely, then, we would be out of major
danger? Sorry. Even if everything else were miraculously fixed, we’re
knackered if we don’t address an issue considered so marginal and
irrelevant that you can go for months without seeing it in a newspaper.
It’s literally and – it seems – metaphorically, beneath us. To judge by its
absence from the media, most journalists consider it unworthy of
consideration. But all human life depends on it. We knew this long ago, but
somehow it has been forgotten. As a Sanscrit text written in around 1500 BC
<http://www.unccd.int/en/programmes/Event-and-campaigns/WDCD/Pages/Proverbs-on-land-and-soil-.aspx>
noted, “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it
will grow our food, our fuel, and our shelter and surround us with beauty.
Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it”.
The issue hasn’t changed, but we have. Landowners around the world are now
engaged in an orgy of soil destruction – so intense that, according to the
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world, on average, has just 60
more years of growing crops
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/>.
Even in Britain, which is spared the tropical downpours that so quickly
strip exposed soil from the land, Farmers’ Weekly reports
<http://www.fwi.co.uk/news/only-100-harvests-left-in-uk-farm-soils-scientists-warn.htm>
that we have “only 100 harvests left”.
To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, 6 million hectares of
new farmland will be needed every year
<http://liquid-investments.com/six-million-hectares-of-additional-farmland-needed-2/>.
Instead, 12 million hectares a year are lost through soil degradation
<http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12571-015-0437-x#page-1>. We
wreck it, then move on, trashing rainforests and other precious habitats as
we go. Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms
the materials it encounters, making them available to plants. That handful
the Vedic master showed his disciples contains more micro-organisms than
all the people who have ever lived on Earth
<http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/>. Yet
we treat it like, well, dirt.
The techniques that were supposed to feed the world threaten us with
starvation. A paper just published in the journal Anthropocene
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221330541500003X>
analyses the undisturbed sediments in an 11th century French lake. It shows
that the intensification of farming over the last century has increased the
rate of soil erosion 60-fold.
Another paper, by researchers in the UK, shows that soil in allotments
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12254/full> – the
small patches in towns and cities that people cultivate by hand – contains
a third more organic carbon than agricultural soil and 25% more nitrogen.
This is one of the reasons why allotment holders produce between four and
11 times <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12254/full>
more food per hectare than do farmers.
Whenever I mention this issue, people ask, “but surely farmers have an
interest in looking after their soil?”. They do, and there are many
excellent cultivators who seek to keep their soil on the land. There are
also some terrible farmers, often absentees, who allow contractors to rip
their fields to shreds for the sake of a quick profit. Even the good ones
are hampered by an economic and political system that could scarcely be
better designed to frustrate them.
This is the International Year of Soils <http://www.fao.org/soils-2015/en/>,
but if you’ve missed it you’re not the only one. In January the Westminster
government published a new set of soil standards
<https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/397046/CCSoilPS_2015_v1_WEB.pdf>,
marginally better than those they replaced, but wholly unmatched to the
scale of the problem. There are no penalities for compromising our survival
except a partial witholding of public subsidies.
Yet even these pathetic standards are considered intolerable by the
National Farmers’ Union, that greeted them with bitter complaints
<http://www.fwi.co.uk/news/soil-rules-must-not-unfairly-penalise-farmers-say-nfu.htm>.
Sometimes the NFU seems to me to exist to champion bad practice and block
any possibility of positive change. Few sights are as gruesome as the glee
with which it celebrated the death last year of the European Soil Framework
Directive. This was the only measure that had the potential to arrest our
soil erosion crisis, yet the NFU, supported by successive British
governments, fought for eight years to destroy it
<http://www.fwi.co.uk/international-agriculture/nfu-tells-brussels-that-soil-framework-directive-is-unnecessary.htm>,
then crowed like a shedful of cockerels when it won
<http://www.fwi.co.uk/news/red-tape-victory-as-soils-rules-axed.htm>.
Looking back on this episode, we will see it as a parable of our times.
Soon after that, the business minister, Matthew Hancock, announced that
<https://www.gov.uk/government/news/businesses-get-greater-say-on-how-regulaton-is-enforced>
he was putting “business in charge of driving reform”: trade associations
would be able “to review enforcement of regulation in their sectors.” The
NFU was one the first two bodies granted this privilege. Hancock explained
that this “is all part of our unambiguously pro-business agenda to increase
the financial security of the British people.” But it doesn’t increase our
security, financial or otherwise. It undermines it.
The government’s Deregulation Bill
<http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/lbill/2014-2015/0058/lbill_2014-20150058_en_9.htm#pb16-l1g88>,
that has now almost completed its passage through parliament, will force
regulators – including those charged with protecting the fabric of the land
– to “have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth.” But
short-term growth at the expense of public protection compromises long-term
survival. This “unambiguously pro-business agenda” is deregulating us to
death.
There’s no longer even an appetite for studying the problem. Just one
university
<http://www.abdn.ac.uk/study/courses/undergraduate/science/plant_soil/> –
Aberdeen – now offers a degree in soil science. All the rest have been
closed down.
This is what topples civilisations. War and pestilence might kill large
numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the
soil and everything else goes with it.
Now globalisation ensures that this disaster is reproduced everywhere. In
its early stages, globalisation enhances resilience: people are no longer
dependent on the vagaries of local production. But as it proceeds,
spreading the same destructive processes to all corners of the Earth, it
undermines resilience, as it threatens to bring down systems everywhere.
Almost all other issues are superficial by comparison. What appear to be
great crises are slight and evanescent when held up against the steady but
unremarked trickling away of our subsistence.
The avoidance of this issue is perhaps the greatest social silence of all.
Our insulation from the forces of nature has encouraged a belief in the
dematerialisation of our lives, as if we no longer subsist on food and
water, but on bits and bytes. This is a belief that can be entertained only
by people who have never experienced serious hardship, and who are
therefore unaware of the contingency of existence.
It’s not as if we are short of solutions. While it now seems that ploughing
of any kind is incompatible with the protection of the soil
<http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520272903>, there are plenty of
means of farming without it. Independently, in several parts of the world,
farmers have been experimenting with zero-tillage (also known as
conservation agriculture), often with extraordinary results
<http://often%20with%20extraordinary%20results>. There are dozens of ways
of doing it: we need never see bare soil again. But in the UK, as in most
rich nations, we have scarcely begun to experiment with the technique,
despite the best efforts of the magazine Practical Farm Ideas
<http://www.farmideas.co.uk/> and other innovators.
Even better are some of the methods that fall under the heading of
permaculture <http://permaculturenews.org/>, that means working with
complex natural systems, rather than seeking to simplify or replace them.
Pioneers like Sepp Holzer <http://www.seppholzer.at/cms/index.php?id=69>
and Geoff Lawton <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzTHjlueqFI> have
achieved remarkable yields of fruit and vegetables in places that seemed
unfarmable: 1100m above sea level in the Austrian Alps, for example, or in
the salt-shrivelled Jordanian desert. But, though every year the
Westminster government spends £450m on research and development for
agriculture
<https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/227259/9643-BIS-UK_Agri_Tech_Strategy_Accessible.pdf>
– much of it on techniques that wreck our soils – there is not one mention
of permaculture either on the websites of the two major funding bodies
(NERC and BBSRC) or anywhere in the government’s entire web presence.
The macho commitment to destructive short-termism appears to resist all
evidence and all logic. Never mind life on Earth; we’ll plough on
regardless.
www.monbiot.com
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