60% of the continent’s land is in an unhealthy state, globally soil degradation costs over €5.5 trillion annually
Restoring soil health can bring from 6 to 27 euros for every euro invested
Against the backdrop of drought and flood disasters, inaction to restore the health on the soil increasingly leaves farmland waterlogged or heat-cracked.
Extreme weather has made 2024 disastrous for European farmers. Stressed by climate change, a vicious cycle of droughts and floods, winter heatwaves and late frosts have ravaged farmland. In recent months, cows have died of thirst in Sicily, wheat fields have become bogged down in France, and wine grapes have shriveled, writes Politico.
However, it is surprising that almost no one talks about the degradation of the soil, neither as a recovery goal nor as a means of easing the crisis, said Benedict Bössel, a German agricultural economist and farmer from the province of Brandenburg.
“We’ve had this crazy amount of flooding that’s so closely related to ignoring the fact that soil is actually something that takes up water and stores water,” Boesel said.
A centimeter of topsoil takes decades to reform as humus, making it an impractical target for post-crisis aid. Enforcing land consolidation measures – such as less use of agrochemicals and more buffer strips, hedgerows and cover crops – are politically toxic (think tractor protests), and politicians are reluctant to step up incentives.
Meanwhile, the EU is still trying to pass its first soil law.
Instead of a soil health regulation, the weak Soil Monitoring and Sustainability Directive appeared last year. She grew even weaker as she made her way through the legislative process, thinning out at almost every stage. So what’s happening to Europe’s soils — and are we doing enough?
Innovative science
Under the thin line at our feet lies the fragile future of European agriculture. Around 60 percent of Europe’s land is in an unhealthy state, threatened by multiple degrading processes, including erosion, compaction, salinization, pollution, biodiversity loss and sealing, according to the EU’s soil strategy.
“It clearly has a direct impact on agricultural productivity and, therefore, on the food system and food security,” said a European Commission expert working on the soil strategy. “Water erosion is one of the worst degradation processes that we have very high levels of.”
“So it’s really about removing topsoil, which is really the richest in organic matter, which plays a key role in nutrient and water cycling,” he said. “Soil biodiversity also plays a major role in nutrient cycling and crop availability by limiting soil compaction, for example root growth and water infiltration.”
In short, healthy soils are the key to a good harvest. This was partly demonstrated by this year’s painfully low yields. Waterlogging and drought have pushed wheat production in France to a 40-year low, dropping it out of the world’s top five grain exporters and ceding market share to grain superpower Russia.
Globally, soil degradation costs more than €5.5 trillion a year — more than 8 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) — although restoration could bring in €6 to €27 for every euro invested, according to a new report published by the movement Save Soil. Within the EU, the resulting annual costs amount to tens of billions of euros, six times the cost of the action.
In March, the European Environment Agency identified soil health as a “substantial” risk of “critical” urgency in its first climate risk assessment. The agency predicts a high chance of worsening erosion and aridity over the next 15 years, but also a medium chance of widespread soil degradation causing “significant cascading impacts on food production, water supplies and biodiversity” by 2100.
According to Bössel, the German farmer, it is clear that the current food industry policy is only making the situation worse. “There is no future in which we can continue as we have been.”
Agricultural dependence
The Soil Monitoring Directive is a case of managed expectations. The commission was due to propose an EU law on soil health during the last term, its second attempt after Slovenian environment commissioner Janez Potocnik tried and failed from 2009 to 2014. Yet the growing backlash against the Green Deal meant , that Brussels came up with a timid bill.
“Both the European Parliament and the Council have significantly weakened many elements of the Commission’s proposal” since then, said Caroline Heinzel, associate soil policy officer at the European Environment Bureau, a non-governmental organization. “None of the institutions have succeeded in turning this law into a robust instrument … with legally binding targets and mandatory national soil health plans.”
However, Heinzel is careful not to bash the law too much, as he is still pioneering the first soil monitoring system across the bloc. Given the strong polarization in EU food policy, baby steps are probably best, says Praveena Sridhar, chief science officer at the Save Soil movement.
“You need a very strong ecosystem to support farmers” and “you need to have interventions that are simple, easy to adopt,” she said. Getting farmers to switch to soil-friendly practices is necessarily slow — “it’s almost like weaning someone off an addiction,” she laughed.
In this regard, the mediocrity of the directive helps. Farm unions were constructively critical of it, compared to the unbridled anger they showed at other Green Deal legislation, such as the controversial Nature Restoration Act, the revised Industrial Emissions Directive and the Pesticide Reduction Regulation – the last of which was brutally scrapped .
What does the industry want? “Support, support, support,” said Niall Curley, senior soil policy adviser at farm lobby Copa-Cogeca. “That means increased educational support, increased financial support and increased access to the tools that enable better management.” Farmers know best how to restore their land and should own the data collected, he explained.
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