£10m a year needed to ensure England’s soil is fit for farming, report warns
England must invest £10m a year to ensure its soil is productive enough to continue to grow food by the end of the century, a new report warns. Soil erosion and the pollution of watercourses is putting the entire £8bn farming industry at risk, according to the study from WWF, the Angling Trust and the Rivers Trust, which warns that failure to act now risks jeopardising future food production and the provision of clean water. Poor farming and land management practices are causing soil to be destroyed at approximately 10 times the rate it is being created, figures show, costing England and Wales £1.2bn a year. The report puts forward a model for land management where environmental and food production needs are given equal weight to reverse the decline. Soil quality is increasingly causing concern at a national and global level. In March, the UK government indicated that its agricultural bill, expected to be published later this year, would contain – for the first time – measures and targets to preserve and improve the health of the UK’s soils. The UN has recently warned that the world’s soils face exhaustion and depletion, with an estimated 60 harvests left before they are too degraded to feed the planet.
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on Apr 24 2018. Filed under News Worldwide.
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