How to Enumerate Soil Capacity Regarding Human Health: Examples and Ideas.

Soil security refers maintenance and improvement of soil resources and it is closely related with food, water, and energy security. Human health is also a major concern in any occasions and consequently, food quality and consumption become an important issue. For this reason, main purpose of this research was to enumerate soil’s capacity to meet the nutrient requirement for human health in Korea. Main component for assessing national’s nutrient value were the national dietary reference intakes (DRI), total amounts of crops and food consumed, total annual crop productions and national-wide soil fertility values. The national soil map for the selected soil attributes was constructed using web-GIS tool and necessary components to calculate the nutrition value were extracted to use. The national nutrition requirements for total population were calculated from the DRI and mass of nutrients that soil can supply to plant or human was calculated based on national average concentration of nutrient and cultivation areas. Total production and consumption of food and crops were estimated from the national D/B system. Estimated results showed that nitrogen in Korean soil could meet 32-48% of the protein demands by Korean and about 28-69% of potassium in soil could supply to Korean diet to meet the recommendation or supplying nutrients intakes. On the contrary, all of calcium and magnesium needed by Korean were totally provided by soil. Main conclusion of this research was that soil plays an important role to provide nutrient for human health and soil security need to be extended for soil welfare.