How Global issues and Soil Security Link with Policy.

Soil is vital for solving the top big issues for the globe; food security, water security, energy security, climate regulation and biodiversity. Humanity relies on the ongoing provision of ecosystem goods and services, and this can only be achieved with a soil resource that is utilized according to its capability, and managed properly to maintain its condition.

 The five dimensions of soil security provide a useful framework for the development of policy that seeks to achieve these outcomes. The dimensions help ensure that soil policy addresses not only the biophysical aspects of soil management, but also the social and economic, thus covering the three pillars of sustainable development.

It is clear that soil must be included in addressing these major concerns for humanity at the international level. However implementation of soil security to achieve the required solutions is an issue of national, state and local policy, and ultimately down to the policy of the farmer at the field level, which can be referred to as ‘field policy’.

 Agriculture land management is key to the achievement of soil security. And yet, soil has become disconnected from agricultural policy, at the international level, right through to the national level and often at state and local level. Soil policy has often become an issue of natural resource management. Agriculture is seen as the problem, and not the solution.

 The reality is that agricultural land management today has an integrated approach to soil and productivity improvement. That is the aim of soil security – the win-win of improved soil condition for natural resource and productivity outcomes.

 Three case studies will be used to show this win-win can be achieved:

 It is time to put the agricultural failures of the past behind us, and to develop agriculture policy for the future, to support agriculture that will secure the soil that will feed us, clothe us and provide us with fresh water, clean energy and a regulated climate.