Europe’s soil emergency

BRUSSELS — Extreme weather has made 2024 a ruinous year for European farmers. Charged by climate change, a savage cycle of droughts and floods, winter heat waves and late frosts has devastated agricultural areas. In recent months, cows died of thirst in Sicily, wheat fields turned marshy in France and wine grapes shriveled in Germany.
The damage from September’s inundations of Poland, Czechia and Hungary hasn’t yet been calculated, but the European Commission last week committed €10 billion in cohesion cash to help restoration. Countries are dipping into the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)’s €450 million emergency reserve and the European Union Solidarity Fund (EUSF) is working overtime to aid repairs.
Astonishingly, however, almost no one is talking about soil degradation, either as a restoration target or crisis facilitator, said Benedikt Bösel, a German agricultural economist and arable farmer from the state of Brandenburg.
“We’ve had this insane number of floods that is so closely related to disregarding the fact that soil is actually something that takes up water and stores water,” Bosel said, as his wheat, maize, rye and spelt sweltered in recent unseasonal heat. If “you produce in a way that you ignore that capability, then that’s what you get,” he argued. 
The omertà around earth is partly understandable. One centimeter of topsoil takes decades to re-form, making it an impractical object for post-crisis assistance. Mandating measures to shore up land — like less agrochemical use and more insect strips, hedgerows and cover crops — are politically toxic (think tractor protests), while policymakers are reluctant to fatten incentives.
Meanwhile, the EU is still trying to pass its first soil law.
Downgraded from a soil health regulation, the Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience was born weak last year and has grown weaker still as it wiggles its way through the legislative pipeline, shedding skin at nearly every stage. So what is happening to Europe’s soils — and are we doing enough?
Under the thin strip at our feet lies the frail future of European agriculture. Some 60 percent of European ground is in an unhealthy condition, threatened by a host of degrading processes including erosion, compaction, salinization, pollution, biodiversity loss and sealing, according to the EU’s Soil Strategy. 
“It directly impacts, obviously, on agricultural productivity and also, consequently on the food system and food security,” said a European Commission expert working on the soil strategy, who was granted anonymity as they were not authorized to comment on the record. “Water erosion is one of the worst degradation processes [for which] we have very high rates.”
“So that is really about removing the topsoil layer, which is really the most rich in organic matter, that plays a key role in nutrient and water cycles,” they told POLITICO. “Also, soil biodiversity has a major role in nutrient cycling and availability for crops [while] soil compaction limits, for instance, root growth and water infiltration.”
In short, healthy soils are key to good harvests. That was partly showcased by this year’s painfully low yields, particularly in France. There, soggy sod — combined with volatile temperatures — has dragged wheat production to a 40-year low, knocking Paris from the list of the world’s top five grain exporters and ceding market share to Russia, a cereal superpower.
Globally soil degradation costs upward of €5.5 trillion per year — over 8 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP) — even though restoration can yield €6 to €27 for every euro invested, according to a new report published by the Save Soil movement. Within the EU, the resulting annual costs run into the tens of billions of euros, six times more than the price of action.
In March, the European Environment Agency identified soil health as a “substantial” risk with a “critical” urgency in its first climate risk assessment. The agency predicted a high chance of worsening erosion and aridity in the coming 15 years, but also a medium chance of widespread soil breakdown causing “significant cascading impacts on food production, water supply and biodiversity” by 2100.
According to Bösel, the German farmer, it’s clear current agri-food policy is only worsening the situation. “There is no future where we can continue as we are.”
The soil monitoring directive is a case of managed expectations. The Commission was supposed to propose an EU soil health law during the last mandate, its second attempt after Slovenian Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik tried and failed from 2009 to 2014. Yet a growing Green Deal backlash meant the Berlaymont came out with a timid bill.
“Both the European Parliament and the Council significantly weakened many elements of the Commission’s proposal” since then, said Caroline Heinzel, associate policy officer for soil at the European Environmental Bureau, an NGO. “None of the institutions have managed to turn this law into [a] robust tool … with legally binding targets and mandatory national soil health plans.”
That said, Heinzel is cautious not to bash the law too much, as it is still pioneering in creating the first bloc-wide observation system for soils. Given the bitter polarization in EU agri-food policy, baby steps are probably best, argued Praveena Sridhar, chief science officer at the Save Soil movement.
“You need a very strong farmer support ecosystem” and “you need to have interventions that are simplified, easy to adopt,” she said. Getting farmers to transition to soil-friendly practices is necessarily slow — “it’s almost like weaning somebody off a certain addiction,” she chuckled.
In that respect, the directive’s mediocrity helps. Agricultural unions have been constructively critical toward it, compared to the unbridled anger they demonstrated toward other Green Deal legislation, like the contentious Nature Restoration Law, revised Industrial Emissions Directive and pesticide reduction regulation — the last of which was brutally axed. 
What does the industry want? “Support, support, support,” said Niall Curley, senior policy adviser for soils at farmer lobby Copa-Cogeca. “That means increased educational supports, increased financial supports and increased access to the tools which enable better management.” Farmers know best how to restore their land and they should own the data collected, he explained.
It’s a delicate debate but, with three-way negotiations expected as early as October, the Hungarian presidency of the Council of the EU has made the directive a policy priority, seeking to earn some green points without disrupting the agri-status quo too much. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. On the one hand, speed has environmental advantages, reflected Sridhar.
But on the other hand, she said, experience shows durable change more often involves “a 1-degree turn rather than a 180-degree turn.”