Recognizing soils as systemically important: Why regenerative agriculture is crucial for food security and peace

We have a special fund for the Bundeswehr, one for infrastructure and the climate, but what we don't have is the political willingness to treat intact soils and therefore healthy food and drinking water as systemically important. We actually all learned the term “systemically relevant” with the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the World Bank, 40 percent of agricultural land worldwide is considered degraded. One thing is clear, and research shows this: Given the degradation of agricultural soils and a disturbed water balance, there is enormous potential for conflict worldwide.

When soils around the world can no longer produce enough, hunger, political instability and war increase. The FAO warns that 90 percent of the Earth's fertile soil could be at risk by 2050. In doing so, they give us an assessment of the security situation with regard to food security that could not be more alarming for all of us.

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Conventional agriculture has so far benefited

Conventional agriculture still produces enough food, but its mechanical and chemical invasive interventions in the soil destroy the soil life that is essential for the fertility of the earth. Bacteria, worms and fungal cultures are our laboratory technicians and chefs for the “buffet” that serves our vegetables and fruit. Only they make the large number of nutrients present in the soil available to the fine roots of the plants in the necessary resolution. Ultimately, with erosion from wind and water, we lose the soil from which we live.

Nevertheless, it is conventional agriculture that benefits most from EU subsidies. The greening reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy is hardly having any effect. If the financing mechanisms of the Common Agricultural Policy were consistently used for agri-environmental protection according to the principle of “public money for public services”, existing environmental problems in agriculture could be significantly reduced. And agriculture would not contribute to climate change and global warming, but would reduce it. The promotion of organic farming came too late and was too half-hearted.

“Healthier” agriculture protects soils

No one can now claim in good faith that there is no urgency to practice healthier agriculture, worldwide. The number of scientific studies on this is now overwhelming. Climate-resilient regenerative agriculture could prevent the foreseeable food crisis and the associated immense potential for conflict in the medium and long term. It's about agroforestry methods and stronger ground cover, i.e. about protecting the soil with intermediate crops and hedges and binding carbon through the reproduction of plant material in the sense of net-zero agriculture. Such agriculture can play an important role as a carbon sink - and thus contribute to reducing global warming.

Our European vegetable and fruit regions, such as Italy, Greece and Spain, are in continuous crisis mode when it comes to agriculture. There is no hunger here (yet). But the food prices that have been rising for years are a reminder that the rest of the world cannot continue to feed us like this. When part of the Ukrainian wheat harvest was lost due to the war, we got an idea of ​​how things can turn out to our disadvantage.

In West Africa, where I have worked and partly lived for 20 years, climate researchers say food insecurity will continue to increase. We already feel it. For three years we have been trying to build climate-resilient regenerative agriculture in Guinea that produces healthy, nutritious food. We build up the soil and protect it from heat and drying out by shading it with fruit trees, for example, so that it becomes fertile - and will still be fertile in ten years - and can hold water. It's a race against time. And it's hard work in all weathers.

We learn something new every day, see another challenge and look for and find a new, helpful answer to it. Initiatives like ours exist on every continent. The “Global Tipping Points Report 2025” calls them “seeds of systemic change”. Such initiatives are important, but to have a truly global impact they require solidarity, resources and political will.

Behind the demand for a special fund for “climate-resilient regenerative agriculture” and thus for healthy food and a healthy living environment, all people across camps should actually be able to unite.