Windhoek
The theme for the 2015 National Horticulture Days is, ‘Soil – building a productive, food secure Namibia from the ground up’.
Namibia’s theme follows on the 68th United Nations General Assembly Declaration of 2015 as the International Year of Soils (IYS). The IYS 2015 aims to increase awareness and understanding of the importance of soil for food security and essential ecosystem functions. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is nominated to implement the IYS 2015 and will also participate in the 2015 National Horticulture Day.
El Niño brings dry conditions to Southern Africa that threaten food crops and food security. On the other hand La Nina brings weather that is wetter than usual. The cause of these weather patterns is higher and lower temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. As the temperatures rise and fall, air currents become drier (El Niño) or wetter (La Nina). This year’s El Niño is described as ‘extreme’, but scientists believe that more extreme La Nina and El Niño events will be experienced in future. This will be a challenge to horticulture in particular.
Landowners around the world are now engaged in an orgy of soil destruction so intense that, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the world on average has just 60 more years of growing crop.
To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, 6m hectares of new farmland will be needed every year. Instead, 12m hectares a year are lost through soil degradation. We wreck it, then move on, trashing rainforests and other precious habitats as we go.
“Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters, making them available to plants. That handful the Vedic master showed his disciples contains more micro-organisms than all the people who have ever lived on Earth. Yet we treat it like, well, dirt,” the article states.
“The techniques that were supposed to feed the world threaten us with starvation. A paper just published in the journal Anthropocene analyses the undisturbed sediments in an 11th-century French lake. It reveals that the intensification of farming over the past century has increased the rate of soil erosion sixtyfold,” the FAO says.
Now, globalisation ensures that this disaster is reproduced everywhere. In its early stages, globalisation enhances resilience: people are no longer dependent on the vagaries of local production. But as it proceeds, spreading the same destructive processes to all corners of the Earth, it undermines resilience, as it threatens to bring down systems everywhere.
“The avoidance of this issue is perhaps the greatest social silence of all. Our insulation from the forces of nature has encouraged a belief in the dematerialisation of our lives, as if we no longer subsist on food and water, but on bits and bytes. This is a belief that can be entertained only by people who have never experienced serious hardship, and who are therefore unaware of the contingency of existence.
“It’s not as if we are short of solutions. While it now seems that ploughing of any kind is incompatible with the protection of the soil, there are plenty of means of farming without it. Independently, in several parts of the world, farmers have been experimenting with zero-tillage (also known as conservation agriculture), often with extraordinary results.
“There are dozens of ways of doing it: we need never see bare soil again. But in the UK, as in most rich nations, we have scarcely begun to experiment with the technique, despite the best efforts of the magazine Practical Farm Ideas.
“The macho commitment to destructive short-termism appears to resist all evidence and all logic. Never mind life on Earth; we’ll plough on regardless,” the article concludes.