A report from GRAIN discusses how agriculture can put back much of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the soil.
Soils contain enormous amounts of carbon, mostly in the form of organic matter. The report shows that industrial agriculture, and thus the global food system, has spewed large amounts of this carbon into the atmosphere. Policies focused on restoring soil fertility - restoring the organic matter in the soil which has been lost - would make a huge contribution to resolving the rapidly escalating climate crisis.
In 50 years, soils could capture about 450 billion tons of carbon dioxide - more than two thirds of the current excess in the atmosphere.
The role of the global industrial food system in creating the climate crisis has been seriously underestimated, says the report. Calculations reveal the global food system is the most important single factor behind global warming, responsible for almost half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. This includes oil-dependent industrial farming, together with the expansion of the meat industry, the destruction of world's savannahs and forests to grow agricultural commodities, the use of fossil-fuel energy to transport and process food, and the extensive use of chemical fertilizers.
To transform the world's food system so that it cools the planet rather than heats it up would require fundamental changes in how we produce food. The current trends towards increased land concentration and expansion of industrial farming would have to be reversed. Only if millions of small farmers and farming communities have access to land and can count on policies to support their livelihoods, can we restore the billions of tons of organic matter that the world's soils have lost.
"The evidence is irrefutable. If we can change the way we farm and the way we produce and distribute food, then we have a powerful solution for combating the climate crisis. There are no technical hurdles to achieving these results, it is only a matter of political will," says Henk Hobbelink, coordinator of GRAIN.
Fertilizers & Climate Change
Soil experts and farmers have long known that chemical fertilizers destroy soil fertility by destroying organic matter. When chemical fertilizers are applied, soluble nutrients become immediately available in huge amounts, provoking a surge of microbial activity and multiplication. This increased microbial activity, in turn, speeds up the decomposition of organic matter, as it is consumed at high speed, and CO2 is released into the atmosphere. When nutrients from fertilizers become scarce, most micro-organisms die, and the soil is left with less organic matter. As this process has been going on for decades, and is reinforced by tilling, soil organic matter is depleted. It is made worse because the same technological approach that promotes chemical fertilizers rules that crop residues should be discarded or burnt, not put back into the soil.
