National dialogue on efficient nutrient management for improving soil health: new delhi soil health declaration-2015

Abstract

Soil is the most wondrous gift of nature to humankind. It provides us the basic needs like food, nutrition and good environment. In order that soils provide ecosystem services effectively and on a sustainable basis, it is essential that they remain healthy. Some attributes like fertility, compaction, erodibility and bio-wealth are the measures of soil health. Basically, the soil organic carbon (SOC) supports and sustains soil health. Often led by faulty land use and gross mismanagement/over-exploitation, the SOC content gets declined. This sets in motion a vicious cycle of events that spark fall in soil health. Incidentally, weakening of SOC is not new and its trail can be traced to the entire 10,000 years old history of agriculture. What is new is the intensity of decline, which rather got accelerated since Green Revolution period starting in mid-1960s. The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) has estimated that since then, world compromised quality of ~2 billion ha good farmland to degradation – all of which is caused by anthropogenic activities. The problem does not stop here, since every year 2 to 5 million ha land is added to this category; a loss of nearly 10 ha good land/minute! In terms of food grain production, wearing down of soil health costs an annual loss of ~20 million tons or 1% of the global annual food grain production. Worldwide, 1.5 billion people and 42% of the poorest of the poor live on degraded lands. Share of India in global degraded land area is about 10% and of population that thrives on degraded land is 17%. Confronted with the persistent mortification of soil health, United Nations (UN) declared the year 2015 as an International Year of Soils (IYS). The primary intent of IYS was to raise awareness among all stakeholders on the crucial role healthy soils play in sustaining world food secure and climate change safe. In view of this, TAAS in collaboration with ICAR, CIMMYT, IPNI, CSISA and FAI steered a National Dialogue on ‘Efficient Nutrient Management for Improving Soil Health’. By design, the discussions largely centered around fertilizers, since without their effective and efficient use, sustaining food security is rather not possible and with their ongoing inefficient management halting any decay in soil health and mitigating climate change effects is not possible. Drawn from national and international institutions/organizations/agencies, about 150 scientists, administrators, policy makers, professionals from the fertilizer industry, representatives of the civil society organizations and farmers participated in the two days dialogue.