Losing the soils that feed us

Dirty work: We often dismiss soil as the dirt below our feet, yet it is a vital resource for food production as well as a highly complex and insuffi ciently understood ecosystem. The image shows farmers in Kyuso, Kenya terracing part of their land in order to minimise erosion losses. (Photo: ©FAO/Thomas Hug.) The year 2015, apart from being a happier time when a Trump presidency was only imaginable in the framework of The Simpsons, was also declared the International Year of Soils by the United Nations General Assembly. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) campaigned to raise awareness globally, organising events in many different countries and celebrating small indications of progress such as the fact that soils are now mentioned in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were adopted in 2015 and replaced the Millennium Development Goals, although they are not headlining one of the 17 main goals. Some model projects were launched in developing countries and well-meaning coverage in media and scientifi c journals duly followed. However, a major U-turn in the way we look after the ground beneath our feet has failed to materialise. Since then, the post-truth, anti-expert revolutionary events of 2016 have made progress towards sustainability perhaps even less likely (Curr. Biol. (2017) 27, R1–R4). Nevertheless, a drastic change of course is urgently required, as demonstrated in the report Status of the World’s Soil Resources, which the FAO released at the end of the Year of Soils (http://bit.ly/1OT6Txx).