Now we must work together to put our goals into action.
Speech by Cem Oezdemir, Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture, at the GFFA Agriculture Ministers' Conference 2021
Fellow Agriculture Ministers,
High Representatives of international organisations,
Viewers from around the world, ladies and gentlemen
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the Agriculture Ministers’ Conference today - – the annual political highlight of the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture – the GFFA.
This is a premiere for me and I am proud, as the German agriculture minister, to be part of this international community.
It is a great wish of mine to have close international cooperation between the agriculture ministers, as we are facing huge challenges worldwide, which we can only tackle by working together, particularly the global climate crisis.
- This crisis has led to droughts, storms and floods – worldwide.
- Eastern Africa is currently facing its worst famine for 35 years due to an ongoing drought.
- The soaring costs for inputs, such as fertiliser and seed, are hitting many farmers hard.
- Livestock keepers in some countries are confronted with animal diseases, such as the African Swine Fever.
- And on top of this there is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This all makes it more difficult to achieve the important goal of a world without hunger by 2030 and to implement the othersustainability goals of the 2030 Agenda.
The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit provided some important impetus for sustainable food systems.
Now we must work together to put our goals into action.
Soil protection, sustainable land management and fair access to land
It is therefore an important signal that the 14th GFFA is devoted to the role of land and soil in fulfilling the right to food.
Soil – that may sound at first like something that can be taken for granted. If you went to a Berlin shopping centre and asked someone whether they had thought of soil today, you would no doubt receive some strange looks. Unless, of course, you happened to be speaking to someone from the agricultural sector. As soil is, for most people, something that is naturally there, something that you don’t need to bother about.
In German, there’s the saying “to pull the ground out from underneath someone’s feet”. Which means taking away someone’s base, someone’s foundation. In life, we need ground under our feet.
And healthy ground - healthy soils - are the foundation for all forms of agriculture. And consequently a vital prerequisite for fulfilling the right to food, conserving biodiversity and combating the climate crisis.
The sustainable management of our soils is a key element in containing the climate crisis and conserving biodiversity. With soil protection and humus formation, we can help curb the climate crisis and improveadaptation to climate change.
At the same time we must preventfurther degradation of our soils. A fifth of land worldwide is degraded. That affects over 3.2 billion people across the globe.
We need innovative solutions and long-term investments in order to restore the soils so that they fulfil their important functions for humans, climate and nature. It remains our ambitious goal to achieve worldwide land degradation neutrality by 2030.
Across the globe, a lot of agricultural land and valuable ecosystems continue to be lost due to soil sealing for housing development and infrastructure measures. This leads to the loss of 10 million hectares of fertile arable land each year. Soil sealing must be minimised and, wherever possible, reversed.
Another aspect is the conservation and the protection of soil health, soil fertility and soil biodiversity. To this end we need sustainable soil and land management, for example by reducing the use of plant protection agents to the minimum amount necessary, by using fertilisers more sustainably and by recording more soil data. To achieve this, we urgently need more investment, breeding, research and digital solutions.
But what is essential is to have fair access to land and the protection of land use rights. And we must support States in establishing rules for the purchase and use of land if such rules are not yet in place. Because we can see that, in many countries, land is being bought by investors who are not from the agricultural sector. This land can then no longer be managed by farmers. Often the young generation can then no longer finance the high land prices from what they earn.
Last Saturday I was called upon and encouraged by a number of civil-society organisations to take actionagainst this concentration of land and against land speculation. I will be glad to do that, together with you, esteemed colleagues, as agricultural land should be used first and foremostto feed people – today, but also in the future as well, and to this end the land needs to be managed sustainably.
Conclusion
Esteemed colleagues, this is our joint task and this task is huge!
Everything I have just spoken about is a necessary prerequisite for being able to conserve the valuable ecosystem of soil and manage the land. Of course, all measures to protect our soils must always be site-adapted.
There is no “one size fits all” solution.
But the threat to land and soil is a global problem – and it is important that we, as the international community of agriculture ministers, agree to protect them. However, the measures which have been presented over the last few days in the many different GFFA events and by some of you in your video messages must be implemented locally.
In German, there is another saying: “Prepare the ground for something” – that is, lay the foundation, make a start – and I hope that this conference will do that.
I am very confident that we can all succeed in this!
That is my aim, and I look forward to working with you!
location: Berlin
