My Lords, I added my name to this amendment and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on the way that she presented it and added a few more points from the noble Lord, Lord Curry, in his absence. Now, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, has spelled out most of what I was about to say. The reality is that this is a very straightforward amendment and one which would be easy, sensible and logical for the Minister to accept.
In relation to the back end of the remarks by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, Defra really has no excuse now. I have to admit that, 20 years ago, when I was a Defra Minister, soil management was not very high on the agenda; it was there, and it was vaguely there in the common agricultural policy and agro-environment
schemes, but it was very low priority. And yet it is such a central issue to life on this earth and the future of the human race that we have a soil—both cultivated and in the wild—that will continue to be sustainable and be resilient enough to provide the multitudinous plants that sustain life for ourselves and for almost every other species on earth.
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It is very odd that soil is not included in this simple subsection. The Minister should recognise that what has been obvious to farmers through the centuries and to gardeners every day—that we have to maintain the health of the soil—has been set back by practices over the last 50 or 60 years. It is not just pollution of the soil, loss to urbanisation and industrialised agriculture; it is also what we put on the soil through cheaper chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Some soil mismanagement is ancient, such as overploughing and trying to extract too many harvests, but some is very modern. We are capable of stopping it now and beginning to reverse this trend.
As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, the horrifying thing is that there has been huge research over the last 20 or so years, in Britain and around the world, showing that the soil in almost every habitat has seriously declined and is continuing to decline. In northern Europe, if we carry on like this, we will perhaps have only 50 more harvests sustainable by the nature of our soil. People who are born today will be only in mid-life by the time that crisis hits us here in prosperous, climate- friendly northern Europe.
Look at sub-Saharan Africa. If we are not careful, and if COP 26 and the other mechanisms the international community has do not give us a lead on soil, what was one of the most fertile areas of the world will go the way of north Africa several hundred years ago. That is a very real threat to us and to biodiversity.
As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, has also underlined, soil is a very important part of our fight to reduce carbon. If soil is incapable of sequestering and retaining carbon, whatever targets we have on carbon reduction become meaningless.
I plead with the Minister simply to accept this amendment. It must be part of the agenda and should be upfront in this clause as a priority issue to address. I believe that, today, he could unite the House in accepting this amendment.