NEWS ON SOIL AND EUROPEAN INSTITUTIONS: European Parliament resolution on land access!
Gepubliceerd op 17/12/2019
Good news: at the end of April and with a large majority, the European Parliament approved a resolution entitled ‘State of play of farmland concentration in the EU: how to facilitate the access to land for farmers’. Resolutions are not however legally binding: they are policymaking recommendations for Councils, Commission and EU Member States.
The abovementioned resolution (also attached below) indicates specific measures to undertake in order to facilitate land access for new generations of farmers.
We would like to draw your attention to point J of the resolution:
‘Whereas land is an increasingly scarce resource, which is non-renewable, and is the basis of the human right to healthy and sufficient food, and of many ecosystem services vital to survival, and should therefore not be treated as an ordinary item of merchandise; whereas land is, furthermore, doubly threatened, on the one hand by the loss of agricultural land through soil sealing, urban development, tourism, infrastructure projects, changes of use and afforestation and the spread of desertification caused by climate change, and, on the other hand, by the concentration of land in the hands of large-scale agricultural undertakings and investors from outside the farming sector; whereas, at the same time, it is the responsibility of the authorities to control and limit the loss of agriculture land through such activities’.
The entire Resolution is a framework for soil, territory and landscape. It also calls to establish an observatory service to collect data on the level of farmland concentration and tenure throughout the Union. The observatory ‘should be tasked with: recording purchase prices and rents, and the market behaviour of owners and tenants; observing the loss of farmland following changes in land use, trends in soil fertility and land erosion; and issuing regular reports’.
In other words, this resolution is a tool which should be referred to in all ongoing battles for the recognition of soil as a common and essential good for our lives and for future generations.
Source: Soil’s Angels - NEWSLETTER n. 36
