The soil conservation cause in India received a shot in the arm with the environmental NGO Greenpeace launching a nationwide 'Living Soils Campaign' on Tuesday.

The campaign aims at encouraging the reduced-dependence on chemical fertilisers, thereby preserving soil quality.

“The ‘Living Soils Campaign’ will bring out grass root level realities concerning soil… These will be reviewed using a participatory approach, basically to examine their capability to solve the soil degradation crisis and the impending food security threat” said Gopikrishna SR, Sustainable Agriculture Campaigner of the Greenpeace India.

Many agricultural experts and commentators believe that the Green Revolution of the 1960s had a heavy bearing on agricultural land with the overuse of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Decades later, the excessive use of chemicals largely remains characterstic of agricultural production in the country. Consequently, the experst say, the soil quality has declined with the chemistry of the soil in areas irretrievably altered.

Considering all this, the central government has also initiated a reform in its fertiliser subsidy policy which is a nutrient based subsidy (NBS) for chemical fertilizers.

The Greenpeace plans to do a series of social audits in selected districts of Assam, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Karnataka. “The information, observations, data, and insights collected from the grass roots will be compiled and submitted to the policy makers at the Centre and respective states,” Gopikrishna further stated.

Amiya Sharma, executive director, Rashtriyia Gramin Vikas Nidhi (RGVN), however, is critical of the Nutrient Based Subsidy (NBS) policy launched by the government. “The policy only supports chemical fertilizers, and hence fails in its own cause,” Sharma added.

India spends around Rs.50,000 crore on chemical fertilizer subsidies every year. “There is an urgent need to act on a comprehensive policy to support ecological fertilising practices. This is critical to ensure food security of the country,” Sharma said.

Several states like Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland, Sikkim, Mizoram and Uttarakhand have already initiated policies to support ecologically-sensible farming practices.

Greenpeace is also advocating a new policy for sustainable agricultural production. “Re-focus scientific research on ecological alternatives, to identify agro-ecological practices that ensure future food security under a changing climate,” the organisation said in a release.