A harvest of bounty and woe

The four nations recently joined the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, an organization originally intended to help countries like those in Saharan Africa.

When rains do come, soil with poor ground cover is often unable to absorb it, and instead is often washed away. Last year, soil erosion caused the worst floods in centuries in Britain. In 1999, the Italian Ministry for the Environment reported that it had classified more than half of Italy as in danger of erosion, after a decade with almost 3,000 landslides. Nearly 80 percent of European farmland will be at risk of soil erosion by 2050, according to UNEP, and within 20 years, another 3.8 million households are expected to be built within flood-prone areas.

Wildlife is endangered as well. With only 2 percent of Europe's wild forests remaining, farmland has become the primary habitat for animal life. Only rarely the direct target of farmers looking to protect their crops, animals such as the Iberian lynx are dying out as modern farming techniques jeopardize their habitats.

"Soil degradation is part of the systematic abuse of the European space, its territory, and the natural resources involved," says Domingo Jiménez Beltrán, executive director of the European Environment Agency. But for now, there is no action taken at the European Community level to combat soil degradation, as there is for air and water contamination.

In the Andalusian region of Jaen, where Ubeda is located, the olive tree has taken over virtually all available land. With the neighboring Córdoba region, the area produces 40 percent of the world's olive oil. From the air, the land looks like a big corduroy quilt, with the green rows of olive trees standing out against the bare brown soil.

On modern olive plantations, heavy use of pesticides kills off insects, which keeps away birds. Groundcover and hedges, which offer a habitat for ground-dwelling animals, are removed to make tractor harvesting easier. The imprint of the mechanized plantations is clear in soil degradation, as well. The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture estimates that 80 million metric tons of soil are lost yearly off the 1 million hectares of olive plantations in Andalusia alone.

Farmland must play a more complex role than just plots that produce food, says Giovanna Pisano, agriculture policy officer for Birdlife International, a non-profit studying the impact of European agricultural policy on bird populations. "The CAP has pushed intensification and monoculture on farmland for the last 30 years," she says, "but traditional agriculture and mixed farming is absolutely fundamental to preserving the majority of wildlife in Europe."

Many experts say what will most likely spur the EU into action on subsidies is its planned expansion in East Europe. "You start handing out cash to Polish and Hungarian farmers," says Pisano, "and the EU budget will go totally out of control."

Page: 1 | 2