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Project Rationale
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1. PROJECT RATIONALE
The Strategic Resume summarizes the outcomes of the Project of reviewing agricultural practices in relation to transboundary protection of biodiversity and soil conservation.
The aim of the Project was to assess current agricultural practices in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia and their impact on the loss of biological and landscape diversity, soil degradation and contamination. Based on this assessment, a system of measures conducive to an optimized land use structure and environmentally balanced farming was proposed.
The land structure within the Dnipro Basin existing in the three participating countries, as well as current land use methods and agricultural practices caused a number of unfavorable environmental changes, in particular degradation and contamination of soils and ecosystems at large. In some regions, these changes acquired a critical scale, having an extremely adverse impact on natural landscapes and leading to a considerable loss of biological diversity and soil fertility.
Large areas of agricultural land are subject to water erosion [1, 2, 3, 4]. Within the Dnipro Basin, plough lands with the total area of 1 million hectares have mildly or highly eroded soils. A great part of the territory is deflated, including light texture soils (light land) constituting the surface of sandy terraces of the Dnipro and its tributaries. Deflation is also observed on over-drained peateries common for transboundary areas. The soils of the Dnipro terraces above the flood lands, as well as of flood lands and terraces of its tributaries are salinized. Large areas of waterlogged and over-moist land are to be found in the northern part of the basin. Man-caused contamination with radionuclides, heavy metals and pesticides is another critical factor accounting for the soil fertility deterioration in the Dnipro Basin. Over the last decades, physical soil degradation has become growingly manifested in soil thickening, and the formation of a solid surface crust resulting from the loss of valuable agronomic soil composition. Among other causes of soil degradation are: the shortage of organic fertilizers, imbalanced application and wash-off of organic substances, common use of heavy agricultural machinery coupled with an insufficient soil loosening. Irrigated lands suffer from flooding observed in 15-20% of all areas, secondary salinization (5-10%) and alkalinization (over 30% or irrigated lands), loss of soil composition and de-humification. In Polessye, where the share of areas with double water regime regulation is relatively low, the excessive expansion of drained areas has an adverse impact on the land quality. The condition of soil micro-flora also deteriorates because of an overloading on agro-landscapes and consequent de-humification, as well as man-caused contamination aligned to a sharply reduced application of fertilizers, especially organic ones, and increased use of pesticides. As a result, soil fertility is damaged, and the capacity of soil to bay and decompose toxic compounds (in particular, metal-organic ones) is decreased.
The use of degraded and infertile lands for farming is both environmentally inaccessible and economically infeasible, since it entails annual direct losses (as the cost of growing plant produce is higher than that of the yielded harvest). Some experts estimate the overall environmental damage caused by the loss of fertile soil layers, humus and nutrients, by soil degradation etc, adjusted to the Dnipro Basin area, at over 350-500 million US dollars per year.
Unfortunately, the environmental and economic damage caused by the use of land under excessive anthropogenic pressure was never properly assessed before, as the reining ideology insisted that “soil fertility could not decrease under socialist economy”. The in-depth analysis of the problem that has started recently cannot possibly embrace the whole scope of the problem, especially in its quantitative terms. A considerable drop in productivity and stability of ecosystems, intensive degradation processes, increased cost of soil rehabilitation testify to the pressing nature of the problem in question.
Therefore, the aim of the Project was to assess current agricultural practices in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine with regard to their contributing to the loss of biological and landscape diversity, soil degradation and contamination. Besides, the Project was geared to develop, on the basis of the said assessment, a system of measures leading to the improvement of land composition and environmentally balanced agriculture.
