Workshop on Regional Alliance for Soils Concludes in Cuba

The need of a International Convention on Soil and the importance of this vital resource facing climate change, were stressed in the Workshop on the Regional Alliance for Soils, which concludes today in this capital to give way to a congress sponsored by the UN. The meeting, taking place at the Havana's Conference Center, is an initiative by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), aimed at implementing actions in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean until 2019, to promote sustainable management of soils.

"The soil, despite being very important for human live, has no an international convention such as climate has," Doctor Theodor Friedrich, a FAO representative in Cuba, stated yesterday.

About 75 percent of the agricultural areas in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean have some level of degradation, according to experts gathered in this Workshop of the Regional Alliance for Soils.

Ronald Vargas, secretary of the World Alliance for Soils, stressed the importance of soils for the production of foods worldwide, because 95 percent of those products come from that resource.

According to the Bolivian doctor, soils are not only for agriculture, but also for life in general.

He explained that soils carry out environmental functions such as recycling all nutrients, regulating climate and floods, and kidnapping in its depths carbon dioxide, a major contributor to global warming.

This Workshop of the Regional Alliance for Soils is the prelude to the Soils Congress 2015, to be run in this capital from Wednesday, June 3, to Friday, June 5, in the framework to declare 2015 as the "International Year of Soils" by the United Nations.