Let's not dig up the soil Directive
Posted, July 17, 2008 @ 18:00
Neil Parish, Conservative MEP and Chairman of the European Parliament Agriculture Committee, believes that the EU'S soil directive should be buried after it emerged that the French Presidency plans to bring it back before the Council of Ministers by the end of this year.
The controversial directive failed to get through the Council of Ministers last year after several countries, including the UK, Germany and France voted against it. It now appears that the French will use their presidency of the EU to put it back on the agenda. The Soil Directive has always been controversial as it would entail huge bureaucratic, regulatory and financial burdens for agriculture. It supersedes all existing legislation that deals with soil management and because it proposes a pan-European approach to a local problem. Initial estimates suggest that the prescriptive nature of the provisions would lead to costs of over £6bn simply to identify and register all sites that would be caught by the Directive
Mr Parish said:-
"Every farmer worth his salt will look after his soil and we already have the legislation in place to effectively protect and manage it. We thought we had killed this Directive off but European Directives tend to be like weeds. You think you have killed them off and then they pop up in another part of the field.
"This one should be a complete non starter; there is no need for it whatsoever. The UK already has a comprehensive 52 point soil action plan that recognises soil as a strategic natural resource. On top of this we have voluntary codes of good practice and legislation against contaminated land as well as there being a whole catalogue of European regulations which deal with soil.
"This directive should be buried and soil protection left to national governments. Quite why anyone wants to force through a pan-European legislation that will impose the same rules on completely different soils all the way from Northern Finland to Southern Spain is beyond me."