Juliana Agbo, Abuja
THE Nigeria Institute of Soil Science (NISS) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have called for the need to enact a national soil policy that would tackle the destruction of soil.
The duo who made the call recently in Abuja said NISS in collaboration with the Soil Society of Nigeria can put together such policy with support from the government.
Speaking on the need for the policy, the Registrar, Nigeria Institute of Soil Science (NISS) Prof. Victor Chude, lamented that people who are involve in quarrying, excavation of sands for building, promote soil erosion.
“Also people involve in felling trees contribute to exposing the environment to erosion”, he said. Prof Chude while noting that the policy by the federal government would tackle soil erosion, said although there are policies made 20-30 years on stopping deforestation, but it has not being reviewed. If we don’t work hard enough to stop soil erosion, what we would leave for posterity, there is the consequences is that there would be nothing to support coming generation so we need to stop soil erosion and save the future generation.
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What soil scientist can do is to support with soil information, make it available to government, information that relate with soil fertility or how the soil can be properly managed to support the growth of those trees.”
On the issue of soil mapping, he said, “the first soil survey that was done was in the 90s that led to the production of the soil map of the country, since then there had been attempts to update that data, there are plans to undertake detailed soil survey. Recently, what was done was to update the existing information but we need to undertake a detailed survey to the scale of about one in 50,000, what is available now is a scale of one to 650,000 square metres.”
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