COP26 is entering its second week, with governments, industry lobby groups, NGO's and international organisations in well-orchestrated negotiations. Most of the decisions on the compromises to make for carbon emissions are made well before the conference, but this international meeting does at least bring global climate and environmental issues into sharp focus across the world. Farming and the food system has so far been given disappointingly small amounts of attention. Governments and industry still have a long way to go before recognising the full potential of farming and food consumption to switch from being part of the problem to part of the solution. There is still limited recognition of the critical role of healthy soils to be able to sequestrate and cycle carbon out of the atmosphere. We encourage all of you to sign the petition to put pressure on the EU to enforce a ban on glyphosate. We have talked about the significance of glyphosate in undermining soil and human health in earlier newsletters. In short, this extremely widely-used herbicide wrecks havoc on soil micro-organisms, and their essential role in creating conditions for building soils, which can tie down and cycle enormous amounts of carbon. Glyphosate also undermines the healthy operation of the human microbiome (gut flora), with all kinds of negative health conditions associated.
