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Six of the soil degradation processes recognised at European Union (EU) level are closely linked to agriculture. Soil degradation implies a need for protection, maintenance and improvement of soil quality. However, due to the public good characteristics of soil quality, the market does not sufficiently assure its provision. Thus, policy intervention is required to reach desired levels of soil quality through appropriate practices. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of EU policies that have scope for addressing soil degradation in agriculture. To this aim, EU legislation and legislative proposals along with related evaluations and research projects were analysed with the intervention logic approach.To date, soil protection is not a specific objective of EU legislation but features in some policies as a secondary objective. Pursuing other environmental objectives contributes to some extent to soil quality, although not always effectively. The most important EU environmental directives for soil quality are the Nitrates Directive and the Water Framework Directive.Under the Common Agricultural Policy, the compulsory requirement to keep land in good agricultural and environmental condition plays an important role in soil protection and conservation. Rural development policy, in particular agri-environment measures, offers Member States or regions options for encouraging farmers to achieve environmental quality beyond a predefined reference level.Overall, the study indicates that the existing EU policies have the potential to address all recognised soil degradation processes across the EU. Nevertheless, they should be well targeted and require appropriate farm management in order to reach desired levels of soil quality.

To study the change in soil organic carbon (SOC) since it was recorded during the Belgian National Soil Survey some 40 years ago, we recently revisited 939 locations still under use as arable land. The study area comprised almost the entire province of West Flanders (about 3000 km2) characterized by profound changes in its arable land management.'raking the increased ploughing depth (by 9.8 cm on average) into account, a significant (P = 0.001) increase of the SOC content by 0.2% on average was found. Expressed as an amount, the SOC in the topsoil rose by 9.3 t/ha on average, representing an increase of 25'Yo. This is comparable with the conversion of arable land into grassland for 2 to 3 decades.Geostatistical tools were used to map the SOC at the two times of observation. These showed that most of the spatial variation occurred within about 4 km. Since the community level is the smallest spatial resolution on which agricultural statistics are gathered officially, a detailed modelling of the change in SOC was impossible. llowever, by selecting communities with extreme changes in SOC, we found indications that the major source of increase in SOC was due to the large increase in pig breeding.