Soils, agriculture and food security: the interplay between ecosystem functioning and human well-being

• Soils provide ecosystem services that go way beyond agricultural production.
• Soil degradation can be controlled and a series of adapted technologies are available.
• The great challenge in agriculture is to achieve both productivity and sustainability.
• Smallholder farming has the highest need, but also the best agricultural potential.
• Food security for all must be negotiated within societies, including all stakeholders.

Healthy soils are critical to agriculture, and both are essential to enabling food security. Soil-related challenges include using soils and other natural resources sustainably, combating land and soil degradation, avoiding further reduction of soil-related ecosystem services, and ensuring that all agricultural land is managed sustainably. Agricultural challenges include improving the quantity and quality of agricultural outputs to satisfy rising human needs, also in a 2 degrees world; maintaining diversity in agricultural systems while supporting those farms with the highest potential for closing existing yield gaps; and providing a livelihood for about 2.6 billion mostly poor land users. The greatest needs and potentials lie in small-scale farming, although there as elsewhere, trade-offs must be negotiated within the nexus of water, energy, land and food, including the role of soil therein.