Worms, bacteria and beetles living below ground are part of the
largest and least known trove of life on earth that could have
spin-offs from farming to pharmaceuticals, a UN report said on
Wednesday.

"We know little of what is living below our feet…yet
it is vital to sustaining life on earth," said Ahmed Djoghlaf,
Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which
is hosting March 20-31 talks in Brazil.

French 19th century
chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was right to say that ‘the
role of the very small is large’, Djoghlaf told Reuters.

Experiments
in promoting natural organisms in soils — shifting from use of
artificial pesticides and fertilizers — had helped improve crop yields
in some studies in Brazil, Ivory Coast, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Mexico
and Uganda.

Experts in the project believed that soil-dwellers
such as earthworms, fungi, termites, ants and bacteria were part of
"biggest source of untapped and unknown life on earth", a UN statement
said.

The life forms could help farming and were "a potential
source of new…pharmaceutical and industrial products," it said. Most
bids to chart life on earth focus on exotic rain forests, coral reefs
or mangroves — overlooking humble mud.

In India, for instance,
re-introduction of local earthworms had improved tea harvests at some
plantations by almost 300 percent, Djoghlaf said.

BEAN COUNTERS

In
the Los Tuxtlas reserve in northern Mexico, bean yields had risen more
than 40 percent after farmers started using a type of nitrogen-fixing
microbe found in local forest soils as a "bio-fertilizer".

Soil-burrowers such as termites — often dismissed as pests — can help aerate soil and ensure that it can absorb water.

The
report said the benefits of diverse soils went beyond farming — the
Los Tuxtlas reserve was a rain forest where 40,000 hectares (98,840
acres) were lost in the past 40 years.

"Boosting yields using naturally occurring soil organisms may reduce
the need to clear more forest for agriculture, thus helping to conserve
the forest and its diversity both above and below ground," it said.

By Alister Doyle
Reuters.com