Combat desertification COP17: Experts question why nutrition and land are treated as separate disciplines globally as report reveals soil degradation to be worsening

A teacher once asked her class to draw a chicken. Most children drew one wrapped in plastic, straight off a supermarket shelf — the only chicken they had ever seen. United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Chief Scientist Barron Joseph Orr narrated that story at the 17th Conference of Parties (COP17) on August 27, to make a point about a disconnect that is at the heart of the world’s food systems: people don’t see the link between what they eat and the soil it grows from.

That disconnect was, in different ways, the subject of Food Systems and Soil Health Day at the UNCCD COP17.

Scientists and experts tried to close that gap by explaining that 95 per cent of the food people eat, comes from soil. But soil itself is in trouble.

A soil report card

A new assessment released the same day by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) showed that soil degradation is getting worse, not better, in many parts of the world, while proven practices to protect and restore soils are still not being adopted at the pace and scale required.

More than half of the regional assessments reviewed found ‘low’ or ‘very low’ adoption of sustainable soil practices; 58 per cent showed conditions getting worse since 2015, and only around 10 per cent reported improvement. According to the Status of the World’s Soil Resources 2026 report, soil erosion came out as the single biggest problem — 81 per cent of assessments rated erosion management as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’, and 65 per cent said it was ‘deteriorating’.

Where India stands

India accounts for the largest share of land degradation in South Asia. Different studies cited in the report put it at roughly 30-37 per cent of the country’s land area, and about 11 per cent (83 million hectares) affected specifically by water erosion. The report cites an estimate of 4.8-5.3 billion tonnes of soil eroded annually in India, carrying away roughly 8 million tonnes of plant nutrients, with about 29 per cent of that eroded soil lost permanently to the sea.

The pattern across South Asia, which is home to roughly 1.9 billion people, is broadly the same: soil is eroding faster than it can rebuild, and the region’s reliance on intensive, fertiliser-heavy agriculture is making the underlying soil worse even where it keeps yields up in the short term.

Nutrients tell a similar story. India, along with Bangladesh and Pakistan are all classified in the report as having unsustainably high nitrogen surpluses; meaning far more fertiliser is going onto fields than crops can use.

Indian soils show low fertiliser-use efficiency: only 30 to 45 per cent of applied nitrogen is actually taken up by crops, compared with a global average of 59 per cent, according to the report.

Where does the money go?

The report traces much of this back to subsidies. In South Asian countries, including India, fertiliser subsidies are common and the biggest subsidy of all typically goes to nitrogenous urea. That has made urea the default choice for farmers even when the soil actually needs other nutrients, the report found, limiting the yield gains a more balanced mix of fertiliser could deliver.

The problem is that governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on agricultural subsidies, and a large share of that money still rewards producing more, over healthier land, a pattern experts say is deeply entrenched.  

Talking to journalists, Orr acknowledged the problem is not lack of will, but how hard it is to unwind subsidies once they are in place. Input subsidies, he said, were “for good reason” when they were introduced decades ago as they helped raise yields and feed people. But governments, he said, are now stuck defending these, long after the original justification for them has faded, even as they are causing damage to soil.

He also pointed to a harder constraint behind all of this: public finance, he said, is tight in every country in the world right now, so traditional government-funded models for fixing land degradation are not going to work at scale on their own.

Meanwhile, Emeline Fellus, Senior Director of Agriculture and Food, at The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, cited a World Bank estimate, saying that more than 80 per cent of the roughly $600-$900 billion governments spend on agricultural support each year works against people or the environment. “We could just take them off and redirect just a bit,” she said, adding that it would change the entire equation.

Lifeng Li, Director, Land and Water Division at the FAO, framed the fix in similar terms, but pointed the responsibility squarely at national governments. Policies on agriculture, land, climate and biodiversity need to “talk to each other” and “reinforce each other,” he said.

The missing link

It brings the argument back to where Orr started. The chicken story was not about children’s drawings but about how easy it is to stop seeing that food comes from soil, and how that disconnect shows up in policymaking.

Down To Earth asked Orr if there is solid scientific evidence linking soil health, particularly micronutrient depletion, to malnutrition and anaemia in people, and if so, why isn’t it reflected in nutrition policy, which focuses more on food distribution and fortification for nutrition rather than improving soil health.

“There’s no question there is evidence that you can link,” Orr said, adding that while the connectivity between what we eat and the soils is very weak, but scientifically, it is straightforward.

What’s missing, he said, is the bridge between that science and policy, he said, pointing to efforts like the EAT-Lancet Commission as one attempt to build it.

The deeper issue, he said, is that nutrition and land are treated as separate disciplines, studied by different experts and handled by different ministries, so the evidence rarely reaches the people writing food policy.

He suggested it was a gap big enough that FAO itself might take it up as the subject of a future report.

COP17 tried to offer some early steps in that direction. The joint FAO-UNCCD guidance released the same day pushes governments to fold soil and land considerations into national planning on agriculture, climate and biodiversity together, rather than as separate silos — the same coordination problem Li and Orr both pointed to.

Separately, the Global Flagship Initiative on Food Security — launched at COP16 in Riyadh in 2024 — announced a new, long-term partnership between UNCCD and the Crop Trust, which will now formally host the initiative’s secretariat in Bonn. The coalition has grown to more than 140 members, including governments, UN agencies, development banks and NGOs, and says it is aiming to engage at least 40 national governments, improve management on more than 100 million acres of farmland, and mobilise more than $10 billion in investment, mostly by drawing in private capital rather than relying on public budgets.

President Carlos Alvarado Quesada, former president of Costa Rica and Chair of the High-Level Panel for a Just Rural Transition, pointed out that while talks in Mongolia recognised the connection between healthy landscapes and food systems, but “in addition to one-off announcements, the bigger opportunity is to change the way we finance our activities on land in the long term. For example, the world spends $800 billion a year on agricultural subsidies, much of which supports environmentally damaging practices, including the misuse of synthetic fertiliser.”

While the initiatives do not fully close the wide gap scientists describe, but they are aimed at getting money and ministries working together, for soil and food to be seen as one problem.