India, Aug. 28 -- At COP17's Food Systems and Soil Health Day, scientists warned that 95 per cent of our food depends on increasingly degraded soil, yet policies still treat land and nutrition as separate worlds.

A new FAO assessment shows erosion and poor fertiliser use worsening globally, with South Asia, especially India, facing severe degradation driven by entrenched, misdirected subsidies.

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 poi...