Thematic Media Briefing on Food Systems and Soil Health Day - Press Conference, UNCCD COP17

Good afternoon, everyone.
I'd like to request everybody to take a seat as we're about to start our media briefing.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Once again, welcome to this afternoon's thematic media briefing on Food Systems and Soil Health Day here at Cop 17.
My name is China Gabriel from the UNCCD communications team and I will be your moderator.
Today's briefing focuses on three key themes, progress, partnerships, and opportunities to accelerate action on food systems, soil health, and land stewardship.
More specifically, this discussion will highlight the growing recognition of soil health in agricultural lands as both an environmental and economic priority since decision 19 at Cop 16 and the role of the private sector in driving investment and action.
Apart from this, we will hear insights from several important and newly launched soil related reports, including the hidden economic Power of healthy soils by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the UNCCD living soils, productive lands, resilient landscapes from policies to implementation by FAO and the UNCCD and FAOs the status of the World soil Resources 2026.
At this juncture, allow me to introduce our esteemed panelists for today's media briefing.
On my left is doctor Baron Joseph Or, Chief Scientist of the United Nations Convention to combat desertification.
Next, we have Lee Chang Li, Director of the Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and who is also a member of the Global Future Council on Healthy Soils and Land.
Finally, we have Emmeline Fellows, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development's Senior Director of Agriculture and Food.
Now, I will invite each speaker to make a brief opening statement of about 2 minutes and then open the floor to questions from the media.
Daron, I invite you to take the mic.
I'm not one for statements.
I'd rather just zoom in on what's important and most of the time when we think about food, we think about a grocery store and most of the time when we think about soils, it's something that we walk on and we don't put the two together.
I would ask that we change that, that we actually recognize that each time you take a bite, it came from those soils.
If we recognize that connection, then everything else can fall into place.
Maybe put it a different way.
In most parts of the world, unless it's entirely rural, when we hear that there's a drought, we hear about conservation measures taken in urban areas for less water use, which is a fraction of the problem.
We don't hear about if we actually had organic matter in our soils, we would have much higher water holding capacity and higher productivity for those soils at the same time.
Then if we thought about that, each square meter of those soils and ran it across the entire country, just think about how much water security we could build on simple premise.
That same premise would lead to productivity, it would lead to climate change mitigation because you're putting the carbon back into the soil.
It would lead to biodiversity because the soils are alive if there's carbon in the soil.
It doesn't have to be the detailed full engineering of our biology in the soils that has to be communicated.
It's just putting the biology back in the soils and starting from there.
The second thing I would say is that we don't think about this holistically in terms of the value chain either.
In the old days and even today, how often do we hear about how many trees we planted? We don't hear about how, how much more vitality we brought back to a community because we took a holistic approach to addressing land where we looked at the economic viability of some areas for a cash crop to make up for the fact that restoring rangelands might not be the same direct square meter for square meter return on investment, but in combination, we would have huge success.
We don't think about the problem that way, but we should.
Because if we actually moved into the planning space and brought the municipal planners, the ag planners, the conservation planners into the same room, and we put the food where it needs to be, we protected the biodiversity where it is, the freshwater where it is, we did some climate change mitigation where it was reasonable.
We would solve many, many problems and if we brought the economic potential in there and really focused on those value chains, these communities wouldn't simply continue to subsist, they would thrive.
This should be the fundamental.
This should be what we're talking about.
That's it.
That's my opening statement.
Thank you.
Thank you, Barn Leg.
Would you like to add to that? Thank you.
Barn described exactly the issue that we need to connect the dots.
Over 95% of the food that we eat every day, it's producing soils.
For most of Earth, we care about the food security, we care also about the health.
Indeed, if we don't have the healthy soils, how come we could have healthy plant, healthy animals, we can have healthy people.
In many parts of the world, most of earth will go back to the soils.
That's exactly why soils is the foundation of the agri food systems, is the foundation of the society.
So today, we launched two publications as mentioned by the moderator, the status of the world soil resources 2026 by FAO, and then the joint guidelines that we developed together with the UACCD from the title of them, it is obvious.
The soil status report really provides new data and evidence about the status of the world's soil resources and suggests some actions to adopt sustainable soil a while the joint publication, joint UNIC FAO guidelines provide much more detailed and technical advice on how to avoid reduce and reverse agricultural land and soil degradation.
The central message is clear.
Soil degradation is continuing to worsen in many parts of the world while proving practice to protect and restore soils are still not being adopted at the space and the scale that required.
58% of the regional and sub regional assessments report deterioration trends since 2015 since we launched the last soil status report, while only about 10% reports improvement.
If this continues, we are facing crisis because the healthy soils, I talked about produce 95% of food and according to FAA, we need to produce 50 more percent of food by 2050.
And we also need to produce 50% or more.
The other agriculture product, it's fibers, it's also biofuels.
Hydrosce is such important not only for food production, as Barn mentioned, it's also important for water security, others biodiversities, climate resilience.
That's why the status report identified the trends, but also suggests five areas for action.
That include strengthen the governance and legal frameworks, promote education and capacity building, monitor and met progress, and rewarding soil student and also strengthen partnerships for scaling up.
I think the two reports really complimentary to each other.
The two publications really give earth both the evidence and the data, but also the how, how can we do it? So what is needed now is really for us to close the implementation gap and translating those knowledge and improving practice into actions on the ground at scale so that we can secure healthy soils, productive land, and more resilient agri food systems for Earth, but also for the generations to come.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Lee Feng.
That was a very strong point, the focus on implementation.
Now, I think this is a very good segue to Emen who would be talking more about the importance of stronger public private collaboration for agri food systems.
Emily, please.
Thank you so much.
Hi.
Hello.
My name is Emmeline Indeed.
I work for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
It's an organization that has 250 member companies, mostly multinationals, and we all work together to ensure a sustainable, resilient, and equitable world.
Specifically on agriculture and food, it's been a delight to be here this week.
First of all, I want to say the venue is incredible.
I The Mongolia is beautiful, the range lands are incredible and the people are just so nice.
I just want to stay this out because it's not always the case in every venue.
What I've really appreciated over the week has been the incredible sense of wanting to collaborate and to scale up and accelerate action.
That's really the spirit.
There is the negotiations in one room and there is what happens outside of the room as well where a lot of stakeholders get together.
What we saw is that there is really convergence in the willingness from the private sector and from the public sector to try and scale up investments and action in originative landscapes.
Now, we've heard about a number of publications that are really insightful in first understanding the situation in the world today, which is dull, whereby we are already facing a crisis, but it's going to accentuate and if business as usual continues, I was reading that 90% of lead t could be degraded by 2050.
That's the situation.
We also are discovering some tools that can help different decision makers to understand where they could try and restore, where there is the most potential and now where I come in and where the business sector comes in is in order to get to action, we need investments.
At the moment, different public sector entities, whether they're governments, multilateral development banks, and others are able to provide a number of supports.
Unfortunately, it hasn't been enough.
The private sector is interested in chiming in because ultimately the soil and the landscapes are the basis to ensure the supply of their businesses.
Now, why has this not happened before and what are the unlocks to do that is the big question.
We believe and we know from several examples of incredible at scale projects that happen in the world today, that there is solutions for everyone to work together, but it requires time and it requires financial arrangements.
What the World Business Council did was we were commissioned by the UN CCD Secretariat under D six and 19 of UNCCD to run a series of consultations with the private sector.
To understand what could policymakers do to really unlock more investments.
We came up with a few recommendations.
We need stable policies, we need coherent policies that really encourage investment in the soil and in the land.
We also need to unlock some long term co investments.
Finally, We need to find ways that the different frameworks that are developed by different entities, CPs, but also reporting entities, et cetera, that they are a bit simpler and that they all encourage the same outcomes.
We need to preserve the water, we need to preserve the soil, ultimately to maintain the livelihoods and the supply that we require to avoid an accelerated food crisis.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Emin and to our panelists for your opening statements.
Now I'll open the floor to our journalists.
Please raise your hand and wait for the microphone if you have a question and kindly introduce yourself, say what media organization you're from and to whom you want to direct your question.
Thank you.
Hello.
Hi.
This is Angeles Lucas from the Spanish newspaper, El Paz.
My question is from Emin.
As you have said, it has been a long time that the companies have been working on the land and from this time up to now, they don't have had taken care that much about the land.
So that could be a consequence that right now we have such a high percentage of degradation.
How do you see that now it's the moment to change this dynamic, we could say? It's just because you are seeing that you are not getting that much products or that much quality of the products that you have been getting before with the old dynamics, we could say.
That's why you decided to change it now and you have to invest as well.
For that? Or do you really think that the consumers are demanding this change or US companies right now you decided that you have to change the dynamic because it's better for the environment and of course, for your business? What is the point right now that you can share with us from your organization? Thank you.
I love this question.
First of all, let's not forget that degradation comes from different origins.
When I was listening to the presentation made by if and UN CCD earlier today, they took the very specific case of Mongolia actually, where we saw that actually human degradation is not very high.
It's mostly climate change driven now today.
It depends where I'm not saying that.
Conversely, before I joined the Wordusiness Council, I worked for another organization where we were working on a project, especially in Spain, in the Weva region.
That is actually a Ramsar site where there is a lot of wetlands and that is under a lot of pressure because there is a whole sector of growing strawberries and raspberries and blueberries that are pumping the water and therefore threatening the landscape around.
What is difficult is that individually, the companies have been working and investing in what used to be called sustainable agriculture, which we like now to try and promote towards regenerative agriculture.
But if you only invest in your supply chain, if you have your farmers move to drip irrigation, If the neighbors or the other sectors continue to pump the water, nothing is going to be sustainable anymore.
The companies have understood, a number of companies have understood, at least the ones we're working with and others as well, that it's not enough to invest in your supply chain, but that you really need to look at the landscape.
Conversely, when we talk about soil health, is the water that is kept in the soil.
That's also because of the forests that are around, because of the basins that are around and so this is what's new.
Increasingly, we've launched a program at COP 28, the WCS and DCG that is called Reginative Landscapes action agenda.
There is increasing commitments.
From 2023, there was two to $2 billion commitments on region landscapes.
2025, we're at 9 billion, but it's still a drop in the ocean compared to what we need.
That's why more than ever, we need to really look at the public and private collaboration because it's not just one supply chain and it's not just one investment.
It's working together to share what we call the risks and ultimately the value for the people and the economy and the planet.
Does that help? Thank you.
Bron would like to add something to that? Just to come in from the science and technology perspective, In the end, if the policymakers don't level the playing field, then a company that doesn't join that effort ends up gaining by not having to do what everyone agreed in common.
It's pretty straightforward.
Here we sit where we have blockchain technology, everybody thinks of cryptocurrency, but it's actually very fundamental to supply chains today.
And that means that at every node in that supply chain, you can place information, not just the exchange of the movement of the good that you're selling and buying, but actually sustainability information.
Technology exists and there are grocery store chains in many countries that have actually adopted the technology.
You can scan a barcode on your product and you can see every node of that supply chain and the sustainability.
But most people don't actually have any idea this exists.
There's no effort in the policy realm to come up with a common approach to this, even though it's not that expensive.
It might have been in the past, but not now.
And so my point here is, it's just a simple example.
But if we could actually have these two worlds come together a little bit more where we look at the challenges that companies face to be successful and the need for sustainability and scientifically.
We have three pieces here, the science, the private sector and the policy realm, we could make an enormous amount of progress.
We can't solve everything in one go, but once we get this pattern moving, could make a huge difference.
But I don't think we're there.
We need to make some progress.
Thanks.
Yes.
If I contribute to this discussion, we need to communicate to the urgency.
The urgency is we already have 1 billion hectares of agricultural land degraded.
UCD look at all the data.
Globally, over 60% of land degradation caused by human activity that's happening on our cropland, our pasture land.
And we are expecting to use that same land to produce 50% more food.
That's from production perspective.
I just mention from a health perspective, we eat everything produced from the soils.
If the soils are polluted soils are not healthy soils don't have the capability to produce the food that we eat, we face a healthy challenge.
What's the private sector looking for? Private sector, they don't like the short policies.
The private sector also have long term stable policies and also the incentives that they can really do the long term investment.
They hate the policy change every three years and very often, that's the political situation.
Four years, another minister, four years, another president or another prime minister.
We need to create much longer term policies and incentives.
The private sector don't like risks.
We have to provide that public good data, information to inform them.
Those data and information help the private sector to do the assessment, where would be the risk area and how those data and science can help them to reduce, overcome the risks, but also find the profit in terms of investment.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your intervention.
Yes.
Another question, please.
Okay.
Please.
Hi.
My name is Abukhari Majid.
I'm a journalist from Nigeria.
I report for Premium Times.
Hi, Baron.
It's good to see you physically.
I have two questions and of course, for Baron and Leen, and of course, Emily could actually add to it.
First, I would like to hear from you, Barn, what do you think are the policy gaps? I'm from Africa.
What do you think are the policy gaps, hindering Africa from restoring the lands, especially like myself.
I'm from Nigeria where Um, you must have heard about the FA clashes and some of the struggles of farmers as a result of degraded lands, desertification and drought.
I would just like to get your perspective on that.
For LFg we have a few operating in Nigeria in the face of these crisis of land degradation, drought and likes, what kind of sustainable agricultural practice model you think should be amplified in a region like Africa.
How is the AUU champion in this course? Thank you.
Yes.
Go ahead.
The last part of your question changed my answer because you brought in the fundamental reality.
When we think of the Sahel and we think of news, we think of conflict, we think of extremism, et cetera and we think of migration.
But if we use the typical model, let's just take the migration example.
We interview people who have had to leave when they arrive wherever they're going about why they left, they'll talk about the immediate crisis.
But if we ask the question, how has the weather been the past few years, they'll tell you about a drought, a big impact that it had on what they were doing.
If you ask the question, how have the crops been? They'll tell you about this decline in productivity or perhaps something that impacted where they had to move.
In other words, there's a foundation there that is eroding and I don't mean erosion like soil erosion, I mean the integrity of that entire rural livelihood.
The policies in the past until COVID, to be quite frank, were very geared towards globalization.
Were not geared towards building local and regional resilience and those supply chains because the benefits were really great for a while on the global supply chains.
But now we have a pressure to get it right locally because of all those uncertainties in the international setting.
That's where I would put a lot of emphasis on policies, the connectivity between these rural regions and the urban centers for life, for growing crops, for pastoralism, et cetera and then It is possible scientifically to actually take the ecological connectivity.
We always hear about that, always independently.
Are we making corridors? Corridors for who? We never say who.
We talk about animal species, but what if we overlaid that? The need to get to market, need to be sure that the products don't rot before they get to market, for example, we overlay that network over the top of the ecological integrity of that region, and then we actually build accordingly.
Think about what we would do.
Right? We would have a huge impact for the entire thing.
It would make a difference economically, ecologically, and otherwise.
My view would be to turn inwards and look at those possibilities.
There's where the opportunities lie and that would be my emphasis.
Then the second thing I would emphasize I've already mentioned, If we actually did the calculations of the impact of what we grow and that decision making process, and if we put in whether or not we have biology in the soil, which means very different approach to the soils often.
We started to move in a direction that increased that and reduce the thirsty crops, we can have a huge impact on the resilience of people and ecosystems worldwide.
Thanks.
Thanks for the great question.
What would I recommend any agriculture models for Africa? Indeed, Africa has a huge potential and there's so many different models you can look at because Africa is vast continent with so much rich natural resources, forests, grassland, cropland, rivers and lakes.
From land soil perspective, we are working in five African countries to help them to understand the soils, the soil types, soil chemical, physical features, soil biological features, because only by understanding the soil nutrition status, then we can advise farmers what would be the right crops you can put onto into the soil and then have the maximum the productivity.
To do so by collecting this data, by strengthening the soil labs, then build all this information into the national soil information systems and advisory systems so that data and information are not only sitting in the computers of the government agencies, farmers can access through the apps.
They can log into the system and say, okay, according to that information, maybe should consider different plant.
That is one of the areas that we are working on that.
Sure, we're working on the restoration.
They are part of the Green Green Wall Initiative.
I together we work with many countries, we restore billions of hectre land to bring them back in terms of productivity, in terms of biversity, in terms of many other ecosysm services.
It depends on where you come from, depends on the local context.
There are plenty of different kinds of sustainable agri food system solutions.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Question for the lady in front.
Okay.
Hi, I'm Skun from Down to Earth Magazine in India.
I have two questions and they're both for Barren or and Life Li.
The speakers talked about the connection between soil and food and my reporting in India, I linked the evidence of how the lack of micronutrients in soil actually cause malnutrition and anemia.
But countries including India, they don't fight malnutrition, they fight malnutrition through food distribution programs or fortification and there is actually no focus on improving soil health.
First, is there enough scientific evidence to prove that link? If there is a solid evidence, why is it not included in our nutrition policies? My second question is that you talked about the FAO report that is released today, that soils are degrading and the solutions are not getting adopted fast enough, but the realities of our food systems are such that we always reward producing more and we always reward yield.
Um, and that at the expense of soil and water, our agricultural subsidies, at least in India are also like that, that we give a lot of subsidies on electricity, water that eventually lead to more soil degradation.
Now for a farmer, I don't think she can really do much about it.
Are there any financial incentives or a model that has actually worked at scale of shifting farmers to sustainable practices? I know of pilot incentives and pilot programs, but something that has worked at scale that can be adopted.
Thank you.
Thank you.
May I invite Link to answer the question first? Yes.
Maybe I'll leave the scientific question to the chief scientist.
In terms of how to scale up the sustainable solutions.
Indeed, in FAU, we have the f project in Central Asia country, five countries and try to help them to improve soil and land management.
Indeed, through that project, it is made that they have to restore 2.8 million hectas of land degraded cropland and also pasture land.
Which did benefit 2.85 million people.
What is more interesting is they also have to avoid the greenhouse gas emission, which equivalent to 8.9 million tons.
This is the one project, however.
Through these kinds of project initiatives, I think we see that lots of places that we can really scaling up the sustainable solutions.
However, the question come back to you as you mentioned, how we can advise the government to shift their policies, their financial incentives, their subsidies to the right directions that maximize the benefit rather than achieve some of the gains in one area, then create problems in other areas.
I think that's exactly as Barron mentioned, that's the policy consistency at the national level.
Globally, we talk about all these global ambitions.
And on the ground, it is farmers that implement everything.
But in the middle, it is the responsibility of the government to make sure they don't create policy silos or they don't create policy inconsistencies.
It's easy to see, it's not easy to do.
That's why we need to bring the policy coherency at the national level, make sure their policies on food and agriculture, on land, on climate change, on biodiversity, they're talking to each other.
They reinforce each other so that at the national level, they also created the consistent incentives and subsidies and financial incentives.
Thank you.
You always ask the hardest questions.
I'll begin with this.
It's the story of a teacher I had who asked the children in the class to draw a chicken.
Most of the children in the class showed a chicken that was wrapped in a plastic bag from the grocery store because that's all they had ever seen in their life.
In other words, the connectivity between what we eat and the soils is very, very weak.
But scientifically, it's straightforward.
I mean, you hear about innovation in growing crops that get a lot of attention because they're so high tech.
They're sitting in an aqua solution and you're not actually imagining that soil is involved, but the nutrients come from somewhere, and that's only a small fraction of what we eat.
And everything else is coming from the soils.
There's no question there's evidence that you can link if you have the access to the food that's grown, what's grown to the quality of the soils.
There's no question there.
Then there is what I would call a science policy interface that is known as eat all caps, Lancet, and they take on this issue to a degree.
But there's no question that you're in the space of disciplinary emphasis on nutrition, versus disciplinary emphasis on land.
I'll just put a challenge to Lee Fang and FAO that maybe this is the next big report to take this on because I think it's an excellent question.
Scientifically, it's there for sure.
The evidence is there.
Then the second part, although maybe I'll try to push it to Emeline if she might want to help here.
But first of all, part of your question has to do with what we do with subsidies and often, Subsidies policies lag far behind where we are because they become entrenched.
People are very cynical about it.
But the subsidies that led to a certain approach for inputs that they get subsidized, which is why we don't have biology in the soils anymore, those were for good reason.
They were trying to feed people.
They got put in place and they worked and people forgot about them until they started to realize we're exhausting those soils.
The policies start to change, but then there are entrenched interests tied to the subsidies, not an easy thing.
But it's key.
We use many different words.
They're all politically charged, but doing the right thing with the subsidies and putting an emphasis on that for policymakers is everything because it's part of leveling the playing field.
If the subsidies are moving in the right direction, companies can move in the right direction.
Then one more aspect of this is Let's be realistic.
Let's talk quite frankly.
We're not in a moment of public finance.
Public finance is tight in every country in the world.
The traditional financial models incentivizing addressing land degradation, if we take the big picture here, are not going to work by themselves.
But the financial gap assessment that the UNCC did for COP 16 makes it pretty clear that there's huge opportunity in this public private approach that was mentioned earlier by Emily and the innovation there is quite interesting and the number of instruments, scaling them up, again, policy, leveling the playing field to make these work.
But when I see them, when I've been in events where they're often small, like a fund that is trying use the public finance to de risk the private finance to then make things move forward.
It makes sense and the examples that are out there are successful.
Can we move more in that direction? I think so and some of the big announcements at this COP are in that space where they're trying to make that move more and more forward.
Back to you.
Amen, please, if you'd like to weigh in.
Yeah.
Thank you, Baron, for offering this opportunity.
I think, you hit the nail on the head when you talked about the reward.
You say we've been incentivizing and we've been looking at the yields.
That's really the critical point.
First of all, totally concur with what was said before.
Having the right policies in place is really critical.
The way to reward a production one way or another is different ways.
It can be incentives that are put into place by governments.
It can be whether the market, the consumers as per the question from the journalist from LPS, whichever pulls you in a certain direction.
So far, what was being rewarded, what was being paid was how much you were able to produce at the cheapest price because that was the direction we were going in.
Now we're realizing that this is not sustainable.
We need to incentivize resilience.
The problem is, how do we motivate? How do we find the right ways to support the farmers in doing that shift? Because it costs a bit of money to change your practices.
Equally, how do we get the companies to be incentivized with the capital internally or externally to actually invest more in resilience? And I think that what I heard was really critical.
I think, yes, the governments increasingly don't have so much margin, but there is trillions of money that are going to subsidies today in the wrong direction.
There was a report produced by the World Bank several years ago that said that 80% and more of the subsidies that are paid by governments today are detrimental to people or the planet.
So actually, we could just take them off and redirect just a bit and that would change entirely the equation.
Perfect.
Thank you very much.
That concludes today's thematic briefing on food systems and soil health.
Thank you once again to our speakers, to the media present, and for everyone following us on UN Web TV.
I invite you to stay immediately.
Following this media briefing is the CSO panel's closing press conference, Civil Society Reflections on Cop 17.
Thank you very much.