“Arresting land degradation” was included among the top priorities by the G20 Working Group on Environment and Climate Sustainability in its meeting held in Bengaluru earlier this month. This issue is highly relevant to India, which has to support 18 per cent of the world’s population on only 2.4 per cent land. More worryingly, a sizeable segment of this land has already lost part of its productivity and carrying capacity due to mismanagement and indiscriminate anthropogenic activity, boding ill for the livelihood of a large number of farmers and forest-dwellers. The per capita availability of arable land has shrunk from 0.48 hectare in 1950 to merely 0.16 hectare now. This is much lower than the global average of 0.29 hectare.