A showdown over the future of food
Today's United Nations Food Systems Summit is not without controversy.
You know that trope around food having the power to bring people together?
Many experts, advocates, farmers, and world leaders believe today’s United Nations Food Systems Summit—the first of its kind—is making that happen in a historic way. At the same time, there will be many people missing from the table, and some question the integrity of what is being served.
Billed as an “opportunity to empower all people to leverage the power of food systems to drive our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and get us back on track to achieve all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030,” the summit has been convening UN member states, organizations, and companies over the past 18 months leading up to today. The idea is to have people from all over the world contribute to laying the groundwork for changes to the global food system that will lead to progress on multiple SDGs—like no hunger and climate action.
But in the spring, an alliance that represents 500 groups with 300 million members announced its members would boycott the summit due to top-down corporate influence and a focus on industrial farming methods over indigenous knowledge and agroecology. A group of scientists and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) followed, and three UN food experts published an op-ed stating similar concerns. Then, over the summer, 9,000 people attended a virtual “counter summit” in protest.
“Farmers and civil society organizations were not consulted when the summit was being organized and it is not inclusive, but only focusing on the big agribusiness players… that is why the boycott has been so intensive,” said Elizabeth Mpofu, an organic small-scale farmer from Zimbabwe and general coordinator of La Via Campesina, in a press release sent out by the Oakland Institute this week to distribute a report titled “People Vs. Agribusiness Corporations: The Battle Over Global Food and Agriculture Governance."
At a press conference this morning to kick off the summit, the representatives who spoke seemed intent on countering that narrative. For example, Elizabeth Nsimadala, President of the PanAfrican Farmers Organization, said that “the process has been a true definition of what we would call a People’s Summit. It has been very inclusive. It has been diverse.”
There are also people involved whose ideas about the effectiveness of the summit fall somewhere in the middle and who see the summit as an opportunity for change regardless of its flaws, like Global Alliance for the Future of Food executive director Ruth Richardson, who I interviewed this week on The Farm Report.
“In many ways the summit has had some controversies, but we also feel that it’s been really important in catalyzing conversations about the future of food, in fact at a scale that I haven’t seen in the 10 years I’ve been at the Global Alliance,” she said. “So that’s where we see hope.”
Here’s what you need to know about both the protests and the potential.
Unwrapped
Essentially, the groups that are boycotting say that the summit’s overall agenda and “action tracks,” which provide an outline for different food system shifts, were set by a group dominated by corporate interests. In IPES-Food’s memo, it points to the involvement of the World Economic Forum (the group that hosts Davos) and the fact that the summit organizers bypassed the UN’s own Committee on World Food Security (CFS), a democratic space for food systems governance, in the planning stages.
But organizers and others involved counter that a wide variety of groups that represent smallholder farmers, Indigenous peoples, and youth have shaped the agenda from the beginning. “Indigenous peoples have been supporting the summit process since Secretary General Guterres announced the summit In 2019. We have organized dialogues in the seven sociocultural regions with almost 300 indigenous peoples organizations participating,” said Myrna Cunningham, president of the Fund for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, at the press conference.
Perhaps the biggest lightning rod was the appointment of Agnes Kalibata as the summit’s special envoy. Kalibata is the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an organization funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that prioritizes spreading Western industrialized agricultural systems—based on inputs including hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides—to African farmers. With Kalibata at the helm, many believed the emphasis would be on sticking to those industrial methods rather than transitioning away from them.
In the past year, reports have come out showing AGRA has not hit its goals to improve yields or reduce hunger in the countries it’s working in, and groups like the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) have been pushing back on its approach for years, maintaining that true progress on sustainable agriculture and reducing hunger on the continent will come from a homegrown movement toward using agroecological farming practices to grow more nutrient-dense, climate-resilient native crops. (I’ve written about these issues in depth for Civil Eats here and here.)
Earlier this week, The Guardian also reported that groups aligned with the meat industry threatened to withdraw from a summit discussion “cluster” after animal welfare groups and environmental scientists were added. One of those groups was the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, an alliance of all of the agribusiness interests involved in beef, including Cargill, JBS, and Tyson.
In the end, the summit has created a larger forum in which conflicting ideas about the future of the food system that were already persistent are now on display in a bigger way. Corporations are working hard, often in conjunction with governments, to convince the world that making small changes to industrial food systems is the only effective path toward a more sustainable, ethical food system that can feed a global population. Many food and environment organizations support that approach. Others are calling for a wholesale transformation of the way we produce food that is not determined by corporations but by people who steward agricultural knowledge and native seeds and are driven to feed themselves and their communities.
Some will skip the global dinner party and will do their own work on the outside. Others, like Richardson, are convinced that sitting down at the table and working from the inside will have a bigger impact. Her mandate, she said, is to push for three priorities: inclusive, participatory governance, the adoption of true cost accounting, and a greater emphasis on agroecology. “What has kept me motivated are the hundreds if not thousands of people who are inside the summit pushing for change and to be able to work with those people ...to learn from them, to debate the issues, I think that’s a critical role of the summit,” she said.
Wrapped up, to go
*People from all over the world will participate in the UN’s first-ever Food Systems Summit today, with a goal of aligning around changes to the global food system that advance progress on Sustainable Development Goals like ending hunger and advancing climate action.
*Many groups are boycotting the summit due to what they see as corporate influence and a lack of attention to agroecology.
*Others see the summit as an opportunity to push for changes within.
Still hungry?
Clean energy or dirty system? For Civil Eats, I reported on a massive facility Smithfield built in Utah that can confine close to half a million hogs in one place and is capturing methane to generate energy. It’s a development that brings up thorny questions around the impacts of climate solutions, and whether they can be called solutions at all.
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