FOOD SYSTEMS
NEED A RADICAL TRANSFORMATION
According to
the latest UN Report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World
(SOFI 2021), the number of people who are chronically undernourished has risen
to an alarming 811 million. The report acknowledges that hunger was increasing
already before the pandemic and estimates that around 118 million more people were
facing hunger in 2020 than in 2019.
The Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated
the already existing deep structural problems of corporate and increasingly
globalized food systems. A radical, human rights-based and agroecological transformation
of food systems is more urgent than ever, towards food sovereignty, gender
justice, climate justice, economic and social justice, biodiversity, people’s
and planetary health, preconditions for lasting peace.
CONFRONTING INDUSTRIAL
AGRICULTURE
Corporate food systems, and the
increasing influence of corporate actors in political decision-making on food
and nutrition at the local, national, regional and global levels, pose a
universe of threats and harm to human rights and the rights of workers, women,
peasants, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, pastoralists, migrants, consumers
and the urban poor.
Those who contribute most to
world food security, the smallholder producers, are the most threatened and
affected by corporate concentration of land, seeds, markets, natural and
financial resources, and the related privatization of commons and public goods.
The Covid-19 pandemic held up a mirror to our food system. The
pandemic ratified the great failure of the industrial food system that
permanently affects our territories and bodies, and causes serious damage to
our health, biodiversity and natural ecosystems.
In addition, Covid-19 showed to the whole world the depth of
the structural inequalities, discrimination, exploitation, racism and sexism
prevalent in our societies, exacerbating their consequences on hunger, health
and poverty.
SOLUTIONS
ALREADY EXIST: AGROECOLOGY AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
A radical change in the way we
produce and consume food is needed. There is much to learn from the networks of
solidarity and care that people - often the most vulnerable and historically
oppressed - have put in place during the pandemic.
There is no need to develop
dangerous new technologies such as genetically modified organisms, nor to push
for euphemisms such as "sustainable intensification", “climate-smart
agriculture” or ‘nature-positive solutions’. The solution already exists, and it
is on our plates. Currently, 70% of the world gets food from the peasant food
web, which works with only 25% of the resources.
Millions of smallholder
farmers, fishermen, pastoralists, agricultural and rural workers, and entire
indigenous communities practice agroecology, a way of life and a form of
resistance to an unfair economic system that puts profit before life. Agroecological farming
constantly adapts to local needs, customs, soils and climates. As countless
experts have attested, agroecology improves nutrition, reduces poverty, contributes to gender justice, combats
climate change, and enriches farmland.
THE UN SHOULD
NOT PURSUE THE AGENDA OF CORPORATE FRONT GROUPS
The UN Food Systems Summit is not building on the legacy of past
World Food Summits, which resulted in the creation of innovative, inclusive and
participatory global food governance mechanisms anchored in human rights, such
as the reformed UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The FSS follows a
strong multi-stakeholder approach, which puts on equal footing governments,
corporations, other private sector actors, philanthropies, scientists, and
NGOs.
While FSS organizers aim to create an illusion of inclusiveness, it remains
unclear who is in control of taking decisions and by what procedures decisions
are made.
Despite the increasing recognition that industrial food systems are
failing on so many fronts, agribusiness and food corporations are trying to
maintain control. On the one hand, they are coopting our language. The World
Economic Forum is also calling for a "transformation of food systems", and the
FSS is self-proclaiming as a “people’s summit”. On the other hand, they are deploying
digitalisation, artificial intelligence and other information and communication
technologies to promote a new wave of resource grabbing, wealth extraction and
labor exploitation; and to re-structure food systems towards greater
concentration of power and even-more globalized value chains.
The upcoming Food Systems Summit is an illustrative example of how
corporate-driven platforms in close cooperation with like-minded governments
and high-level UN Officials intend to use the United Nations for supporting and
legitimizing a corporate-friendly transformation of food systems while promoting
at the same time new forms of multistakeholder governance to further
consolidate corporate influence in public institutions at national and UN
level.
RISE UP AGAINST
CORPORATE FOOD SYSTEMS!
The power that today's
agribusiness corporations exercise over governments and the UN must be
dismantled so that the common good is privileged before corporate interests. It is time to connect our
struggles and fight together for a better world based on mutual respect, social
justice, equity, solidarity and harmony with our Mother Earth.
Join the peoples'
counter-mobilization to transform corporate food systems. Check out the online
& offline programme of our four-days event which will soon be published on this website!
1. The Summit is not based on
human and peoples' rights: although the official event promotes an apparently
inclusive structure, from the beginning the process of organizing the Summit
was opaque and side-lining the existing human rights-based UN institutions as
well as the legitimate platforms of organized civil society organizations and
Indigenous Peoples. It has also largely ignored the COVID-19 crisis and the
multiple and systemic violations of human rights exacerbated by the pandemic.
2. The Summit is dominated by corporate interests: corporate
front groups and corporate-driven platforms such as the World Economic
Forum (WEF), the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the
International Agri-Food Network (IAFN), the World Business Council for
Sustainable Development (WCBSD), the Global Alliance for Improved
Nutrition (GAIN), the EAT Forum, Scaling-Up Nutrition (SUN) Business
Network, as well as leading corporate Philanthropies such as Rockefeller
Foundation, Gates Foundation and Stordalen Foundation have been playing
strong roles in the Summit process. The President of AGRA, Agnes Kalibata,
was appointed as UN Special Envoy for the Summit.
3.
The Summit promotes highly problematic models of
governance based on multistakeholderism. The strong threat that a
deliberate multi-stakeholder approach poses to the UN system must not be
underestimated. Multistakeholderism treats all actors as the same,
regardless of their different roles and responsibilities, enormous
asymmetries in power and resources, and evident conflicts of interest. The
attempt to replace governance models of inclusive multilateralism, as
established in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), with a multi-stakeholder
model with supposedly equal responsibility of all, firstly weakens the
role of the member states themselves; secondly facilitates an undue
influence of corporate interests, a trend of corporate capture in the UN;
and finally makes a clear definition of effective accountability systems
impossible.
4. The Summit promotes a very narrow concept of science
and frontally attacks the existing High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of
the CFS. The Summit’s Science Group proposes a new Science-Policy
Interface that would weaken and side-line the existing HLPE. The HLPE has
a clear mandate to serve as a global food Science-Policy-Interface and
works through a participative science-policy process, including open
consultations that enable input from civil society, Indigenous communities
and all relevant actors. The Summit’s initiative for a new SPI, however,
proposes a one-dimensional focus on modern science, ignoring many of the other
knowledges (e.g., Indigenous, experiential, farmers’, tacit, feminine).
Such exclusive approaches to knowledge and science tends to favour the
powerful, especially the corporate sector, and to neglect the huge
problems posed by conflicts of interest for research and science.
5. The Summit drives transformation of food systems
into the wrong direction: it does nothing to pave the way for the urgent
and profound change needed in food systems. With the UN event being hijacked
by representatives of the food industry and agribusiness, it is likely
that the Summit’s narrative supports industrial food systems that promote
ultra-processed foods, deforestation, industrial livestock production,
intensive use of pesticides and monocultures of commodities, which causes
soil deterioration, contamination of water courses and irreversible
impacts on biodiversity and people's health, will continue to grow and
wreak havoc.
6. The Summit promotes multi-stakeholder platforms as a replacement
of public institutions on the national, regional and global levels: in
this sense, big data and scientific evidence are increasingly being used
to displace people's direct participation and subjective knowledge in democratic
deliberations within policy-making spaces. At the same time,
multi-stakeholder platforms tend to be oriented towards
"solutions" to cherry-picked problems and are therefore
characterized by a mix of pragmatism and urgency, which does not allow uncovering
root causes and unjust, historical power asymmetries.
7. The Summit does not provide solutions to combat
malnutrition, hunger nor the climate crisis and ignores what is most
needed and urgent: a profound human rights-based and
agroecological transformation of food systems towards, food sovereignty,
gender justice, climate justice, economic and social justice,
biodiversity, people’s and planetary health which are all preconditions
for lasting peace.
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