Colin todhunter
The UN Food Systems Summit(UNFSS ), consisting of a’pre-summit’, will take place in September 2021 in New York. The Italian government is hosting the pre-summit in Rome from 26– 28 July. The UNFSS claims it intends to provide the current evidence-based, clinical techniques from all over the world, launch a set of fresh commitments through unions of action and mobilise brand-new funding and collaborations.
Despite claims of being a ‘individuals’s summit’ and a ‘options’ summit, the UNFSS is assisting in greater corporate concentration, unsustainable globalised value chains and agribusiness leverage over public institutions. As an outcome, more than 300 international organisations of small-scale food producers, researchers and indigenous peoples will gather online from 25-28 July to mobilise versus the pre-summit.
The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSM) for relations with the United Nations Committee on World Food Security is working to get rid of food insecurity and poor nutrition. According to the CMS, the UNFSS– founded on a collaboration in between the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF)– is disproportionately affected by business stars, does not have openness and responsibility and diverts energy and funds far from the genuine options needed to tackle the several appetite, climate and health crises.
The CMS argues that the UNFSS is not developing on the tradition of previous world food tops, which led to the production of innovative, inclusive and participatory international food governance mechanisms anchored in human rights, such as the reformed UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS).
Promoting commercial agriculture
It seems the UNFSS is now controlled by corporate front groups and corporate-driven platforms, including the Alliance for a Green Transformation in Africa (AGRA), the International Agri-Food Network, the World Service Council for Sustainable Advancement and the EAT Forum along with the Rockefeller Structure and the Gates Structure. The President of AGRA, Agnes Kalibata, was even selected as UN Special Envoy for the summit.
According to the CMS, those being approved a pivotal function at the UNFSS assistance commercial food systems that promote ultra-processed foods, deforestation, commercial livestock production, intensive pesticide use and product crop monocultures, all of which trigger soil degeneration, water contamination and permanent effect on biodiversity and human health.
The industrialised food system that these corporations fuel does not even feed the world, despite business claims to the contrary. For instance, the 2021 UN Report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition indicates that the number of chronically undernourished people has increased to 811 million, while nearly a 3rd of the world’s population has no access to appropriate food. Moreover, the Global South is still reeling from Covid-19 associated policies which have actually laid bare the intrinsic fragility and injustices of the dominating food system.
Those who contribute most to world food security, smallholder producers, are the most threatened and affected by the corporate concentration of land, seeds, natural and funds and the related privatisation of the commons and public products. F
And these processes are speeding up: the high-tech/data corporations, consisting of Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have actually signed up with standard agribusiness giants in a mission to impose a one size fits all type of agriculture and food production on the world. Digitalisation, expert system and other innovations are serving to promote a new age of resource grabbing and the restructuring of food systems towards a total concentration of power.
The Costs and Melinda Gates Foundation is likewise heavily included, whether through buying up substantial systems of farmland, financing and promoting a much-heralded (however stopped working) ‘green transformation’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic foodand brand-new genetic modification innovationsor more generally helping with the goals of the mega agrifood corporations.
Under the guise of conserving the planet with ‘climate-friendly services’, helping farmers and feeding the world, what Gates and his business associates are actually doing is desperately trying to repackage the dispossessive techniques of imperialism covered in the language of ‘sustainability’ and ‘inclusivity’.
Through numerous elements of data control referring to soil quality, customer choices, weather, and land use, for instance, and e-commerce monopolies, business land ownership, seed biopiracy, patents, synthetic food and the weakening of the general public sector’s role in guaranteeing food security and national food sovereignty, international agricapital looks for to gain full control over the world’s food system.
Smallholder peasant farming is under hazard as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, genetically crafted (GE) soil microorganisms, information harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies. The design being promoted desires farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless makers, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from trademarked GE seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.
The CMS keeps in mind that these are false ‘options’ that look for to bypass and undermine the peasant food web which presently produces as much as 70% of the world’s food, dealing with just 25% of the resources. Furthermore, these false services do not resolve structural oppressions such as land and resource grabbing, corporate abuse of power and economic inequality. They merely enhance them.
Towards food sovereignty
More than 380 million individuals belong to the motions objecting against the UNFSS. They are demanding an extreme transformation of corporate food routines towards a just and really sustainable food system. They are also requiring increased participation in existing democratic food governance models, such as the UN Committee for World Food Security (CFS) and its High-Level Panel of Professionals. The UNFSS threatens to weaken CFS, which is the primary inclusive intergovernmental global policy-making arena.
There is a magnifying fight for space in between regional markets and international markets. The former are the domain of independent producers and small-scale enterprises, whereas worldwide markets are dominated by increasing monopolistic massive worldwide sellers, traders and the quickly growing influential e-commerce business.
It is for that reason essential to secure and strengthen regional markets and indigenous, independent small-scale producers and business to ensure neighborhood control over food systems, financial self-reliance and regional food sovereignty. With this in mind, the CMS is calling for a radical agroecological change of food systems based upon food sovereignty, gender justice and economic and social justice.
Agroecology is practiced throughout the world. As many high-level (UN) reports have actually argued over the years, this approach enhances nutrition, lowers hardship, adds to gender justice, fights environment modification and enriches farmland. Without any need to buy exclusive inputs (chemicals, seeds, etc) and its surpassing of industrial agriculture, agroecology represents a shift towards authentic food sovereignty and hence a direct risk to corporate agribusiness.
Throughout the online mobilisation against the pre-summit, participants will share small food manufacturers and workers’ realities and their visions for a human rights-based and agroecological change of food systems. In doing so, they will highlight the value of food sovereignty, small sustainable agriculture, conventional knowledge, rights to natural resources and the rights of employees, indigenous individuals, females and future generations.