UN Food Systems Summit

Farmers and rights groups boycott food summit over big business links (4/3-21): Focus on agro-business rather than ecology has split groups invited to planned UN conference on hunger.

The planned summit is already embroiled in arguments over who is to blame for the growth of hunger and disease, and whether the meeting is biased in favour of corporate, hi-tech intensive farming.

The meeting got off to a controversial start when Guterres appointed Agnes Kalibata to head the event. The former Rwandan agriculture minister is president of the Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), set up in 2006 to open the continent up to genetically modified crops, high-yield commercial seed varieties and intensive farming.

Further suspicions that big business was dominating the agenda came when the summit’s concept paper mentioned precision agriculture, data collection and genetic engineering as important for addressing food security – initiatives supported by big technology companies and philanthropists – but made no mention of ecological farming or civil society involvement.

The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, wrote to Kalibata in January saying the global food crisis was “chronic, urgent and set to intensify” but the summit appeared focused on science and technology, money and markets, and did not address “fundamental questions of inequality, accountability and governance”.

The capture of the UN Summit on Food Systems by agribusiness lobbies denounced at the Human Rights Council (3/3-21): La Via Campesina and CETIM express their concern about the corporate capture of agribusiness lobbies on the preparations for the UN Summit on Food Systems.

On March 2, 2021, Perla Alvarez Britez, representative of La Via Campesina, addressed the plenary assembly of the 46th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), on the occasion of the presentation of the report of the new UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Mr. Michael Fakhri.

In his report, the Special Rapporteur highlighted the issues and priorities he intends to address during his mandate, putting a special focus on the issue of global governance of food systems, referring in particular, and with concern, to the UN Food Systems Summit that will be held in September 2021 in New York. Indeed, this summit, which is subject to many controversies in international debates, is at the heart of the UN agenda for 2021, but also of the agenda of rural movements and organizations.

Human rights overshadowed by big business in UN food summit, says UN expert (26/2-21): UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, raised concerns in a recent report that despite some progress, the UN Food Systems Summit, is still prioritising big business interests over human rights.

“Human rights were initially excluded from the Summit preparations, and have now been included, but remain on the margins,” the report published this month stated. The UN expert will present his findings early next week at the UN Human Rights Council taking place this month in Geneva.

The report raises concerns that it’s mostly market-based approaches that are being championed in the summit, while critics say these are at the core of many of the problems with global food systems, including inequality, low salaries, bad working conditions, disregard for land rights and other socio-economic and cultural rights. Other alternatives such as agroecology and indigenous-based practices have also been left out.

Priceless background on the Davos take-over of the UN Summit on Food Systems: Economic, political, and futurist agendas!!! (18/1-21): Activists sometimes claim that messages and policies in favor of the consumption of animal source foods (ASFs) are fabricated by the livestock sector. This holds true for its promotional activities, as for any sector, but is at least equally valid for anti-livestock agendas. The latter are increasingly endorsed by various large investors, food corporations, ideological parties, and policy makers. It needs to be asked how much of this dynamic can be explained by genuine ethical, environmental, or health concerns, and how much by electoral or market opportunities and belief systems.

Towards a Great Food Transformation? — The once solid position of animal source foods (ASFs) as valuable nutrition in dietary models is no longer undisputed. This is particularly the case for red and processed meats, but increasingly also for other ASFs. The recent Planetary Health Diet, which was designed by the EAT-Lancet Commission to induce a Great Food Transformation, is a driving force of this new paradigm. Its proponents claim benefits for humans, animals, and the planet, thereby arguing for a range of hard policy interventions to move the global population towards more plant-based eating.

A very important position paper!!! A Summit Under Siege! (Dec. 2020): Corporate lobbies defending Agribusiness interests are influencing the 2021 UN FOOD SYSTEMS SUMMIT preparations, making the process opaque and exclusionary. La Via Campesina explains why this endangers people’s food sovereignty and threatens the planet’s future.

There is little doubt that the world needs to come together to deal with the severe and ongoing impact of COVID-19 on our food systems. When the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS21) was announced in December 2019, the world was a different place. Even then, concerns existed about the non-transparent and illegitimate process behind developing, announcing and organizing that Summit. Consequently, in March 2020 La Via Campesina (LVC) joined around 550 other social movements and civil society organizations in opposing the corporate takeover of the Summit.

In the past, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) convened the World Food Summits (WFS) - in 1996 and 2002 - following explicit decisions of its member governments. These previous summits also saw an active and fully supported participation of the Civil Society through parallel autonomous and selforganized fora. However, the UNFSS21 has not received any mandate from an intergovernmental decision or process. Instead, the decision was taken by the UN General Secretary, in response to a request made by the World Economic Forum, which is a private sector organization representing global corporate interests. It also had crucial support from a few powerful member states and a few major ‘philanthro-capitalist’ organizations as sponsors.

A few organizations and individuals were summoned to join advisory bodies, while a growing number of individuals are being called to participate by signing up as ‘champions’ of the UNFSS. No compunction has been shown in including small-scale food producers, civil society and indigenous peoples’ organizations in a way respecting their autonomy, self-organization, and self-determination.

The idea that a restricted panel of so-called ‘experts’ should be at the helm of global food system policy is utterly undemocratic. Such an idea has already been rejected by consensus and replaced by the reformed CFS. The current trajectory of the Summit’s build-up process allows the global power elites, and especially the private sector, to once again legitimize themselves as architects of the future of our food system, using its transnational corporate arms to continue to accumulate capital and destroy the planet.

Its giving agribusinesses a free rein to shape the future of our food systems, covered by anti-democratic public policies. Hence, we cannot consider the UNFSS21 as a legitimate multilateral governmental space allowing the autonomous participation of Civil Society. The process towards the UNFSS also clearly shows the increasing corporate capture of some important UN Bodies.

There are clear indications that corporate interests will control the Summit, evident from the fact that it originates from a partnership between the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the UN Secretary-General.

The WEF-UN partnership agreement signed in 2019 has de facto provided transnational corporations preferential and deferential access to the UN System. This partnership, denounced by LVC and other organizations, raises serious concerns about the integrity of the United Nations as a multilateral system and its independence and impartiality, particularly concerning the protection and promotion of human rights. Moreover, many UN agencies, including UNICEF, UNDP, WHO and UNESCO, have engaged in partnerships with major transnational companies (TNCs); at the same time, they are not doing enough to curb the impunity of TNCs. The result is that we see more and more UN policies that put private interests and speculation above public interests.

In Africa, a recent expose revealed the catastrophic failure of AGRA’s continent-wide plan to stop hunger through an aggressive shift of African agricultural systems towards industrial and agro-toxic-reliant agriculture models. In our eyes, the appointment of Dr Agnes Kalibata as Special Envoy for the Summit shows how the relevant multinational corporate interests seek to control the “Summit” and further entrench their power over the public policy and governance of the global food system.

148 groups worldwide urge UN to sever partnership with WEF (May 2020): A total of 148 organizations from 28 countries issued a statement calling for the revocation of the 2019 Strategic Partnership between the United Nations (UN) and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

According to the groups, WEF’s involvement in the 2021 World Food Systems Summit (WFSS) through this partnership will result in the event’s “corporate hijacking.”

The WEF is an international organization of corporations “for public-private cooperation.” The strategic partnership framework it inked with the UN June last year identified six”key focus areas” where the two would collaborate in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

“The WEF will exploit the Summit to streamline neoliberal globalization, which it has espoused for the past 50 years,” the statement said. “It would mean that global inequality and corporate monopoly would beside tracked rather than confronted as the root causes of perennial hunger, malnutrition and extreme poverty in the world.”

Stop the corporate hijack of the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit! (April 2020): As of 31 January 2021, a total of 153 organizations from 31 countries and seven advocates have supported this sign-on statement. This was sent to concerned UN offices such as the Committee on World Food Security and officials including UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri.

”We, civil society organizations, grassroots groups and advocates for the welfare of marginalized sectors, call for the revocation of the 2019 Strategic Partnership between the United Nations (UN) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its implications for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

We express our grave concerns with regard to the WEF’s opportunism in attempting to influence the processes and outcome of the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit (FSS) through this partnership. The WEF – an organized global platform in which the world’s corporate giants, plutocrats and heads of states converge to promote the corporate agenda in the guise of “improving the state of the world” – aims to cement its dictate through the recalibration of our food systems and agriculture. By positioning themselves as indispensable actors in accelerating the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, they are, in reality, attempting to further their own interests in amassing super profits. A clear indication of this is their financing of the 2030 Agenda as the first area of focus specified in the UN-WEF strategic partnership framework and the appointment of an agribusiness representative as the Special Envoy for the Summit. (it continues)

The 2021 Food Systems Summit Has Started on the Wrong Foot – But it Could Still Be Transformational (March 2020): Fixing food systems and meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are two sides of the same coin. Food and agriculture account for 21-37% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and one third of land is severely degraded and losing productivity. 820 million people are still hungry, while 2 billion are lacking micronutrients and 1.9 billion are overweight or obese.

Yet, until now, agriculture has been ignored in climate talks, while nutrition has been largely neglected in attempts to eradicate hunger. This is why the UN has broken with protocol and called a World Food Systems Summit in 2021.

The focus on food systems is particularly welcome. Unsustainable dynamics are currently locked in along the whole food chain. Farmgate prices are driven downwards by powerful food companies that control national and global markets. Public policies and market incentives reward the mass production of uniform crop commodities, regardless of the costs. Support services – from product development to farmer training – remain focused on (and funded by) industrial agriculture. In other words, farmers face an uphill battle to shift their practices, and systemic solutions are urgently needed.

But talking about food systems is not enough. How we talk about them and with whom is what matters most. The opaque process leading up to the Food Systems Summit has fueled concerns that it will in fact ignore the growing consensus on how to fix food systems, and ignore those who are already fixing them.

The fact that the WEF and the UN have signed a Strategic Partnership Framework to "accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development", opened the door to corporate influence. As a result, the Food Systems Summit has been hijacked.

This partnership has been rightfully condemned by many as a WEF takeover of the UN. In general. But also with respect to the food policy programs that are overseen & catalyzed by the UN.

WEF takeover of UN strongly condemned (16/1-20): With the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in DAVOS around the corner, hundreds of CSOs reiterate condemnation of the partnership between the corporate world with the UN.

‘This agreement between the UN and WEF formalises a disturbing corporate capture of the UN. It moves the world dangerously towards a privatised and undemocratic global governance’, says Gonzalo Berrón of Transnational Institute, one of the key organisers of the open letter.

Harris Gleckman, a former UN official and senior fellow at the University of Massachussets says ‘This strategic agreement is a coup for the corporate leaders at Davos, but what does it offer the UN and the international community? This gives some of the most controversial corporations unprecedented access to the heart of the UN, yet it has not even been properly discussed by the UN’s country members and certainly not by the broader public.’

According to Sofia Monsalve, FIAN International Secretary-General, “The UN should acknowledge the different roles of private interest and of rights-holders that look after common goods and benefits. Corporations in the global industrial food chain alone destroy 75 billion tons of topsoil annually and are responsible for the annual loss of 7.5 million hectares of forest. This destruction, along with other factors, leaves 3.9 billion underfed or malnourished people. The WEF represents the interests of those who destroy the environment and abuse our human rights. It can not be considered a strategic partner in solving the world’s crises."

You'll find The Great Reset and Build Back Better narratives all over the UN Food Systems Summit. As in this pre-Summit "Reseting the Food System" event co-hosted by the pasta giant Barilla's "Center for Food and Nutrition".

It's important to understand that this Summit's outcome is to set the global agriculture and dietary agendas for decades to come. It will do so through 5 "action tracks" (photo above).

The WEF's grip is strongest within second action track - "sustainable diets".

The anchoring agency is WHO, mostly represented by #EATLancet commissioner Branca who states that within the food system "everything has to be RESET … we have to have much smaller amounts of meat on our tables. We need to RESET". Sounds familiar? Francesco Branca on Healthy and Sustainable Diets: Everything Has To Be Reset (14/9-20)

The chair of the track is the founder of EAT. She wants 'to TAKE full advantage of the Summit' and 'to FORCE the kind of far-reaching changes that the world now desperately needs'. That's really clear language, n'est-ce pas?!? EAT at the UN Food Systems Summit 2021: Our Founder and Executive Chair Dr. Gunhild Stordalen is appointed a leading role at the UN Food Systems Summit.

Open letter to the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change (Nov. '20): «What’s disappointing is that, in your rush to target red meat, you have managed to miss not one but two giant elephants in the room. Regarding health, there is no comment on the damage being done to health by carbohydrate rich ultra-processed foods, which now make up over 50 per cent of the UK shopping basket and are associated with rising rates of obesity and diabetes. On the environmental front, you have turned a blind eye to the uncomfortable fact that fossil fuels and industry account for 75 per cent of global emissions[3] and 85 per cent of all emissions are derived from sources other than animal agriculture (even more if the sequestration benefits of animal agriculture are taken into account). No amount of tinkering with red meat consumption is going to make a dent in emission levels in the context of fossil fuel-based industries that continue to pump such levels of carbon into the atmosphere.»

The Place of Meat in Dietary Policy: An Exploration of the Animal/Plant Divide (28/7-20): The praxis of dietary reform during the last 200 years has resulted in the contemporary advice to eat less meat and more grains, vegetables, nuts, and fruit. It has contributed to the formation of an animal/plant divide, which amplifies its own message through the mechanism of healthy-user bias, affecting epidemiological literature through positive feedback. As an act that is both moral and scientific, “eating right” (e.g., less or no meat) has come to overrule tradition and preference, being at the same time consistent with the interests of the industrial order. Governmental intervention is welcomed by drawing support from the middle classes and activating social engineering. This evolution is problematic as food is no longer about culture, diversity, adequate nutrition, or even sustainability but is about how technocrats and their industrial allies measure and uniformize dietary needs within normative discourse, in view of societal management. The excessive focus on “plant-based” policies is not only counterproductive but also potentially harmful. It distracts from the actual planetary priorities that society should be dealing with, namely the root causes of climate change and inadequate nutrition because of nutrient-poor diets.

EAT-Lancet's Plant-Based Planet: 10 Things You Need to Know (19/1-19): We all want to be healthy, and we need a sustainable way to feed ourselves without destroying our environment. The well-being of our planet and its people are clearly in jeopardy, therefore clear, science-based, responsible guidance about how we should move forward together is most welcome.

Unfortunately, we are going to have to look elsewhere for solutions, because the report fails to provide us with the clarity, transparency and responsible representation of the facts we need to place our trust in its authors. Instead, the Commission’s arguments are vague, inconsistent, unscientific, and downplay the serious risks to life and health posed by vegan diets.

EAT-Lancet report’s recommendations are at odds with sustainable food production (17/9-19): The Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) welcomes the analysis in the EAT-Lancet report, published today, which illustrates why diets and global food systems need to change. However, due to a fundamental lack of agricultural understanding, some of the main dietary recommendations are incompatible with the food production outcomes of truly sustainable farming systems. For instance, in prioritising reductions in beef and lamb consumption over poultry consumption, the resulting environmental and health outcomes will both be negative.

20 Ways EAT Lancet’s Global Diet is Wrongfully Vilifying Meat (16/1-19)

WEF: Why we all need to go on the ‘planetary health diet’ to save the world (17/1-19): In order to “safeguard the natural systems and processes that humanity depends on”, there must be greater cooperation between all sectors to implement a “Great Food Transformation”.

Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems (16/1-19): Food systems have the potential to nurture human health and support environmental sustainability, however our current trajectories threaten both. The EAT–Lancet Commission addresses the need to feed a growing global population a healthy diet while also defining sustainable food systems that will minimise damage to our planet.

The Commission quantitively describes a universal healthy reference diet, based on an increase in consumption of healthy foods (such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts), and a decrease in consumption of unhealthy foods (such as red meat, sugar, and refined grains) that would provide major health benefits, and also increase the likelihood of attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. This is set against the backdrop of defined scientific boundaries that would ensure a safe operating space within six Earth systems, towards sustaining a healthy planet. The entire report

World's Seeds Banks:

One Empire Over Seed: Control Over the World’s Seed Banks (2020): This hijacking of farmers’ seeds is best highlighted with the shameful removal of India’s pre-eminent rice research scientist Dr. R.H. Richaria, as the head of India’s Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) in Cuttack, Orissa, which housed the largest collection of rice diversity in the world, for refusing to allow the IRRI in the Philippines to pirate the collection out of India. With his removal at the behest of the World Bank, Indian peasant intellectual property was hijacked to the IRRI in the Philippines which later became part of the newly created Consultative Group of International Agriculture Research (CGIAR).

Farmers’ seed heritage was held in the private seed banks of CGIAR, a consortium of 15 international agricultural research centers, controlled by the World Bank, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as of course the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), which since 2003, has poured more than $720 million into the CGIAR centres. CGIAR gene banks presently manage 768,576 accessions of farmer’ seeds. Taken together, CGIAR gene banks represent the largest and most widely used collections of crop diversity in the world.

Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic (2007): No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).

Very important food groups:

The ALEPH2020 initiative (Animal source foods and Livestock: Ethics, Planet, and Human health) was launched at the end of 2020 by an international and interdisciplinary consortium of more than 35 scientific experts.

CSM - Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples' Mechanism for relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security

The People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS) is a growing network of various grassroots groups of small food producers particularly of peasant-farmer organizations and their support NGOs, working towards a People’s Convention on Food Sovereignty.

Other food groups:

iPES-Food - The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems is an independent panel of experts with a mission to promote transition to sustainable food systems around the world. Since 2015, IPES-Food has shaped the debate on global food system reform through scientific reports & detailed policy recommendations.

Among its experts is also Olivier De Schutter (co-chair of IPES-Food) who is the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights since May 2020. He also served as UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 until 2014 and was elected to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights from 2014 to 2020.

Under scrutiny:

EAT is the science-based global platform for food system transformation.

FOLU - Food and Land-Use Coalition is a self-governing coalition composed of over 30 organizations established to transform the global food and land use systems.

One key new partnership in 2017 for action at both the private sector and individual countries level was the launch of the Food and Land-Use Coalition (FOLU) at the United National General Assembly, co-hosted by EAT. FOLU is a self-governing coalition composed of over 30 organizations established to transform the global food and land use systems.

It uses the EAT-Lancet dietary guidelines and planetary boundaries to develop global and national science-based targets, and pathways towards them. This work will be used to iteratively inform and raise the ambition of the private sector.

FOLU will also go deep into the policy, regulatory environment, and businesses of individual countries. Its efforts will start with Colombia, Indonesia and Ethiopia, and could later include the Nordics, Australia and Europe.

AGRA - Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa was founded Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the Rockefeller Foundation in 2006 on the belief that investing in agriculture is the surest path to reducing poverty and hunger in Africa. It works across the continent to help millions of smallholder farmers—who make up 70 percent of Africa’s population—boost their farm productivity and incomes.

Well, not really: Failing Africa’s farmers: New report shows Africa’s Green Revolution is “failing on its own terms” (10/7-20) and Africa's Choice: Africa’s Green Revolution has Failed, Time to Change Course (28/7-20)

Interesting book: