By Dr Vandana Shiva - Even as industrial agriculture brings the planet and our economies to collapse, corporations and billionaires are hijacking the food system by capturing the Food Summit. The Poison Cartel and Big Tech are joining hands to push the failed model on a fast forward, destroying democratic structures from local to global levels. The toxic future they are promoting is based on more chemicalisation and more GMOs, more mechanisation and driverless tractors, Digital Agriculture, surveillance drones, robots and spyware. Read more
In response to the corporate hijacking of global food systems taking place ot the UN Food System Summit,grassroots organizations from all over the world seeking real, agroecological change, have mobilizeda counter-summit to show what real food systems transformation should look like.
We will not accept this top-down, non-transparent and unequal process of deliberations that has resulted in corporate friendly “Coalitions of Action.” The capital-intensive, proprietary technologies and products proposed as “game changing solutions” will be ecologically destructive, deepen extractivism, colonialism, patriarchy and inequality, and open up more areas for corporate expansion and control.
The UNFSS is dominated by private interests, allowing corporations and billionaires to influence global food policy and to decide what “sustainable” and “healthy” food means. Action Track 1 and 2 of the UNFSS use diets and nutrition to push a range of false solutions based on technical innovations and partnerships with private corporations, under the guise of fighting climate change and malnutrition.
For instance, the Action Track 1 promotes food fortification (adding nutrients in crops through conventional plant breeding or genetic modification). This corporate-based approach undermines communities’ ability to strengthen their local food systems based on their cultural and traditional knowledge and preferences, while leading to further dependence on a few staple crops. Another example is the promotion of plant-based animal products made with synthetic biology in Action Track 2. This so-called solution replaces biodiverse and local diets with ultra ultra-processed foods, made with patented technologies that profit agrifood corporations and that directly contribute to the industrial food system that is threatening the planet and our health.
While these corporations and their partners have been silently pushing these false-solution narratives for years, the huge platform provided by the UNFSS now gives them direct power to shape global food systems. It is high time to denounce this corporate hijacking, and to advocate for truly ecological and sustainable biodiverse diets that empower local and indigenous communities and produce nutritious and healthy food, and to advocate for a genuine transition to an agroecological paradigm which considers biodiversity and cultural diversity, local food economies and regenerating the planet as central to any kind of food systems transformation. Read more
The “Towards an Ecological Food Systems Transformation: Earth Care is People Care” Campaign is a call for the diversity of movements working on agroecology, organic agriculture, local food, Earth Democracy, Ecocide, Rights of Mother Earth and all else around a holistic and ecological transition of our food systems to join forces through joint collaboration, dialogues and action. By highlighting what true food systems transformation means both on the ground and globally, this campaign seeks to bring together various and diverse voices across the planet to fortify an interconnected movement that deepens the principles of a biodiversity-based, socially just, ecological agriculture.
The urgent need to transition from industrial monoculture, GMOs and pesticides-based systems to biodiversity intensive agroecology based on the principles of Earth Democracy has become a survival imperative. This includes a transition away from the hijacked food systems transformation proposed by the upcoming UN Food Systems Summit, which actively sidelines real root solutions, food justice, the human rights of indigenous people, small farmers and most importantly Nature’s Rights. Read more
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