TODAY: The UN Food Systems Summit

The long-awaited UN Food System Summit takes place today.  The programme includes announcements from more than 85 heads of state and government.

The UN Food Systems Summit was announced by the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, on World Food Day in October 2019 as a part of the Decade of Action for delivery on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The aim of the Summit is to deliver progress on all 17 of the SDGs through a food systems approach, leveraging the interconnectedness of food systems to global challenges such as hunger, climate change, poverty and inequality. The Summit will take place during the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday, September 23. More information about the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit can be found online: https://www.un.org/foodsystemssummit

Despite its focus on food systems approaches, it is highly controversial—as I explained in previous posts.

• The UN Summit on Food Systems 1: The UN Version
• The UN Summit on Food Systems 2: The Critique
• The UN Food Systems Pre-Summit starts in Rome TODAY: Online Access
• Weekend reading: A call to the UN Food Systems Summit: Ultra-processed foods

In preparation for today’s events, Lela Nargi of The Counter provides a thoughtful summary of the issues: “The UN is holding a summit on building a sustainable future for food and ag. Why are so many people upset about it?”

The concerns:

• Who is behind the Summit? [Proponents of industrial agriculture]
• Who sets the Summit agenda? [Ditto]
• What is excluded? [Indigenous practices, regenerative agriculture, agroecology]

While watching to see how this plays out, you can take a look at:

• Information about today’s #FoodSystems4People counter-demonstration
• Meat lobbying groups hard at work.  As The Guardian puts it,

Also from The Guardian:

• UN food summit will be ‘elitist’ and ‘pro-corporate’, says special rapporteur
• Corporate colonization’: small producers boycott UN food summit

And for why the issue of agroecology is so important, see Raj Patel’s discussion in Scientific American: Agroecology Is the Solution to World Hunger

Marcia Ishii asks: Could FAO’s partnership with CropLife International have anything to do with the disappearance of agroecology from the agenda?