Food Systems for Life: Are we all on board?
Throughout the second half of this year, a working group made up of people affiliated with the organizations that are launching this declaration held a series of meetings with the aim of analyzing the activities and agreements established for the celebration of the Summit on Food Systems organized by the UN and held on September 22 of this year at the main headquarters of the organization in New York City.
Once the organizational process and the debates about the summit were recognized, as well as the participation and absence of organizations, member countries, agribusiness corporations and academics, we decided to develop a questionnaire to find out among our colleagues the level of knowledge that they had about said summit, its importance, as well as the actors involved in this process.
Three hundred and twenty-three people participated in completing the form. The most significant finding was a widespread lack of awareness regarding the characteristics, binding process, and global role of this summit. Therefore, we organized two webinars to share the perspectives of leaders from social organizations, government officials, academics, students, activists, and the general public on this summit.
Both webinars were attended by approximately 600 people, and as a result of the presentations, questions, and debate, this declaration was signed.
In early 2022, we will hold another webinar to review, from our pluriversal perspective, what comes after the summit and how we should organize ourselves in the region to strengthen the Latin American and Caribbean agroecological movement, and what activities we should carry out in the territories and among ourselves.
December 9th 2021
CLACSO Working Group
Political agroecology
Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology – SOCLA
Brazilian Association of Agroecology – ABA-Agroecology
National Network of Family Farming – RENAF Colombia
Agroecology Research Group – GIAUN – National University of Colombia
Mexican Society of Agroecology – SOMEXA
Food Systems for Life Declaration Are we all on board?
Reflections from the “Independent Dialogues Summit on Food Systems” September 20-21, 2021
In alternative food dynamics, are we all on board? Yes, but in different, unequal boats and vessels, with varying numbers of passengers; yet, we are all in the same waters, facing the challenge of a common storm. How do we meet this challenge? By designing and implementing multiple mechanisms, all of them inclusive and adapted to each regional, territorial, and local context. That is, built through multiple territorialized approaches to manage truly sustainable food systems: a pluriverse of agroecologies. However, this is not a shared vision, especially within the global regulatory context, where those who own the biggest ships continue to influence the definition of food policies in their favor, without our voices or perspectives.
Last September, under the auspices of the United Nations and amid widespread criticism from various sectors not aligned with global agribusiness, the Food Systems Summit was held. And what was it all about? Those who were unaware of it could be considered part of the 63% of participants in a survey conducted1 To understand the level of awareness surrounding this event, which significantly influenced how it unfolded and by whom it was implemented, it is crucial to examine the level of understanding. This lack of awareness reflects one of the Summit's main shortcomings or anomalies: exclusion, and consequently, the absence of a genuine willingness to engage in dialogue with the diverse sectors involved in food production, distribution, and consumption. However, the regional preparatory processes for the Summit fostered the illusion of inclusive participation from its various stakeholders, giving the impression that diverse perspectives and voices had been considered. But the reality is that the social organizations managing local food systems, those responsible for the care and defense of territories, common resources, and food sovereignty, were not included in the Summit's decision-making processes on Food Systems. This brings to mind a quote from Paulo Freire, who argues that there can be no dialogue without genuine recognition and respect for others.
In this context, the seminar “Food Systems for Life Are we all board?" The seminar aimed to discuss the role of agribusiness in influencing public policies on current and future food systems, both globally and nationally, and to reflect on the relevance of the agroecological paradigm in these discussions. Some of the seminar's conclusions are presented below.
According to several studies, over 70% of locally consumed food originates from traditional, short-circuit systems, tailored to their specific territorial and cultural context. The key players in this food supply chain are generally ignored, even in the decision-making processes of the Food Systems Summit. The reason: to facilitate control over the various links in the chain: production, processing, distribution, marketing, and consumption. With its focus on industrial agriculture, the underlying objective is to secure markets for technologies and procedures that rely on synthetic inputs, mechanization, commercial seeds (hybrid and genetically modified), and ultra-processed foods. Consumers, especially those in urban centers, are also involved in these dynamics of appropriation, and their purchasing decisions are manipulated.
The exclusion of small-scale producers who feed the world and the privilege of large corporations that profit from it demonstrate that the current Food Systems Summit and food governance are mired in a conflict between worlds. In this conflict, agribusiness and the agro-industry generate forms of action, narratives, proposals, and elements for a hegemonic project, despite being in crisis. The result is the further exclusion of actions, narratives, and proposals from other possible and necessary worlds. This is a strategy to mask the fact that industrial food systems, based on increasing corporate control, are responsible for inextricably interconnected threats: the climate crisis, deforestation, biodiversity loss, the degradation and poisoning of land and oceans, air and water pollution, hunger, marginalization, and countless human rights violations. In other words, it is part of the civilizational project of “modernity” in profound collapse.
From this analysis, the Food Systems Summit is recognized as a strategy that is recreated through the establishment of a narrative that attempts to be “common,” adopting terms associated with a “positive” and “desirable” message of human and collective rights, innovation, the economy, development, gender equality, women's empowerment, etc. But in reality, this strategy is linked to the intrinsic mechanisms of the model associated with the perpetuation and deepening of the hegemonic food system in favor of the privileged. From there, it co-opts proposals—such as agroecology—incorporating their concepts while emptying them of their content, especially their political and cultural significance. In doing so, it attempts to appropriate multiple demands from peasants, Indigenous peoples, women's struggles, Afro-descendants, and other groups. Part of this co-optation is “eco-technocracy” as the axis of “solutions” which, in general terms, proposes actions based on technology, individualism and “commodifying” ecosystems and communities.
These approaches involve the ignorance, invisibility, and subordination of millions of peasants worldwide. By denying the root causes of the crisis and of food systems, farmers, peasants, Indigenous peoples, rural workers, and many others are transformed from central political subjects and actors into excluded actors within economic systems that instrumentalize them through a new spiral of false solutions based on the exploitation of the commons and the planet.
Based on the above, the Food Systems Summit can be considered a political, ecological, and social failure, due to the lack of commitment to food sovereignty, the denial of agroecology as a strategic path for the radical transformation of the corporate food regime, and the invisibility and exclusion of its historical creators of healthy food.
So… what will the future of agroecology be after the Summit?
Agroecology cannot face this storm of distorted and denied crises alone. Agroecology needs to reinvent itself—as it always has. It needs to strengthen its socio-political foundation through more constructive and inclusive dialogue to build public policies that are developed through dialogue, where the voices of political actors are heard and integrated into the design, enactment, and implementation of multi-sectoral, multi-dimensional, and multi-scale public policy.
Agroecology also faces the challenge of corporate and academic co-optation in its many forms. Conversely, it would be possible to reverse this affront through agroecologies based on territorialized knowledge, preventing historical agroecological territories from becoming targets of extractivism, a form of dispossession exacerbated by the corporate regime. The challenge, then, is to guarantee, first and foremost, the food sovereignty of peasant families and ensure a just and sovereign agenda for them. This requires strengthening collective approaches to designing the processes and mechanisms for transforming food systems—here and now!
As a provocation to incite discussion, the following points are raised for the sectors that design public policies:
– Strengthen peasant agriculture under agroecological principles.
– To encourage, strengthen and/or consolidate territorial agroecological markets (territorialized agroecological networks), through short, social and solidarity circuits.
– Reconnecting farmers with consumers by strengthening the relationship between rural and urban areas.
– To encourage peri-urban and urban agriculture based on agroecology, also promoting the conversion towards agroecological production and food systems.
– Expand the training of cadres through co-training and the construction of learning communities with horizontal pedagogical processes for the radical transformation of these relationships.
– To create regional coordination mechanisms among the various agroecological actors as a strategy to counter the onslaught of potential corporate “agroecological” coalitions. – To expand knowledge about public policies in favor of agroecology at the national and
regional, visualizing and disseminating progressive policies that favor agroecological transformations and massification, and denouncing those that are regressive or attempt to consolidate the status quo.
– To empower territories, the concrete, the micro, uniting it with the structural and political-institutional with social and ecological justice, where women, youth, peasant communities and indigenous peoples, among other groups that have been disadvantaged until now, are at the center.
In summary, the transformation from agroecology to build sovereign and popular food horizons in the face of this new onslaught from agribusiness and its international allies.
Signatories
CLACSO Working Group on Political Agroecology
Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology – SOCLA
Brazilian Association of Agroecology – ABA-Agroecology
National Network of Family Farming – RENAF Colombia
Agroecology Research Group – GIAUN – National University of Colombia
Mexican Society of Agroecology – SOMEXA
1 In July 2021, the Working Group on Political Agroecology of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology (SOCLA), the Brazilian Association of Agroecology (ABA), and the Mexican Society of Agroecology (SOMEXA) launched an online survey to assess the level of information regarding the Food Systems Summit. A total of 323 people participated.
This statement expresses the position of the Working Group Political agroecology and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.
