Can ‘one day in New York’ end hunger and make food sustainable?

An international conference aimed at fighting hunger and reducing the environmental impact of our food could end up making the situation worse, even in Canada, farmers, activists and academics warn.

The UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), a virtual event that took place Thursday from New York City, was described as a “historic opportunity” for countries, companies, NGOs and other organizations to collaborate. in repairing the world’s food systems. A term that refers to the complex pathways that food travels from farm to table.

“Governments brought together businesses, communities and civil society to chart paths for the future of food systems,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres, who convened the summit last year. He added that the event would “lead (…) the path to food systems that can drive global recovery in three different ways. For the people. For the planet. And for prosperity. ”

Yet many of those who apparently have the most to gain of the event’s “bold new… solutions” aren’t buying the hype.

“If you talk about the right to food, you first have to talk to those who don’t realize that right,” said Nettie Wiebe, a member of the National Farmers Union, a Saskatchewan organic farmer and a former professor.

“There has to be a very powerful and important discussion (that) includes all those people and not this kind of multi-stakeholder fiction where everyone is around the table, but actually the decisions are made by those with full pockets.” .

The problems with the summit started from its inception, Wiebe explained. Unlike most UN meetings, the UNFSS was created by Guterres and the World Economic Forum, a nonprofit organization representing the world’s most profitable companies. The summit also hosted companies and industry groups on an equal footing with national governments, a so-called “multi-stakeholder approach,” critics say, gave corporations an important role in the event.

Food is responsible for about a third of anthropogenic emissions and is destroying biodiversity, according to a 2019 IPCC report, and experts agree that major changes are needed in everything from agriculture to waste management systems to address the climate crisis. Most of these impacts come from high-tech industrial agricultural models favored by corporations, despite their negative impact.

Many of the summit’s salient pledges relied heavily on technology to make agriculture more sustainable, as opposed to less impact agroecological and regenerative methods. For Canada, that could mean more of the same.

“The government (of Canada), in terms of trade agreements and at the UN, has almost completely aligned itself with our agribusiness sector,” Wiebe said.

Furthermore, despite massive advances in global food production over the past century, poverty and other factors mean that around 811 million people go hungry each year, including more than five million in Canada, according to Statistics Canada.

An international conference aimed at fighting hunger and reducing the environmental impact of our food could end up worsening the situation, including in Canada, warns a coalition of farmers, activists and academics. #Food safety

Experts have repeatedly emphasized that the key to ending this crisis is not growing or donating more food, an approach often promoted by major agribusinesses and other corporations. Instead, countries should implement policies that guarantee the human right to food of their citizens, such as adequate income supports.

“The UN Food Systems Summit has avoided the difficult questions of power dynamics,” said Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and a vocal critic of the event, in a quote provided to Greenpeace.

“The decision makers were elitist in their perspective, unable to listen to the daily struggles and slow to recognize human rights. They started with experts and corporations and eventually turned to national governments, but governments have regularly informed me that the process has been confusing and they don’t know what their role is. “

Wiebe was concerned about the lack of transparency about the role of business at the summit and emphasized that without mechanisms to hold participants accountable for their commitments, they carried little weight. She is not alone. Frustrated with the widespread role that corporations and industrial groups played at the summit, hundreds of leading food, agriculture and environmental organizations boycotted the event.

The UN already has an organization that brings countries together to fix our food system that has the authority to create more effective, transparent and legally binding agreements: the Committee on World Food Security. Founded in 1974 to develop global policies for food safety, the organization is designed to give a voice to minimize corporate influence while giving farmers, indigenous and other advocacy groups a voice in the making process. decision making.

“Instead of supporting existing work on food systems … the UNFSS totally undermined all of that,” said Sophia Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy, an organization promoting sustainable agriculture that is among those who boycotted. the event. .

“How strange that they looked around the (UN) multilateral machine and realized this deeply flawed and highly controversial day in New York when they have all this existing infrastructure that actually has a mandate to talk about (food).”

Reference-www.nationalobserver.com

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