What's new?

Agribusiness giants could dominate the future of our food systems, accelerating environmental breakdown and surrendering the food security of billions of people to untested technologies managed by for-profit companies. Or civil society and social movements could fight back instead and succeed in transforming financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up. This is the message from a new report published by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and ETC Group on March 30. In the report “A Long Food Movement? Transforming Food Systems by 2045”, they outline how these different futures for food systems, people and the planet could look like. The authors stress that the 2021 Food Systems Summit, convened with the express intention of restructuring the regulatory environment for food and farming, could be a sign of the battles to come. “We are facing a corporate tidal wave. In only six months’ time, the UN Food Systems Summit could rubber-stamp changes that force millions of people off the land and put our food security at the mercy of high-risk big data and AI-controlled farming,” warns lead author Pat Mooney. “But farmers, food workers and their allies are mobilizing in new ways to defend their spaces and livelihoods. In fact, the Summit could spark a quarter century of food system transformation - a ‘long food movement’.” [+] more ...