COP 27, the fight against climate change requires a change in food systems, but the voice of farmers is still excluded from international policies

Of Francesco Panié*

They account for a third of global emissions, but remain systematically excluded from international climate policies.Since this year, however, food systems and agriculture have finally made inroads in the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.At COP 27 in Sharm El-Sheikh there was a lot of talk about these issues, especially in the new dedicated pavilion, set up by FAO and managed together with the CGIAR network of research centers and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Just the FAO he's pushing to be more involved in discussions on how to integrate the agriculture and food sector into national plans that should ground the goals included in the 2015 Paris Agreement.For now it has only succeeded to a small extent:this is demonstrated by the fact that there have been no advances on the part of the working group on agriculture born in 2017 at COP 23 in Bonn.His mandate was renewed for four years at the end of the Egyptian summit, but little else has been decided on the topic.Furthermore, in the final decision of the Sharm el-Sheikh summit, the topic of food and agriculture was included only in the preamble, even if this is the first time this has happened.

However, as demonstrated by the number of side events organized during the two weeks of negotiations in Egypt, it is now a difficult topic to ignore.The unprecedented drought in Europe, the United States and Africa, the heat wave that affected the wheat crop in India and the extreme climate phenomena in Pakistan and China are clear evidence of how food production is at risk due to weather events increasingly intense and unpredictable.If you add the impacts of pandemic and war, with the associated increase in energy costs and fragility of the international market, we obtain what the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, he defined a “perfect storm”.With another more philosophical but equally effective term, Professor Adam Tooze on the Financial Times recently called it “polycrisis”.

Agricultural productivity is the first to suffer the consequences, with effects on the availability and accessibility of food, as well as on farmers' incomes.It's only a matter of time now, but the topics of agriculture and food seem destined to gain ground main stage of the COP.The question that remains open is:with what proposals?

The demands of small farmers

If everyone seems to agree that we should talk about the problem, differences emerge when it comes to discussing solutions.On the one hand, there are the small producers, those who according to the FAO definition practice family farming:they represent over 90% of agricultural companies and produce most of the food globally.This cohort of small-scale producers is supported by NGOs, civil society organisations, independent research institutes and climate activists.Their requests are based on concepts of climate, economic and social justice:fair redistribution of land and subsidies to the sector, policies for access to the local market and dedicated funds for adaptation to climate change.

At its first official speech at a COP, the global network of small producers Vía Campesina he reiterated that the transformation of food systems starts from the land.“Businesses and governments have profited enormously from land grabbing and water grabbing,” denounced Celeste Smith, an indigenous custodian of the National Farmers Union, a member of the Via Campesina in Canada.Behind the slogan "food sovereignty cools the planet", the small politicized producers of the international movement they ask a paradigm shift in international politics, which puts human rights at the center of public discourse.Their pillar is the UN Declaration on Farmers' Rights, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 2018 and strongly influenced by the vision of food sovereignty movements:it is in fact seen as an "international legal instrument that we have contributed to creating and which defends the rights of people over their territories, seeds, waters, forests and which promotes a more sustainable way of being and living".

Concretely, they ask that the Green Climate Fund, established at COP 16 in Cancun in 2010 and intended to finance mitigation and adaptation interventions in developing countries, be entirely financed with grants, to repair the climate damage that countries industrialized countries would have caused the global South with their dizzying development.To date, however, three-quarters of 83 billion dollars allocated by advanced economies they are in the form of loans, which aggravate the debt crisis in which the "less developed" countries are already immersed.

The International Panel of Experts on the Sustainability of Food Systems (IPES-Food) argues that small farmers have been “largely excluded from mainstream decisions, struggling to make their calls for additional climate finance to build more sustainable food systems heard. diverse and resilient.THE IPCC data demonstrate that agroecological agriculture, which works with nature, supports food security, livelihoods and biodiversity, helps buffer temperature peaks and sequester carbon".

Agribusiness responses

A vision, this, contrasted with that promoted by AIM4Climate, an alliance founded at COP 26 by the US government and the United Arab Emirates, which includes under its umbrella a group of actors from the industrial, financial, academic and philanthropic world and proposes to orient climate policies in the agri-food field towards market solutions, avoiding a direct regulation of the most energy-intensive and climate-altering activities.

The initiative aims to group ongoing projects and, according to critics, “to entrench the industrial logic by dressing it as 'climate-smart agriculture'.It is dominated by industrial interests in the meat and agrochemical sectors and to a large extent it merely tinkeres with environmentally destructive, fossil fuel-fueled practices, rather than fundamentally transforming food systems.”

In concrete terms, the proposals focus above all on the expansion of so-called "precision agriculture", an extensive mechanization of the production process in combination with new satellite detection technologies, managed by the largest big data platforms.The hope is to cross-reference meteorological and soil structure data to optimize the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, reducing their use and waste.Added to this is the attempt to counter public pressure on the unsustainability of intensive farming through the formulation of new feed, which reduces methane emissions caused by animal digestion.Finally, there is an ongoing intense debate on the use of agricultural soils as carbon sinks:the farmer who demonstrates that he implements practices that favor storage could soon have a metric system with which to calculate his performance.At this point it could have the "buried" emissions certified through its land maintenance work, generate carbon credits and sell them to polluting companies on emissions trading markets, which to date - despite decades of disappointing results - still represent the main instrument of climate policy.

The underlying trust in technological innovation finds fertile ground not only in industrial interest groups, but also in new initiatives such as the Reboot Food campaign, promoted by a group of philanthropic organizations who chose Guardian columnist George Monbiot as their testimonial.The range of requests, in this case, includes the legalization of new genetic manipulation techniques for "more efficient" crops, investment in synthetic meat and cultured meat.

Where does the money go?

Second Tomaso Ferrando, researcher at the Antwerp Development Policy Institute, this approach “erases non-extractive pathways, the socio-ecological diversity that nourishes the world, and the need to address the unequal distribution of benefits and power.”

The main problem seems to be, once again, deciding which model to embrace and support with policies and funding.Currently, on 540 billion dollars per year of global agricultural subsidies, 90% are directed towards unsustainable and climate-altering practices according to the United Nations.And that there is a theme of funds on the adaptation, mitigation and compensation of losses and damages front is equally evident from the data released by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, a network of international philanthropic foundations.In the report released in recent days, the alliance has calculated that only 3% of climate finance it goes to support agriculture, while for the energy and transport sectors the amount allocated so far is 22 times greater.

Closing this gap is a priority that climate summits can no longer ignore, but the paths towards the goal will be the subject of heated debates in the near future.The approach of peasant agroecology and the "techno-digital" approach supported by industry are in fact difficult to reconcile and will soon find in the COP a new space in which to collide.

*Earth! – Environmentalist association, which works on agri-food supply chains, agroecology and human rights with investigations and advocacy campaigns, including those that led to the approval of the law against gangmastering and the law on the ban on double-downside auctions.

Preview image via FAO