Corporate Takeover of the Global Food System Should Not Get UN Approval

The U.N. should address issues such as land concentration, so that peasant agroecology can have a real chance to flourish and make a significant contribution to tackling hunger, climate change, and biodiversity loss.

A U.N. summit on global food systems should be an opportunity to address structural inequalities and tackle hunger. It should be a chance to learn from small-scale producers whose sustainable food practices feed 70% of the world. Instead, next week’s conference in Rome will be a festival of greenwashing, allowing Big Agriculture corporations to tighten their grip on food systems.

This will be the second Food Systems Summit (UNFSS). The first, in 2021 was supposed to address the lack of progress towards the U.N.’s sustainable development goals. It was dubbed a “people’s summit” by the organizers, but caused an outcry among local producers when their calls to roll back the power of transnational corporations were cynically ignored.

Corporations that dominate global food systems, such as Bayer and Nestlé, used the summit to promote greenwashing initiatives rather than address pressing problems such as food speculation and the impact of Covid-19 on world hunger.