Agroecology at the UN food systems summit

For millennia, Native peoples around the world have cultivated food, fiber, fuel, and medicine in ways that reflect an understanding of “food systems” – networks of people, land, water, seeds, and the more-than-human world regenerating ecological functions and nourishment to sustain the web of life. Western scientists moved toward this understanding in the 20th century, formalizing the study of “agroecology.” By the turn of the millennium, when Francis et al. (2003) defined agroecology as “the ecology of food systems,” it was undeniable that focusing only on production in agriculture was too restrictive to support the transformative change needed across the food system. This understanding led to our modifying the subtitle of the textbook Agroecology: Ecological Processes in Sustainable Agriculture. The second edition bore the new subtitle: “The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems” (Gliessman 1998; Gliessman 2007). By the third edition, the food system was the key concept upon which the social movement side of agroecology was based (Gliessman 2015).

“The food system,” however, is sometimes understood as something not far from a factory model. On paper, we have encountered boxes for links in the supply chain, arrows between boxes to mark inputs and outputs, and some kind of circle in the margins to represent “nature.” From an agroecological perspective, the whole food system is an ecology, meaning a complex, multi-scalar, and power-laden set of relationships among humans and the nonhuman organisms. Agroecosystems include and are parts of much larger systems. Beneath the soil’s surface, they include the microbial, fungal, and viral universes that confer nutrient cycling and soil fertility. Above ground, these systems mobilize sunlight into chlorophyll complexes in plant tissues, generating sugars and forming the trophic foundation of “feeding the world.” Farmers’ knowledge and labor are linchpins here, orchestrating the passage from wild to cultivated plants, from a bag of seeds to a harvested crop.

The food system lens doesn’t stop with farm-level processes, though. It spans farm to fork, including networks of food production, distribution, and consumption. It invites us to pay attention to farmers, farm families, and farm workers; food industries, grocery clerks, plant workers, restaurant staff, and their communities; suppliers and manufacturers of agricultural inputs, commodity traders, and transportation systems; government regulatory apparatuses, civil society organizations, and the larger economic, environmental, sociocultural, and political structures within which food production and distribution occurs.

In other words, it’s not just that everyone is part of a food system. It’s that whole institutions, infrastructures, and norms that society has constructed are parts of the food system. It’s that the food system, in turn, drives an economic system that’s generating climate crisis, health and pandemic risks, and ongoing poverty and inequality. While distinct food systems exist at local to global levels, resistances to the dominant model become hard to expand and sustain when the interdependencies of food systems work mostly in favor of stabilizing power asymmetries that make this dominance possible. For these reasons and more, the science and practice of agroecology has grown into a social movement seeking transformative food system change.

In September 2021, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will hold what organizers call the United Nations Food System Summit (UNFSS). According to the Summit’s website (www.un.org/en/food-systems-summit/vision-principles), the “UN Food Systems Summit will launch bold new actions, solutions, and strategies to deliver progress on all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), each of which relies on healthier, more sustainable and more equitable food systems. The Summit will awaken the world to the fact that we all must work together to transform the way the world produces, consumes and thinks about food.”

Despite claims that the Summit will chart a new way forward for the world’s future food systems, a closer examination of its terms of engagement, the organization of committees and advisory groups, and the strong call for “nature-positive” agricultural practices suggests otherwise. Agroecology appears relegated to being one more tool in a “toolbox” dominated by genetic engineering, digital frameworks, big data, and new technological innovations. When asked about agroecology in an interview, the chair of the Scientific Group, an advisory committee to the Summit, responded: “the summit must not get bogged down in ideological battles, but must focus on the challenges, especially with regard to smallholder farmers in developing countries and the question of how they can move from a level of low productivity in arable and livestock farming to more income with productivity and sustainability” (von Braun 2021). In other words, raising harvest yields and increasing incomes appear to be the primary goals. By contrast, agroecology is not anti-technology, but it never begins with the assumption that boosting yields equals people being nourished, especially when production is abetted by technologies that tend to benefit corporate control of those technologies more than the farmers who are compelled to use them.

The Summit has been met with considerable resistance and much multi-sectoral criticism of its processes. In March 2021, the Indigenous Peoples’ and Civil Society Mechanism – a group of more than 500 civil society groups with more than 300 million members – said they would boycott the Summit and set up parallel actions. One month later, in a letter signed by hundreds of researchers, faculty members, and educators who work in food and agricultural systems (many of them agroecologists), scholars from around the world announced they too would boycott the Summit. The scientists’ letter states that “this summit has been deeply compromised by a top-down exclusion of many food systems actors and an impoverished view of whose food system knowledge matters. This exclusive approach undercuts ongoing work by farmers, farm workers, and food workers worldwide to advance transitions to justice and sustainability” (ARC 2021).

These protests responded to a Summit that has been compromised from the very start. First, according to three former and current UN Special Rapporteurs on the right to food, the Summit’s rules of engagement were determined by a small set of actors: “The private sector, organizations serving the private sector (notably the World Economic Forum), scientists, and economists initiated the process” (Fakhri, Elver, and De Schutter 2021). This meant that an exclusive pro-business community had already largely configured the agenda before the rollout of what the public has been treated to: a parade of youth empowerment, women and gender equity, and other signs of inclusivity. Second, the Summit has attempted to sidestep existing multilateral processes for food system governance. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) already has the structure that Summit organizers have been trying to reconstruct – and compete with – in proposing a new “IPCC for Food.” The CFS is a space for discussing the future of sustainable food systems based in a comprehensive commitment to the human right to food. It includes mechanisms for involving civil society and the private sector, and a panel of experts (the High Level Panel of Experts, or HLPE) that produce evidence-based reports on issues of critical importance. The HLPE (2019) report, for example, was a landmark assessment of agroecology and other innovative approaches for achieving food security and nutrition in ways that meet critical markers of sustainability. Perhaps most importantly, because of these biases, the very communities and ways of knowing that should have been a starting point for a real “People’s Summit” were effectively excluded.

Struggles with Summit participation have shed important light on the politics of “including agroecology.” After initially assuming several roles in the early planning of the Summit, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) in July 2021 withdrew from direct involvement in the Summit (IPES-Food 2021). IPES-Food is an independent panel of experts with a mission to transition to sustainable food systems around the world. In its reports and briefs, agroecology consistently forms a key framework for transformative food system change. Comprising environmental scientists, development economists, nutritionists, agronomists, sociologists, and agroecologists, as well as experienced practitioners from civil society and social movements, the panel takes a systemic approach that recognizes the complex and interconnected nature of challenges in food systems, the power relations that shape decision-making, and the need for a democratic co-production of knowledge process. None of these approaches were being effectively employed in the planning for the Summit. Instead, its origins were opaque, its relationship to existing global fora unclear, and its governance poorly defined (i.e. who is in charge, who participates, and how decisions are made). IPES-Food put these concerns temporarily aside in the hope that they would be addressed by the time a pre-Summit was held in early July 2021, but the concerns, raised so clearly and consistently by farmers’ organizations, social movements, civil society, Indigenous Peoples, and independent scientists, were not being addressed.

July’s pre-Summit may have been a disappointment for those holding out for signs for a Summit about-face. But it showed many of us that the Summit is in key ways a distraction from the work of growing the movement, practice, and science of agroecology. As the well-oiled PR machine of the pre-Summit got underway, thousands of people around the world tuned in instead to the People’s Counter-Mobilization to Transform Corporate Food Systems (https://www.foodsystems4people.org). Featuring African seed sovereignty networks, eco-feminist collectives, Native land and water protectors, and campesinx organizations from Africa, Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the grassroots event was a testament to how agroecology and food sovereignty movements are building coalitions, struggling for legitimacy, expanding their practices, and caring for one another and the Earth. Though it struggled with a few more technical hiccups than the sleek FSS show, what we saw at the Counter-Mobilization was vastly more interesting, ambitious, and hopeful.

All these signs point to agroecology as the foundation for transforming food systems and achieving sustainability. They are all the voices for a “Call to Action” for food system transformation. A summit as important as this cannot hide behind a veneer of greenwashing, claims of full participation, and a system of governance with no clear accountability. Agroecology should have been front and center at the Summit, and the worlds peasant’s, Indigenous peoples, food workers, farmworkers, fishers, pastoralists, caretakers, community organizers, and more should have been making the table – not invited to it. By not putting agroecology and food sovereignty at the center of the Summit, the systemic, whole-system, participatory, change-oriented vision of the food systems needed for the future was never going to come about. Instead, we are in danger of this important international body known as FAO closing the window that has only recently been opened for agroecology in this tower of the green revolution.

We are inspired by those actively making agroecology in spaces that towers cannot hold. Our journal Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems will continue to be a key place for these voices calling for action to be heard.