Author: Juliet Millican
The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), a non-profit thinktank headquartered in Brussels, brings together thinkers and practitioners from diverse fields and regions to research and provide policy recommendations for sustainable, equitable, and healthy food systems. Their panel at this year’s ORFC, ‘Navigating Global Disorder’, addressed the current political context and the crises we have seen unfold since I was here in Oxford for last January’s ORFC.
A ‘new geopolitics of food’
Tariffs, introduced by the current US administration, have proved a cruel but ingenious way to firmly put ‘America first’ and have heralded the unfolding collapse of a multi-lateral, global justice approach to ending hunger. What could an ‘international panel of experts’ do or say to offer hope in an unfolding crisis?
On the first day at ORFC news headlines announced further US withdrawal from 66 different international agreements or bodies, many relating to climate agreements, emissions and food. The iPES session, held on the second day, described this moment as one of ‘cascading disruption, geopolitical instability, imperialism, trade wars and increasing conflict’. International bodies and institutions are being weakened every day, in turn impacting food systems, poverty and debt, especially for those in the Global South.
Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability began by mapping out the ‘new geopolitics of food’, starting with the resurgence of military conflicts where food is increasingly being used as a weapon of war. Trade wars, economic chaos and the allocation of high tariffs have destroyed markets, particularly in areas recovering from global debt and dependent on international aid. The least developed countries, and those most vulnerable to climate change, are the worst hit by disappearing aid, further ecological damage, food insecurity, and escalating inequality.
Resilience, self-reliance or working cooperatively?
The panel debated different and viable approaches to resilience and self-reliance, including working cooperatively, building infrastructure to support territorial food markets and linking across jurisdictions. Key questions included how far we should be prioritising domestic markets and the value and significance of global trade.
Trade is not new and is not ending (Sophia Murphy, director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, IATP), but may be changing shape with new partners and more localised exchange. Informal cross border trade continues and other economies, such as the social economy, need to be recognised and protected. The World Trade Organisation, now significantly weakened, has always been seen as the rule of law, and its disappearance could indicate a loss of trust in the rule of law, or a complete disregard for it. But Rucchi Tripathi, feminist leader and food rights activist gave many examples of how the WTO is seen as restrictive by grassroots communities, undermining informal trade agreements with the control and patenting of seeds, commodifying it in the interest of corporate profit.
Movements across borders
So what does resilience look like? iPES are currently looking into strategies or market smoothing measures to protect small scale producers and consumers from market volatility. Agency, equity, diversity are all important to help ensure producers don’t go out of business and global agreements are important. Trade is a relationship that depends on trust as well as mutual self interest, and there are ways of buying and selling that could be more values based. Movements also cross national boundaries; Via Campesina is now reimagining what food sovereignty could look like with trade agreements based on ethics and rights to food rather than commerce. Activists at COP30 this year in Brazil advocated and gained agreement for agroecological food to be served at this and future COPs and the EU and Denmark have set targets for organics forming a significant percentage of overall food production. Farmers in India, formerly criminalised for saving seeds, have after 10 years succeeded in winning their case.
There was general agreement among the panel that while we should strengthen domestic conversations on resilience, we should not lose sight of international collaboration. Countries that depend on trade for food are found in both the Global North and South. Global corporations seek to mitigate risk by owning or patenting resources, and we need to mobilise globally to push back against them. Multilateralism is a tricky balance but does at least provide spaces for governments to speak to each other, even though such institutions are slow and cumbersome and need reforming. Civil Society movements should choose which agreements to promote and which to resist, working on the global scale, as well as the local.
Farhani, an international lawyer working on climate change, asked from the audience: could this crisis be seen instead as the beginning of new opportunities, new sites of resistance? Has Trump just done a good job of wrecking things that needed to be destroyed, that allows us to build new alliances? Could the rupture of the markets prove to be an opportunity to redefine the social contract and the political contract, an opportunity for farmers to reclaim some of their power as producers? What should civil society be prioritising at this moment in history?
About the author: Juliet Millican is a research associate at the Institute of Development Studies and coordinator of Re-Alliance, a UK based network supporting regenerative response to climate and conflict displacement.
To learn more, check out this session in the ORFC archives.
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