Including trees in farm management offers opportunities to future-proof our farms against the effects of global climate change. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent throughout the world. 60% of UK farm businesses have been affected by severe weather over the last 10 years. Soil degradation and loss are evident as wet winters carry our topsoil onto roads. Annually, flood damage costs the farming sector £1.9 billion, with a rise to £2.4 billion expected by…

Access to fresh, affordable, nourishing, locally produced and culturally appropriate food (as well as the fuel to cook it and time to prepare it) should be the guaranteed right of every individual and household. However, global food systems are increasingly dominated by an ‘industrial diet’ where highly processed and low nutrient foods are widely available and most easily accessible. Many countries, including the UK, have shameful levels of food insecurity and diet-related ill health, and…

The Food, Farming Countryside Commission is launching new research looking at how future farming systems based on agroecological principles could be feasible for UK nations – removing the need for artificial inputs whilst producing healthy food to feed a growing population, contributing to net zero targets and making more space to restore nature.

In this session, the panellists will explore some of the details of this research, and talk about the questions that it…

At last year’s World Food Day, UN Secretary General António Guterres announced that he would convene a UN Food Systems Summit in the fall of 2021. Little did anyone know that the stakes would become so acute so fast. The COVID-19 pandemic has quickly become a hunger crisis. At this moment of upheaval, what gets decided in the next few years will determine the path for global food governance for decades to come. Guterres‘s goal…

En el Día Mundial de la Alimentación del año pasado, el secretario general de la ONU António Guterres anunció que convocaría una Cumbre sobre los Sistemas Alimentarios de la ONU en el otoño del 2021. No nos imaginábamos que los desafíos serían tan grandes tan rápido. La pandemia de COVID-19 se convirtió rápidamente en una crisis alimentaria. En estos momentos turbulentos, lo que se decida en unos pocos años determinará el camino de la gobernanza…

Africa faces multiple challenges related to our food systems, including hunger, malnutrition, obesity, noncommunicable diseases, the climate crisis, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, cultural erosion, and other climate related shocks, such as pest and disease outbreaks and escalating prices of external inputs. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the weaknesses of current food systems to meet the needs of African peoples.

These interconnected challenges demand a holistic response, with African civil society and institutions…

Biodiversity is critical to sustainable farming. Evidence from long-term field experiments (50 – 170 years) suggest that the central relationship between microbes, organic carbon and soil structure determines soil system performance. Detailed work at Rothamsted led by Prof. Andrew Neal is demonstrating the strong relationship between organic carbon, structure and the hydrodynamic behaviour of soil. Among other sources, farmyard manure plays an important role in managing soil systems. The experiments also demonstrate significantly higher levels…

Too much investment flowing into agriculture is perverse – shoring up inequitable food systems that grow an ever narrower range of foods and exacerbate climate change. Massive public and private investments in agroecological food systems and agroecological movements are urgently needed – investments that align with agroecological principles and don't serve to greenwash investor portfolios. This session will explore why and how philanthropies and bilateral and multilateral development agencies invest in agroecology, both the challenges…

Pathogens are repeatedly emerging out of a global agrifood system rooted in inequality, labour exploitation, and unfettered extractivism by which communities are robbed of their natural and social resources. In response, some propose agricultural intensification under the guise of sparing ‘wilderness’ – an approach that actually leads to greater deforestation and disease spillover. The false solution to divide people from nature would omit many forms of peasant, Indigenous, and smallholder agriculture methods that are integrated…