It is now widely accepted that fundamental changes are needed across the food system to address the climate emergency, food insecurity, tackle an escalating global public health crisis, and ensure resilient livelihoods for food and farm workers. Over recent decades, agroecology has risen to meet the challenge, offering a holistic framework to address current food systems’ environmental, social and economic failings. At the same time, the steady growth of the organic market has made a strong impact on the global development of standards and regulatory requirements. Additional – and occasionally competing – approaches, such as regenerative agriculture, ecological organic agriculture and others have also increasingly been taken up in different regions of the world.

This session, organised by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) will discuss the contributions of agroecology and other approaches to the development of sustainable food systems. It will particularly consider what could be common principles across these various approaches to sustainable food systems development, and recognize the dangers of ‘greenwashing’ and ‘co-optation’ of terms in the ongoing global debates on the future of agriculture and food.