The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), in collaboration with ETC Group, released a report in March 2021 mapping out pathways to the future of food titled “A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045.”
The report maps out two different visions for the future of food. One future scenario follows the business-as-usual trend lines that would put food systems under even greater corporate control, accelerate environmental breakdown and further entrench inequity and injustice. The second scenario follows a people-centered and people-led vision for food systems that restores ecosystems, prioritizes health and safeguards the rights of food producers, workers and other people living in rural areas. The report aims to challenge civil society and food movements globally to come together and reimagine how their collaboration over the next 25 years could help ensure this vision becomes a reality.
The report concludes:
In spite of these risks and uncertainties, the case for building a Long Food Movement remains compelling. It does not require short-term strategies to defend against land grabs to be traded off against campaigns for a new international treaty. The idea is not to get everyone on the exact same page, but to help all actors to see and assemble their separate pages into a powerful plan of action toward 2045. A Long Food Movement challenges civil society groups to place multiple objectives and actions on a 25-year roadmap, and to keep this bigger picture in mind as they navigate wide-ranging campaigns, potentially rapid environmental and social breakdown, and the tidal wave of the corporate agenda.
The report also proposes specific pathways and recommendations for transformation that are needed to achieve this vision both politically and financially:
Pathway #1: Rooting food systems in diversity, agroecology, and human rights
- Building resilience through diversity and agroecology, prioritizing food sovereignty and protecting ecosystems
- Defending human rights, nature rights, and renegotiating the contract between state and society to protect workers and people’s access to life-sustaining resources like land, seeds and water in the face of increasing efforts to privatize and commodify them
- Accelerating shifts towards territorial supply chains and ethical consumerism
Pathway #2: Transforming governance structures
- Reforming the UN’s agri-food agencies and designing processes to facilitate ‘grassroots-to-Rome’ agenda-setting
- Cracking down on corporate impunity and excess power through reimagined trade agreements and enhanced antitrust initiatives
- Adopting an international agreement on food emergencies that places the needs of people ahead of political and commercial interests
- Building new models of citizen participation and ownership over re-localized food systems
Pathway #3: Shifting financial flows
- Redirecting R&D and technical budget lines to sustainable food systems
- Reforming major commodity subsidies
- Levying junk food and taxing corporations fairly
Pathway #4: Rethinking modalities of civil society collaboration
- Connecting with activists across sectors (food, climate, health, labor, racial justice, e.g.) and coordinating around common goals and strategies
- Developing and deploying strategies to block corporate capture of value chains and political processes
- Building new partnerships with donors to accountably finance food system transformation
Read the entire report here.