This piece is part of the weekly series “Growing Forward: Insights for Building Better Food and Agriculture Systems,” presented by the Global Food Institute at the George Washington University and the nonprofit organization Food Tank. Each installment highlights forward-thinking strategies to address today’s food and agriculture related challenges with innovative solutions. To view more pieces in the series, click here.
Over the next two weeks, more than more than 50,000 policymakers, government negotiators, scientists, farmers, advocates, journalists, and business leaders are expected in Belém, Brazil for the 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP30). This year’s Conference, according to the COP30 Presidency, will prioritize implementation over declarations, promising to address the climate crisis with the urgency it warrants. And central to this work are the world’s food and agriculture systems, framed as one of the six pillars foundational to the COP30 Action Agenda.
For this agenda to be truly successful, “we need to ensure that those who are most impacted by the climate crisis have a voice and a seat at the table,” says Anna Lappé, the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
Lappé, an award-winning author and internationally recognized expert on food systems, is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working for food system transformation around the world. Prior to joining the Global Alliance, Lappé had published three books on food, farming, and sustainability, including Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, and contributed to nearly two dozen more. Lappé is also the founder or co-founder of three U.S.-based organizations, including Real Food Media. In this conversation with Food Tank’s Jessica Levy, Lappé discusses the encouraging progress that has been made to bring food and agriculture systems into climate negotiations, the ties between farming and the fossil fuel industry, and the organizations proving that a regenerative food future is possible.
You have long said that hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. Can you explain that distinction and its ongoing significance?
As some of your Food Tank readers may know, I stand on the shoulders of so many incredible food leaders, including my own mother! For decades now, she and many, many others around the world have been beating the drum that the ongoing scourge of hunger in the world—on a planet where more than enough calories are produced to feed every single person—is caused not by a productivity crisis, but a democracy crisis.
We know that wherever people’s rights are not fulfilled, there is hunger. We know that where there is conflict, there is hunger, and that, despite the Geneva Conventions, denying access to food is still used as a weapon of war—as we’re seeing in Gaza today. We know that war and conflict are the single largest drivers of hunger worldwide.
But we also know it’s not just the extremes of war and conflict-induced famine driving the crisis of hunger, it’s the everyday food insecurity we see in countries all around the world. In the United States, despite being one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, tens of millions of U.S.-Americans go hungry and nearly 42 million, about one in eight households, rely on government food assistance.
Do you think food and agriculture systems are overlooked in climate negotiations and policymaking? What factors continue to keep them on the sidelines?
You’re right that food and agriculture systems are still largely overlooked in climate negotiations, even though food systems contribute to about one-third of the emissions driving the crisis. And, even though, I would argue, reducing those emissions, if we had the political will, is one of the lowest hanging fruit for action on climate—with some of the greatest benefits: More climate-friendly food systems are better, not just for climate, but for health, biodiversity, animal welfare, community well-being, and for fishers and farmers, too. Whether it is climate adaptation, loss and damage, or just transition—integrating food systems into climate solutions is critical to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
With that said, I am pleased that food and agriculture systems are increasingly on climate negotiators’ and policy makers’ radar—thanks to years of organizing among social movements and civil society organizations, philanthropy, and visionary political leaders. Close to 90 percent of Nationally Determined Contributions plans have referenced food systems and agriculture, showing its inextricable link to addressing the climate crisis. But we have a lot of work to do to turn this awareness into action: When we analyzed the amount of public climate finance dollars going to food system transformation, the percentage is still staggeringly low. We need to take this awareness, and bold declarations, and move into tangible outcomes that address hunger, food and nutrition insecurity, and emissions from food systems.
You challenge the myth that fossil fuel-intensive agriculture is necessary to feed the world. How has that conversation evolved over the past decade? How do you think we can shift the story more effectively at the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP30)?
Yes, many of us have been working to challenge this myth for a long time. It’s a stubborn one! It’s becoming increasingly clear that the impact of fossil-fuel intensive agriculture is not only a barrier to our climate ambitions, it is also causing so many other harms, from ecosystem pollution to public health crises related to petrochemicals used in agriculture like pesticides—to name just a few.
I like to remind folks that the mythology of industrial agriculture’s productivity comes from a narrow focus on yields. To poke some holes in that myopic focus, consider the crop that has seen one of the largest yield gains in the past century: corn. Yes, corn yields have gone from 40 bushels per acre in the 1950s to a staggering 180 per acre in recent years, but at what cost and what benefit? Most of that corn raised in the U.S. is not food—it’s either headed to the bellies of cows or cars. And consider the cost: the agrochemical pollution, the topsoil loss, the dead zones from fertilizer runoff, and much more.
What’s become clear through research by many around the world is the incredible abundance of agroecological and regenerative practices that don’t rely on fossil fuels to produce diverse, healthy food, yielding incredibly high nutrition-per-acre. There is so much evidence around the world about this, sharing just one example from India.
I’m hopeful that the story is starting to shift, with more and more understanding that we need to phase out fossil fuels across our entire economy, not just in transportation and the built environment, but food systems, too. Our colleagues at IPES-Food have done so much to connect these dots, and make this point, most recently in their new report on fossil fuels and food systems. My organization also produced a report to lift up the message for shifting away from fossil field dependency in food systems and we co-produced a podcast on these themes with TABLE-Debates. We’ve been pleased by the feedback we’re receiving.
Can you share an example of an on-the-ground partner demonstrating that a food system rooted in agroecology and community resilience can deliver real results?
There are so many great examples around the world, but since COP30 is in Brazil, I thought it would be appropriate to lift up an example from Brazil: One of the largest and most successful social movements in the world, the Landless Workers Movement known by its Portuguese acronym MST, has been at the forefront of building agroecological knowledge across the country, creating agroecological schools for teaching these kinds of practices, building up cooperatives to help distribute products coming from regenerative farms, and working to advocate for the kind of policy reforms that have put Brazil on the forefront of addressing the roots of hunger and promoting ecological farming practices.
What are some of the most promising policy approaches you’ve seen governments take—or that you’d like to see them take—to support a transition to low-input, fossil-free food systems?
Sticking with Brazil, the country has been a global leader in using public procurement as a tool to support a transition to more ecological food systems. In Brazil, for example, the national school food program (PNAE) has clear mandates for supporting local, small-scale farms, requiring that at least 45 percent of school food funds by 2026 support family farms, prioritizing organic producers.
I was just at the Stockholm Food Forum and I got to hear the Deputy Mayor of Paris share what the city is doing to promote similar goals: Since 2015, Paris has been working to increase the production of organic and local food in its municipal catering services like schools, with a target of at least 50 percent local and sustainable.
I could go on! We’re seeing so much political leadership—from local to national governments—to help create the enabling environments to support this transition to regenerative enological food systems. It is so inspiring.
The Brazilian COP30 Presidency has framed this year’s summit as an “implementation COP.” What would it take to make sure this COP moves beyond declarations and delivers real action?
We need to ensure that those who are most impacted by the climate crisis have a voice and a seat at the table, including Indigenous peoples, small-scale farmers, and traditional fishers. We’ve been part of an effort to bring frontline food leaders to the U.N. Climate Summits over the past several years, supporting 22 frontline leaders in Belém.
And, we need to ensure that the largest corporations in the world that are driving this crisis—the big polluters from oil and gas corporations to petrochemical giants—are rightfully called to account for their deception and lack of action. We have no time for what I think of as the “dreadful d’s” of the climate crisis: industry’s disinformation, deflection, and delay. We need real action, and that includes supporting the agroecological and regenerative practices at the heart of food systems that are good for people and the planet.
Photo courtesy of Fernando Rebêlo, Wikimedia Commons
