Page 60 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 15

Health & Healing

Demonising agroecology ate deceptions block needed food
The Gates Foundation has been system reforms.
funding the Cornell Alliance for
Science, ostensibly to “depolarize UN Special Rapporteur on the
the GMO debates” by providing Right to Food Michael Fakhri
training in “advanced agricultural alerted UNFSS Special Envoy
biotechnology communications”. Agnes Kalibata that agroecology is
Why traditional agricultural practices being dismissed as backward when
can’t transform African agriculture it should be central to the Summit.
is only one instance of such spon- Concurrently President of AGRA,
sored propaganda masquerading as with its particular commitment to
science. needed food system reform, she is
in an impossible position.
Well-resourced lobbyists are using
the UNFSS to secure support and Best Summit money can buy?
legitimacy for commercial agendas. Investing in the Summit is secur-
With abundant means, their advoca- ing legitimacy and more resources
cy routinely invokes ‘public-private from governments, the UN system,
partnerships’ and ‘science, technolo- private philanthropy and others to
gy and innovation’ rhetoric. further their commercial agendas.
Meanwhile, many are working in
Forced to be more inclusive, Summit good faith to make the most of the
organisers are now using ‘solution UN Summit.
clusters’ for advocacy. They then
build broad ‘multi-stakeholder’ coali- Nevertheless, it is setting a danger-
tions to advance purported solutions ous precedent for the UN system.
with the UNFSS mark of approval. It has rashly opened a back door,
allowing corporate-led ‘multi-stake-
With strong and growing evidence holderism’ to undermine well-tested,
of agroecology’s progress and inclusive ‘multi-stakeholder’ ar-
potential, propaganda against it has rangements developed over decades
grown in recent years. Agroecology under multilateral Member State
advocates are caricatured as ‘Luddite oversight.
eco-imperialists’, ‘Keeping Africa UNFSS Science Days on 8 and 9
on the Brink of Starvation’, and July indicated the Summit is being
condemning farmers to ‘poverty, used to push for a new food science
malnutrition and death’. panel. This will undercut the HLPE,
and ultimately, the CFS. Hence, the
A public relations consultant has UNFSS seems like a Trojan Horse
accused agroecology advocates of to advance particular corporate
being “the face of a ‘green’ neoco- interests, inadvertently undermining
lonialism” “idealizing peasant labour what UN-led multilateralism has
and retrograde subsistence farming” come to mean.
and denying “the Green Revolu-
tion’s successes”. As both CFS and HLPE are suc-
cessful UN institutions, the Summit
Agroecology solutions are the main, will inevitably undermine its own
if not only ones consistent with achievements. Hence, for many
the UN’s overarching commitment Member States and civil society,
to sustainable development. But UNFSS represents a step backward,
the propagandists portray them as rather than forward.
uninformed barriers to agricultural
and social progress. Such deliber-

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