According to Whitney Bauck ‘Food is finally on the table’: Cop28 addressed agriculture in a real way.
Seriously? In a real way? Ok let’s leave aside the idea that it could be a good idea to put food and agribusiness on the agenda simply to divert attention away from oil production. We can also slide over the fact that agribusiness knows that, with current systems, there is no food without oil. Ok, we can ignore the other fact that the number of agribusiness lobbyists more than doubled since 2022, 340 of them attended COP 28.
Instead let’s have a look at what they produced and then look at some things they could have done.
COP 28, world ‘leaders’ signed up to :
Encourages the implementation of integrated, multi-sectoral solutions, such as land-use management, sustainable agriculture, resilient food systems,
Urges Parties and invites non-Party stakeholders to (b) Attaining climate-resilient food and agricultural production and supply and distribution of food, as well as increasing sustainable and regenerative production and equitable access to adequate food and nutrition for all,
Jolly well done!
Or it could have been :
Stop using ‘tonnes per hectare’ as a measure and switch to ‘number of people fed per hectare’.
Replace the dog-poo metric (it contains nutrients and thus can be considered as nutritive) with a wholefood metric.
Stop the production of ultra-processed foods and link food back to health.
Convert farms to agroforestry and sylvo-agro-pastoralist systems.
Replace long food supply chains with local community integrated production systems.
Stop food waste generated by long supply chains and grade outs and replace them with ultra local supply chains and the transformation of food waste into a resource.
Stop food poverty by creating local resilient community integrated food production and supply. Each community ensures that nobody in the area goes hungry.
Get all of this done in 2024.
Whatever you’ve been doing over this Solstice, Christmas, New year period, I hope it was great! Many thanks for your support :-) There are some interesting articles coming out soon, well I think they are!