A global process that facilitates and legitimizes tighter monopoly control over the world’s food systems by the super rich, their agribusiness interests and elite foundations is taking place. This process is called the Food Systems Summit (FSS) that the UN Secretary General is organizing but which big corporations with vested interests are omnipresent and are calling the shots.
To illustrate, the FSS discussions have been organized around Action Tracks wherein various stakeholders can supposedly foster new actions and partnerships and amplify existing initiatives for food systems transformation.
They cover the issues of ensuring access to safe and nutritious food (Action Track 1); shifting to sustainable consumption patterns (Action Track 2); boosting nature-positive production (Action Track 3); advancing equitable livelihoods (Action Track 4); and building resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stress (Action Track 5). The FSS website says that these Action Tracks draw on the expertise of different actors who explore how so-called levers of change like human rights, finance and innovation can be tapped to transform the food systems.
But an examination of the leadership of the Action Tracks reveals the firm grip that big corporate interests have over the entire FSS process.
Poison cartel promoting safe and nutritious food
Chairing Action Track 1, for instance, is the executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). Established in 2002 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and with seed funding from the United States Agency for International Development, GAIN is currently bankrolled by corporate giants notorious for harming our food systems like the German multinational company BASF.
It is absurd to buy that BASF would be promoting “access to safe and nutritious food for all”, which is the mandate of Action Track 1. As the largest chemical corporation in the world with reported revenues of USD 66.59 billion in 2019, BASF massively profits from manufacturing and selling highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs). These are “pesticides that are acknowledged to present particularly high levels of acute or chronic hazards to health or environment.”
In 2018, BASF along with fellow top agrochemical producers Syngenta, Bayer, FMC and Corteva (formerly Dow and DuPont) sold around USD 4.8 billion of HHPs, said an investigative report by journalism group Unearthed. This amount comprised more than 35% of their total sales that year. Most of these HHPs went to poor countries. About half of them were used on commodity crops like soya and corn, which mostly ended up as feed for the poultry and hog industries. Moreover, about 43.5% of pesticides used on rice and 25.8% for cereals are HHPs. All these agrochemicals that are acutely toxic and cause chronic health hazards for humans ultimately end up on our plates.
GAIN claims to galvanize both the public and private sector in ending malnutrition, particularly through food biofortification. In contrast with its claims, however, biofortification has been criticised for emphasising dependence on just a few market-based crops that focus on a handful of nutrients (vitamin A, iron and zinc). Ultimately, this promotes a poor diet based on corporate-contolled monocultures, with little nutritional diversity that can be found in agroecologically produced food.
GAIN, for instance partners with HarvestPlus for the commercialisation of biofortified crops. Biofortified crops are currently grown by 10 million farmers worldwide. While none of these are so far genetically modified, millions of dollars, through the Gates-funded CGIAR and Monsanto/Bayer-funded Donald Danforth Plant Research Centre, go into the development of GM biofortified crops such as maize, wheat, rice, mustard, sorghum, cassava, and banana. Recently, biofortified vitamin A “Golden Rice”—of which Syngenta holds patents—has already been approved for food and feed in the Philippines. In Africa, HarvestPlus works with seed companies for commercialisation of biofortified crops, which critics say also threaten and displace nutritionally superior indigenous and traditional seed varieties.
Safe and nutritious food? Certainly not an agenda of the agrochemical and commercial seed interests sponsoring the leadership of Action Track 1.
Land and food monopolies for sustainable consumption?
Action Track 2, on the other hand, is led by the executive chair of EAT Foundation. EAT is co-founded by the Wellcome Trust, the second-largest “charitable” organisation in the world behind the Gates Foundation. The Wellcome Trust, established by a company what would later become GlaxoSmith Kline, maintains significant investments in Big Pharma, such as Novartis and Roche. It has also been criticised for its investments in fossil fuel and coal.
EAT organises the annual EAT Stockhom Food Forum—also called the “Davos” of food—a “carefully curated” event where business leaders and policymakers meet to discuss “transforming food systems,” while, as one observer says, leaves out the voice of farmers, especially from the Global South. Examining EAT’s partnerships and initiatives, one could glimpse how the leadership of Action Track 2 envisions the “shift to sustainable consumption patterns” – mass production and consumption of genetically modified, lab-created, chemical-heavy fake foods financed by monopoly corporations.
For instance, EAT Forum actively promotes Impossible Foods, a meat substitute company co-founded by Big Tech billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Google. Impossible Foods uses genetically engineered soy protein to mass produce burgers sold through global fast-food chains like Burger King. Their products are said to contain glyphosate that is 11 times higher than its competitor. Glyphosate is the world’s most widely used herbicide and is the subject of thousands of lawsuits for its link with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer. Despite this, Impossible Foods has received the Child Nutrition Label from the USDA and will now pilot in several schools in the United States through national school lunch funding. The brand has also recently expanded into Asia.
It should be noted that the World Economic Forum (WEF) is expecting global meat substitutes to grow into a USD 6-billion market by 2023. It hypes the role of both “start-ups” (such as the Gates Foundation-funded All Things Bugs, which produces insect-derived food products as “alternative protein” for children in famine-stricken countries) and big biotech and pharmaceutical corporations such as Merck in cell cultured meat production.
A major initiative of the EAT Forum backed by monopolies in food and agriculture under the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) is the Food Reform for Sustainability and Health (FReSH). FReSH, described as “an effort to drive the transformation of the food system and to create a set of business solutions for industry change,” was launched at the WEF in 2017. Because “businesses are central to food production and consumption patterns”, the FReSH project banks on its partners that include the world’s largest monopolies in agrochemicals (Bayer, BASF, Corteva and Syngenta); trade and distribution of grain and agricultural commodities (Cargill); food processing (Kellog’s, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever); and technology (Google), among others, to collaborate and innovate for food systems transformation.
Another of EAT’s major initiatives is the Food and Land Use Coalition, which “seeks to define global targets for food and land use systems” and raise private sector response by “highlighting the business case for a sustainable transformation.” Indeed, in its 2019 Growing Better Report, it says that “promoting healthy diets” is a “business opportunity” worth USD 2 trillion by 2030. Its success stories are of initiatives by food giants, such as the Dutch biotech company Royal DSM’s super cereals production in Africa, Nestlé’s sugar reduction program, One Planet Business for Biodiversity (a consortium of 19 companies chaired by the dairy multinational Danone), PepsiCo’s Sustainable Farming Program, and a data platform for cocoa growers whose partners include Syngenta.
Sustainable consumption patterns? Not when the corporate giants backing the leadership of Action Track 2 are the same monopolies behind the destruction of people’s health and environment while grabbing away their lands, water and other resources.
Profit-driven tech for nature-positive production, climate change
Meanwhile, in key leadership position of two action tracks of the UN FSS is the CGIAR (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research). Through its Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystem, CGIAR is the co-chair of Action Track 3 (boost nature-positive production). It is also in the leadership team of Action Track 5 (build resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stress) through its Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.
CGIAR is a consortium of 15 international agricultural research centers. With more than USD 720 million in donations poured over the last two decades, the Gates Foundation is the largest financial backer of the CGIAR. As its largest donor, Gates has a direct say in the priorities and direction of CGIAR including its focus on supposedly improving food productivity through agricultural biotechnology, especially genetic engineering.
Critics have noted how Gates has leveraged this position to facilitate the accelerated takeover of public research and seeds (of which CGIAR has the world’s largest pool at nearly 800,000 crop varieties collected from farmers) by private monopoly corporations that Gates has strategic partnerships with or investments in such as Cargill, Syngenta, Corteva, Bayer/Monsanto, BASF, and AgBiome, a biotech start-up using CRISPR technology.
At present, the Gates Foundation is front and center of ongoing efforts to consolidate the 15 international research centers of CGIAR into one entity known as One CGIAR. This process, being led by key officials of Gates Foundation as well as of Syngenta, is an apparent attempt by Gates to enhance his control and that of his agribusiness partners over global agricultural research and the world’s seed resources. The consolidation will fast track the development and deployment of new technologies like more GM crops. As One CGIAR envisions it, “scientific innovations for food, land and water systems can be deployed faster, at a larger scale, and at reduced cost”.
The One CGIAR consolidation goes hand in hand with the Gates Foundation’s newly formed Bill and Melinda Gates Agricultural Innovations LLC or the so-called Gates Ag One. Described as a nonprofit, Gates Ag One supposedly will “empower smallholder farmers with the affordable, high-quality tools, technologies, and resources they need to lift themselves out of poverty”. It is headed by Joe Cornelius, a former executive at Bayer and Monsanto. Together with One CGIAR, the Gates Ag One will speed up efforts to make available patented agricultural technologies, in the pretext of sustainable improvement of crop productivity and climate change adaptation. Indeed, in Latin America, Ag One has launched partnerships with Microsoft, Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta.
Nature-positive production and resilience to vulnerabilities like climate change? With Gates as its patron, the leadership of Action Tracks 3 and 5 appear to be biased towards contentious technological fixes that will only serve greater monopoly control over food and agriculture, while perpetuating the highly input-intensive and corporate-controlled model of food and agricultural production, driving biodiversity loss, soil degeneration, greenhouse gas emissions and overall environmental and climate crises.
Land grabbers advancing equitable livelihoods
Lastly, Action Track 4, on advancing equitable livelihoods, is chaired by the president and chief executive officer of CARE USA, which describes itself as humanitarian nonprofit that fights global poverty and social injustice. To achieve such noble goal, CARE has been partnering with private corporations to implement “innovative” programs.
Among the longtime partners of CARE is the world’s largest agribusiness company Cargill. According to the group’s website, CARE and Cargill have been partners for over 60 years, supposedly addressing the issues of food insecurity, malnutrition and hunger. Cargill has been funding CARE’s strategic projects such as the Rural Development Initiative I and II from 2008 to 2016 worth USD 17.5 million and the USD 7.2-million PROSPER project from 2016 to 2019. These projects claimed to have increased the productivity and incomes as well as built the resilience to climate change of small-scale food producers of countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
But like Gates, who is now America’s largest farmland owner, Cargill has been steadily expanding its portfolio of farmlands thus taking away from the small farmers the most crucial resource for them to have equitable livelihoods. As noted in our previous article on the UN FSS, Cargill has been able to consolidate more than USD 3 billion in farmland assets globally through its private equity firms Proterra and Black River that are dedicated to farmland buyouts. The agribusiness giant has also been using its investment firms, in collaboration with local ruling compradors, to control lands that it could not otherwise get its hands on due to existing constitutional or legal restrictions on foreign ownership of land, and establish large-scale plantations at the expense of rural communities.
Equitable livelihoods? A pipe dream when the leadership of Action Track 4 has been for decades tied to some of the world’s biggest land grabbers.
Charting the people’s action track
Clearly, the people’s aspirations for a genuinely progressive transformation of food systems – i.e., policies and programs anchored on food sovereignty, agroecology and genuine agrarian reform – are not on the table of the FSS. The corporate-led Action Tracks are designed not to address the people’s rights to land and resources, to a healthy planet or to decent living in any meaningful way. Bill Gates, Cargill, the Poison Cartel and their ilk are just blatantly using the UN and its system of multi-stakeholder consultations and dialogues to provide a semblance of legitimacy and justness to an otherwise illegitimate and biased process and agenda.
Mass movements of peasants and workers, indigenous peoples, fishers, women and youth, consumers, and other social sectors marginalized in food systems, together with advocates of food sovereignty, agroecology and genuine agrarian reform, including progressive scientists and policy makers must come together. Urgent more than ever is the need to strengthen and grow the people’s movement that will chart their own action track to truly change how the world produces and consumes food; confront the multiple crises of the economy, climate, environment and health; and challenge and dismantle global corporate monopoly domination that is behind all this. ###
PAN Asia Pacific is among the lead organizers of the Global People’s Summit for a Just, Equitable, Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems. The Global People’s Summit is a campaign to expose and oppose the corporate agenda in the UN Food Systems Summit. It will gather and campaign for the people’s demands for a truly radical, pro-people and pro-planet transformation of the world’s food systems. For more information about the Global People’s Summit, visit the website or contact the PANAP Secretariat through nolandnolife@panap.net.
Arnold Padilla is the Food Sovereignty Programme coordinator of PANAP. Ilang-Ilang Quijano, PANAP Communications Officer, contributed research for this article.
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