Recent UN climate talks (SB62) and the upcoming COP30 are dominated by corporate interests like Bayer and CropLife, which promote false solutions while sidelining genuine, people-led approaches like agroecology and food sovereignty, thereby failing vulnerable communities and climate justice
The results of the 62nd sessions of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Subsidiary Bodies (SB62) in Bonn (June 16–26, 2025) reflect yet another profound betrayal of the world’s most vulnerable communities, including rural populations and small food producers, as well as the continuation of climate politics dominated by colonial and neocolonial agenda and monopoly corporate interests. As the worsening climate crisis devastates food systems in the Global South, SB62 further reinforced profit-driven, false solutions, as Global North governments continued to evade historical accountability.
Despite urgent appeals for accessible adaptation finance through grants, SB62 postponed key decisions on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) indicators and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs). Led by the US and the EU, developed countries have hindered binding commitments to “means of implementation”—such as finance, technology, and capacity-building—leaving vulnerable nations without the necessary resources to carry out their adaptation strategies. Furthermore, although procedural adjustments were implemented to align the Adaptation Fund with the UNFCCC’s 2015 Paris Agreement, the funding levels remain severely insufficient. The call to triple adaptation finance by 2030 has been overlooked or ignored, continuing the dangerous disconnect between promises and actual action.
SB62 continued to endorse and legitimize ineffective and flawed climate solutions advanced by big corporate interests, while sidelining people-led, genuine solutions to the crisis. For instance, notwithstanding concerns that carbon markets (under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement) and digital platforms facilitate emissions outsourcing and land and resource grabbing, these options remain at the forefront of policymakers’ agendas. The USD 45 million from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a carbon market mechanism established under the UNFCCC’s 2006 Kyoto Protocol, was allocated to market-based approaches instead of the Adaptation Fund, benefiting polluters at the expense of community-initiated efforts.
On the other hand, efforts to include people-led agroecology, despite increasing evidence of its climate benefits, in key negotiations such as the GGA indicators, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), or the Baku to Belém Roadmap have been rejected or ignored by official parties to the climate talks. The Roadmap, a major global climate finance initiative launched at the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, aims to raise USD 1.3 trillion annually by 2035 for climate action in developing countries (COP30 will take place in Belém, Brazil in November this year). However, as SB62 concluded, it still lacks clear steps to mobilize public finance substantially. Instead, it remains focused on private-sector investment and multilateral banks such as the World Bank, which often impose debt traps and conditions that exploit resources. This approach violates the polluter-pays principle and Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement.
The development of NDCs, aside from being significantly delayed, has fallen far short of what is needed, and the ambition gap is widening even further. The world’s most industrialized countries and the major historical emitters continue to expand fossil fuel operations or invest in projects that encourage more unsustainable consumption of climate-warming oil and gas, even as they pressure the poorest nations to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and use their already scarce resources to cope with the climate crisis they did not cause. By continuously denying their accountability, rich countries worsen the injustice against the poor and vulnerable peoples and further set back real progress in climate action.
Meanwhile, some advocates and campaigners are lauding the developments in the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP), which reportedly moved closer to a potential decision at COP30. Parties have agreed on a draft decision structure for COP30, shifting the focus from procedural debates to substantive textual negotiations. A proposed Belém Action Mechanism could operationalize just transitions. However, aside from lacking concrete and ambitious financial commitments, especially public grant-based funding from wealthy countries, the JTWP negotiations failed to integrate agroecological shifts as a core component of a just transition, such as divesting from large corporate agriculture and rechanneling finance to support small farmers and agroecological practices.
The growing influence and presence of corporate interests in official climate meetings, which we observe with increasing concern, explain why platforms like the SB and COP sessions have been failing significantly. For example, agribusiness lobby groups such as CropLife International, which represents pesticide and seed companies, have played a dominant role in shaping discussions on climate and agriculture. Advocating for so-called “innovation-focused solutions,” they promote techno-fixes such as digital tools and climate-smart seeds, while deliberately sidelining agroecology and food sovereignty, which provide genuine, people-centered solutions to the climate crisis.
While CropLife itself did not organize a formal event, it leveraged media influence and alliance-building to advance corporate-aligned agriculture frameworks at SB62, sidestepping public scrutiny while embedding industry priorities in climate discourse and policy. It amplified, for example, the Global Flagship Initiative for Food Security side event at SB62, which promoted “multilateral leadership” for resilient food systems – aligning with CropLife’s tech-focused agenda. The Global Flagship Initiative for Food Security, launched at COP16 of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in 2024, is a coalition that promotes so-called climate-smart innovations (e.g., drought-resistant seeds, digital agriculture).
Belém is emerging as a critical battleground for the future of both people and the planet. The SB62 talks exposed the high-stakes confrontation facing the climate justice movement as we near COP30. Despite some progress in formal negotiations, such as the JTWP, official climate discussions continue to stall on systemic justice issues. Developed nations again failed to fulfill their commitments to provide public, grant-based funding, instead promoting risky, profit-driven private-sector schemes that exacerbate debt burdens in the Global South.
The flawed priorities and narrow corporate agenda that dominated SB62 significantly threaten rural communities and small food producers, as well as their efforts to promote agroecology and assert food sovereignty as solutions to climate issues. Meanwhile, corporate co-option looms large, with false solutions like profit-driven, carbon-marketed agriculture and harmful tech-centric fixes continuing to gain ground in official forums.
The news that Bayer is a diamond sponsor of the AgriZone pavilion at COP30 of state-owned Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) is unsettling. It signifies the highest level of financial and strategic support from a corporate giant notorious for harming the climate, the planet, and its people. Bayer AG, the world’s largest commercial seed company and the second largest pesticide producer, is a founding member and key powerbroker within CropLife. Nestlé, another infamous corporate monopoly in the global food systems and peddler of false climate solutions, is also a supporter of Embrapa’s AgriZone. No wonder that the Brazil presidency has rejected calls to have a dedicated “Agroecology Day” during the COP30.
For Belém to become a turning point in the people’s struggle for climate justice, we must address three deep-rooted challenges. First, we must tirelessly insist that people-led agroecology and food sovereignty are included in the COP30 outcomes, including within the GGA indicator framework and other key negotiations taking place in Brazil. Second, we must strengthen collective resistance against the financialization of climate responses, which prioritizes profit over people, even as public, grant-based funding for community-led initiatives, such as agroecology, is consistently overlooked. Third, we must ensure that farmers, fishers, and forest communities, rather than lobbyists such as CropLife, Bayer, and their ilk, shape the just transition of our food systems. The road ahead calls for nothing less than a radical shift of power: from the halls of Bonn and Belém to the frontlines of the climate crisis. ###
Arnold Padilla is the Deputy Executive Director of PAN Asia Pacific
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