Food systems at COP29: A youth perspective
By: Belinda Ng (UK Youth Leader, Act4food)
This year, I had the privilege of attending the 2nd week of the 29th annual Conference of Parties (COP) held in Baku, Azerbaijan as a young food sustainability advocate. I attended high-level ministerial events, spoke at side events, and observed negotiations around climate adaptation. ‘Food, Agriculture and Water’ had its time in the spotlight with its own ‘Thematic day’, where there were a range of events and rich discussion about sustainable food systems across various contexts and scales.
However, negotiations and high-level events produced relatively few new commitments on food systems and failed to reference the strong relationships of food systems with action to protect and restore forests, land, and nature. The delays in negotiations owing to a failure to come to a consensus between Parties on climate finance contributed to this.
Despite this year’s conference being a ‘mixed bag’ for food systems, young people on the ground had really emerged as a real beacon of hope for continued progress amidst increasing geopolitical uncertainty and fragmentation, and reinforces the need to work collaboratively across sectors, generations, and industries to drive the systems change needed urgently.
“Upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.” This was a particularly memorable line that I heard in the negotiation rooms, delivered by Eswatini's negotiator during an intervention. The quote underpins what I felt was a wider recognition about the collective responsibility to urgently increase food system resilience as one of the sectors most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Countries echoed their support to create more sustainable food systems in meeting rooms, referencing the role of climate-related data and forecasting, agricultural subsidies, and equitable transfers of finance to farmers, particularly women, to achieve impactful outcomes. When the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) announced the launch of the Baku Harmoniya Climate Initiative for Farmers, which aims to aggregate flows of information around climate action for farmers, a youth representative from YOUNGO, the youth constituency of the United Nations, made an intervention to emphasise the importance of priority being given to youth-driven projects, development of youth-led solutions, upskilling youth, and youth involvement in policy-making to ensure the continuity and impact of the platform on the ground.
One of my biggest takeaways from the conference is the value of a multi-scalar approach to transform food systems. It was heartening to hear a mix of solutions ranging from the hyper-local to the global, many of which were being led and championed by young people. For example, I represented Act4food to share on panels some of the key projects that young people in our network have been leading in their home countries around healthy and sustainable school meals. In Ghana and Nigeria, our young people have set up school nutrition hubs educating and empowering students to grow, harvest, and prepare nutritious local foods, demonstrating the value of, and necessity for young people to be key stakeholders and project co-leads - and to be given the autonomy, levers, and opportunities to drive change.
Crucially, the term ‘ecosystem’ was used a lot to recognise the symbiotic relationships that should occur to drive food systems transformation, particularly in relation to key discussions around the vital role of nature and water governance for healthy food systems. Different stakeholders (such as private sector, multilateral development banks, civil society, and policymakers) similarly emphasized the importance of coming together to find ways to create the necessary incentives that accelerate action for each group (e.g. de-risking the landscape to increase financial flows from public and private sector to food systems, empowering young people with knowledge transfer and capacity building to contribute to work in food systems, and engaging local communities in equitable ways that encourage land stewardship).
Finally, we mustn’t forget that an inclusive and equitable food systems transformation is underpinned by cultural identities and values around food. In a conversation with Naserian Kirrorkor, a youth delegate from the Masaai people of Kenya, I learnt about the centrality of cattle to their culture, spirituality, and daily practices of herding livestock in their semi-nomadic ways of life, which was so different in relation to approaches for cattle reared for the beef and dairy industry in the UK. In reflection, top-down approaches that fail to take in the diverse types of knowledge and perspectives around what ‘sustainability ‘ can and should be at the local and national level for food systems, risk perpetuating harmful inequalities for historically marginalised groups.
A morning session’s reflection from Fernando Mattos, Uruguay’s Minister of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries, offered plenty of food for thought. “The future is not random. Its design depends on our decisions.” Youth can and should continue to be at the decision-making table at future COPs, and at the national and local scale- together with stakeholders across sectors, we can catalyse transformative efforts for more sustainable, healthier and equitable food systems.
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