On September 9th, together with Toekemsboeren and members of the Agroecology Network, we stood in front of the Beurs van Berlage building in Amsterdam, where the yearly Regenerative Agriculture Summit Europe was held, to expose its greenwashing narrative and talk to participants going inside.
This year much of the narrative focused on promoting solutions under the guise of “digital innovation” and “AI-enhanced technologies” like precision farming that do not question the power dynamics and interests of the dominant food system.
We handed out flyers debunking the summit organisers’ co-option of the term “regenerative agriculture” that does not challenge the profit-driven model and in fact keeps corporate interests at the fore.
Many participants were interested in talking to us, and while some were surprised to hear about the Summit’s greenwashing and false solutions, many were to some extent aware of it and agreed with our critique. Yet, they all chose to join the summit anyway.
One of the arguments we encountered for this was that corporations can help to transform our food system by having ‘sustainability’ or ‘regenerative agriculture’ departments and giving money to environmentally and farmer-friendly organizations. We want to challenge this view: Instead of redistributing power and resources to the people and communities who truly feed the world, depend on food production for their livelihoods, and hold grassroots knowledge to a way of producing food in line with ecosystem wellbeing, these “solutions” keep the power in the hands of large corporations and absolve them of their accountability in causing the unjust and harmful conditions of the global food system.
Read the full signed statement for more info on why we stand against this Summit on our website under ‘News’!
We will be back next year to resist these agro-industrial giants’ until the agroecological principles for just and sustainable food production are met!
