Against corporate capture, greenwashing & co-optation!
Fight for food justice, not profits!
From the 3rd to the 5th of September 2024, the agri-food industry is holding its so-called “Regenerative Agriculture Summit” for the third time. At a critical time of climate chaos, environmental degradation and malnutrition crises, we, social movements, civil society organizations, academics, farmers and engaged citizens, once again denounce this Summit’s attempt to greenwash participating corporations’ devastating ecocidal and neocolonial practices.
The term “regenerative agriculture” is abused to give agrochemical and fossil fuel intensive industrial farming a green image. Corporate actors are rebranding themselves so they can continue the reinforcement of their economic and political power. This encompasses the marginalisation of small-scale and diversified organic and agroecological farmers. By adjusting their narratives and platforms, big corporations cling to their market share and profits without making significant changes to their destructive business activities. They move in the vague greenwashing realms of “decarbonisation”, “sustainability” and “green growth”. Concretely it means that agribusinesses, next to their chemical products, start selling & patenting “bioinputs” or produce “clean” fertilisers by including carbon capture in their strategy.
False solutions like these also often focus on digitalisation and data-driven technology for large-scale industrial farms and are based on empty promises of innovating our ways out of the crises industrial agriculture has created. This implies that the system can improve, without fundamental challenges to the power imbalances in the industrial way of food production. This could not be further from the vision that guided the original thinking on regenerative agriculture in the 1980s. Then, the call for fundamental social and political redistribution of power in the food system and focussing on small-scale producers, processers and distributers was the core idea.
Black, indigenous, peasant and Majority World farmers and food workers have been and are leading the fight for agroecological and organic regenerative agriculture. Small-scale farmers and peasant, fishers and pastoralists are the ones who really feed the world. Announced Summit speakers, however, are almost exclusively white and employed by some of the most environmentally and socially destructive actors in the agribusiness sector. Attendance is priced at €240 for farmers, €361for academics and €1329 for NGOs. The only reason why they are incentivising farmers to join is to use them as tokens to legitimitize their destructive business model.
Participating agri-food corporations and allied research institutions, consultancy and marketing businesses cannot be trusted to lead system change with their false solutions. They are fuelling human rights violations, structural poverty, unhealthy diets, and destructive agricultural methods while co-opting the language of regenerative agriculture.
- Summit speaker and summit “gold partner” Rabobank finances 85% of Dutch industrial agriculture and is involved in land grabbing, drug cartel money laundering and the industrial livestock farm expansion that has produced the Dutch nitrogen crisis, mass farmer indebtedness, deforestation and dramatic biodiversity loss.
- Unilever, also the summit’s “sustainability partner”, has been instrumental in orchestrating plantation economies and has continued its relentless exploitation of farmers and food workers in their extractive global supply chains . They also intrude systematically in public universities such as Wageningen.
- As gold partner of the summit, the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform (SAI Platform) will be present at workshops and discussions. It services numerous agri-food industry multinationals, such as Unilever, that systematically undermine real sustainable agricultural development and social justice in the name of corporate greed. SAI Platform partner Yara is outrageously profiting from the war in Ukraine as it continues to expand a global synthetic fertilizer addiction that requires the burning of hundredths of thousands of tons of fracked gas to be produced. SAI Platform partners Bayer and Syngenta trap farmers in increased reliance on synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, patented seeds and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that threaten biodiversity, pest resistance, human health and soil, air and water quality. Their lobby machinery continuously undermines environmental policy and science-based decision-making processes.
- Attending company Cargill is guilty of child labour, environmental pollution and the destruction of the world’s last remaining intact forests and prairies. Nestlé, another global agribusiness giant attending the summit, continually breaks promises to end child trafficking and labour exploitation in their cacao chains. Agrochemical cacao plantations such as Nestlé’s caused 85% of the Ivory Coast’s forest cover to be lost.
- Multiple attending companies are profiting from the ongoing apartheid system in Palestine. Coca Cola operates a factory in the illegal Israeli settlement of Atarot, and Axa still invests in Israeli bank Hapoalim, which finances Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.
We stand for justice in the agri-food system and call out fossil fuel-addicted corporations that sustain exploitative and destructive industrial agriculture. Governments have failed to protect us from the promotion of capital-intensive, proprietary agro-technological development. Consequently, powerful corporate actors control global value chains and are deeply entrenched in food governance at the cost of civil democratic participation and local control over food, nutrition and agricultural decision-making. But the real solutions to the environmental, social, economic and political crises in our food systems will not come from conforming to the industrial capitalist model.
In contrast, the principles of agroecology offer guidance on how we can transform our food systems and produce and consume food in harmony with nature for present and future generations. Diverse forms of smallholder food production based on agroecology restore ecosystems, nourish communities, generate local knowledge, promote social justice, nurture identity and culture, and strengthen the economic viability of rural areas. This requires putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons back into the hands of the people who feed the world.
Activists, farmers and researchers in the Dutch agroecology movement have been protesting against the Regenerative Agriculture Summit ever since its arrival in Amsterdam. We will continue our tradition of building resistance and community resilience against greenwashing through promoting healthy and just food systems: through demonstration, conversation and art.
Stand in solidarity!
Join the conversation on how to resist the agro-industry and become part of the movement towards an alternative food future that truly nourishes all peoples and the planet. Connect to the Agroecology Network NL, and its members Toekomstboeren, XR Landbouw, ASEED and many other associations, groups and collectives in the Netherlands who are promoting agroecology and food sovereignty.
Resistance is Fertile!
Signed by: Agroecology Network NL, ASEED Europe, XR Landbouw, Toekomstboeren
With the support of: Boerengroep, Voedselpark Amsterdam, Aralez
