EGM on SDG 2: Magdalena Ackermann Statement, Session 9

Magdalena Ackermann

Co-coordinator ad interim of Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM) Secretariat

Session 9: Planet

What key elements have to be considered and what action should be taken to achieve SDG2 within
the limit of 1.5 degree Celsius and planetary boundaries?

• Understand what are the barriers for backstopping progress for SGDs in question.
• This is the third food crisis in 15 years. We are living in a situation where the conventional agriculture and food systems, based on a global trade logic and import/export  dependencies, are causing multi-layered crises, including rising hunger and malnutrition, catastrophic climate change, biodiversity loss, public health emergencies, and ever-rising levels of poverty and inequality with people’s being dispossed and displaced from their land.
• Conflicts, wars and occupation are persisting and increasing, and food and water are being used as a weapons of war, while people are being dispossessed and displaced, if not forced to starvation. According to the latest IPC briefing, the entire population in the Gaza Strip, constituted by 2.23 million people, is facing high levels of acute food insecurity. A main message that I hope that emerges from this meeting, is that if the right to life is not fulfilled, no other right will. An urgent call for peace needs to be at the forefront of understanding what is impeding interlinkages between SDGs, and a necessary condition both for the people and planet.

• Agroecology, within the framework of food sovereignty, offers an alternative to extractive models, and has proven to address social injustices, climate change and biodiversity loss. It also provides diverse, healthy and adequate food for communities. However, political and financial support to this transformative pathway is still scarce in most regions.
• According to both the HLPE and FAO, agroecology is fundamentally different from other approaches to sustainable development. It is based on bottom-up and territorial processes, helping to deliver contextualised solutions to local problems. By enhancing their autonomy and adaptive capacity, agroecology empowers producers and communities as key agents of change.
• Rather than tweaking the practices of unsustainable agricultural systems, agroecology seeks to transform food and agricultural systems, addressing the root causes of problems in an integrated way and providing holistic and long-term solutions.
• In order for agroecological food systems to flourish, the right to land and productive resources, such as water and seeds, need to be guaranteed. Policies need to support such transformative practices and knowledge co-creation. Hence, the governance of food systems, which is human rights based and hence ensures social participation, becomes central to leverage the synergies of the agroecological pathway. The UN Committee on World Food Security offers such a space at the global governance level for food security and nutrition, in which the CSIPM participates actively to bring the experiences and demands from those most affected by hunger and malnutrition, who are often food producers themselves.

Are there trade-offs between these objectives? In what context, and how can practices and policies address them?

• Financial actors are increasingly turning food, land and nature into objects of speculation. “Solutions” put forward that pretend to cover a range of schemes for climate and biodiversity protection, but that do not contemplate the social dimension risk to become solutions driven by the market logic rather than guided by the public interest.
• Food and land are foundations for and of life, both human and non-human. Progress has been made and instruments such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) have recognized this.
• Action and policies aimed to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises, will be meaningful as a response to the increase in hunger and malnutrition if they also consider these pillars for food systems. If solutions proposed do not respond or address the question of power imbalances, including concentration of land by only a handful, then they risk of trade-offs is higher than the benefits of synergies.