 Hello and welcome. I'm Lynne Freese, producer of Global Political Economy, or GPE News Dogs. Today's guest is Pat Mooney. At the end of this year, 2021, a meeting is being held to rubber stamp a corporate strategic maneuver to take over global governance of the entire world food system. Effectively food production, research, and finance. Pat Mooney will be talking about all this in the context of the long food movement and his report, Transforming Food Systems by 2045. The report shows the stakes are high because food systems are being rapidly transformed as food and agriculture go digital. This is the last chance to change course. Pat Mooney is lead author of that report, produced by IPAS Food in collaboration with ETC Group. Pat Mooney is leading IPAS Food's Long Food Movement project. He's co-founder and executive director of ETC Group that's monitored corporate power and commercial food farming and health for over four decades. He's an expert on agricultural diversity, biotechnology, corporate concentration and global governance. Pat Mooney was awarded the Pearson Peace Prize in Canada and received the alternative Nobel Prize, the right livelihood award. Welcome Pat, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Pat from farmers and fishers groups to cooperatives and unions, the Long Food Movement calls on civil society and social movements to unite and collaborate. This is a forceful counter position to an agribusiness led transformation of the food systems. Your report Transforming Food Systems by 2045 maps out what this kind of ground up collaboration could achieve. And as the title suggests, you're looking decades ahead. So what was the impetus behind that? Well, we back in 2016, in fact, we began to talk about the need for a strategy that was not so short term as it has always been. It can't just be two or three years of thinking we need to be thinking further down the road. And we were expressing our general frustration, many of us in civil society that we're always trapped into these cycles of funding, which are so short that we really can't do the horizon scanning that's important. So we talked about, well, let's build something different. Let's try to see if we can imagine not just what we would like to have down the road, but how we would get to it. We all have the same kind of dreams of the way we'd like to see the world be, but can we really get there? Can we politically, practically do it? So the exercise of the Long Food Movement was to not just dream of what we want, but really do the politics of it, what's really viable in terms of moving institutions, moving money around to get where we want to be. The Long Food Movement is for decentralizing control and democratizing food systems as the key to feeding the world, as well as regenerating ecological and other systems vital to people and the planet. You say achieving that will require policy frameworks at every level of governance from local law to international law that support and empower smallholder and peasant farmers all over the world. So talk about policy frameworks that have moved in the opposite direction by supporting and empowering agribusiness and the role of agribusiness in getting governments to make those policy choices. For example, what did agribusiness want and get from government, say back in the days when biotechnology was the then new technology? Back in the even the late 70s and in the 80s, agribusiness was saying we have a technology here, biotechnology, gently modified crops, which will feed the 500 million. They said at that time there are 500 million malnourished people in the world that would solve that problem. They would take care of that and that they had the only tools that would actually be able to do it. They said that they needed some help to do it though. They needed three things basically. They needed government regulators to get out of the way, given the freedom to act as they wanted to. Secondly, they needed to be able to be given a regulation, a certain kind of regulation, intellectual property rights over life, over plants and livestock so that they would own it. And so no bad regulations but the regulations they wanted which gave them more corporate power. And then thirdly, they needed to turn the public sector researchers in their culture into basically servants for the private sector. So do the basic work for us and we'll do the rest. Just to clarify that third point about what agribusiness wanted was to turn public sector agricultural researchers into servants for the private sector. So this was to get the sort of research they wanted. In other words, research that advanced the interest of high input chemical intensive agriculture that eventually will feed into profits for the main agribusiness players. So pro GMO research. The green revolution sort of research we've been hearing about forever and all the developments coming out of universities and government research stations around the world for agriculture as well. The research money in the public sector goes into again support services for the private sector, basic research for the private sector. What were some real world consequences of this policy framework that agribusiness wanted and got? Take one example. I'm thinking here of corporate concentration in food systems. What happened there? Well we went from roughly 7,000 private sector seed companies in the world in when I first got into this work in the 70s to where we now have really what five or six of the most in many ways it's really only three or four companies that really control all of commercial production of seeds and pesticides together. So it's vastly concentrated compared to what it was. So there's been a lot of corporate takeover and buyout activity. Yeah on a massive scale. I mean it's been a huge convergence really started in the 70s and it's kept on going. It hasn't stopped. It is transforming itself. Who's doing the converging has been changing over time. When I was first dealing with this the biggest seed company in the world was Royal Dutch Shell. They had bought more than 100 seed companies and they thought they were going to be big in the market. They decided they couldn't do it after a while when they got out of it and more conventional crop chemical companies took over and bought the seed companies. Now of course we're seeing a new development where it's the big data companies that are moving in and taking over large sectors of the food system. And you think there's more to come that this trend shows no signs of slowing down. It's coming because again the industrial food chain is changing. It's no longer the chain with all the links in it that we used to have. Seeds used to be sold and owned separately from pesticides and from fertilizers and far machinery companies were stuck in the business of producing tractors. The traders and the cargoes of the world and the processors and the retailers were all different folks with big data management and the ability to manipulate not just digital information but also to manipulate digital DNA to actually adjust technologically computer wise adjust living materials. Makes it possible for the biggest companies with the biggest computers to step in and really try to govern the large chunks of the food chain. So seeds and pesticides have become one basically with the farm machinery companies and the fertilizer companies they could actually just become one big input sector. The grain trading companies are kind of lost in this whole exercise. They're not quite sure that they've got anything that anyone else wants anymore. The processors and the retailers are coming together more and the big data managers behind all of that the Amazons and the Alababas of the world the Googles and 10 cents of the world from whether it's China or Germany or the United States are saying well we can actually manage that better than anybody else can. So you get Alababa advising peasant producers in China on how to grow pigs and gardens as well as how to market their products as well as setting them up for retail sales in stores. I've been emphasizing that the big data managers is the ones who are really at the front of this now and calling the shots and deciding what to do with with the food system but behind them again are asset management companies the Black Rock and State Street and Vanguard and so on who are huge companies Black Rock has now more than nine trillion dollars in asset management power an enormous amount of money and Black Rock has shares in firstly every part of the food chain every every significant company in the food system is Black Rock is there. So Black Rock has that knowledge of what's happening it's sort of like being at a poker game when Black Rock is the only one that can walk around and see what all the cards that all the players have they know it all and they can then make decisions they think are important to make for for their profit and they have again the the massive control of data press more than anybody else does to to know how to use it most effectively. So in going digital food and agriculture is generating massive data and with it massive profits for food and the non-food corporations like data platforms asset management firms and others that moved in on food to get control of those data and profit flows and with consolidation and concentration mega corporations can amass vast profits. It's a very profitable enterprise really it's food is something that you do three times a day if you're lucky and it's something where you're shopping for all of the time so it's your repeat buying is built into the into the idea but and that means a lot for the companies it means an awful lot of data can be gathered you can attach things to that as you see with grocery stores that have bigger and bigger other you know areas and merchandise beyond food and so on there's lots of ways you can build from a food base to to control more the retail markets but also of course with big data management you control the production side much more easily it's possible to go to farmers and say if you take this package of of inputs that we own and control and have proprietary rights over and we can monitor that for you we can help you understand the weather understand the markets deciding exactly how much of fertilizer how much of pesticides what seed varieties you should be using they can control all that package of information and then attach that even to to cropping sure and sell that to the farmers so you end up with the company like John Deere for example as the world's largest farm machinery company having the the sensors on its tractors on its combines that really let it control the entire production process John Deere is in the field at the beginning of the growing season planting and dumping in the fertilizers the pesticides it's there at the end of the growing season picking up the harvest so it's knowledge of what's being produced and what will make it to the marketplace is is vast and much stronger than any other company. From seed sector consolidation in the 1980s into the present you've charted a trend of rising corporate concentration and control and food and agriculture since agribusiness got the policy framework it wanted you pointed out policymakers embraced what agribusiness wanted on the back of promises made by agribusiness at that time promises that biotechnology so genetically modified crops would solve problems like world hunger you debunked agribusiness promises then and you debunked them now and as an expert on corporate strategies you demonstrate agribusiness has a narrow focus that puts profit before people in the planet and systems vital to their well-being the ecological system the knowledge system the social system your early work exposing the terminators seed being an iconic example of how that works tell us something about that and read through into the present well terminator was um something we worried about even back in in the 1980s that as we saw biotech developing we and it wasn't doing well slow and getting into the marketplace and when it got into the marketplace in the mid 1990s it ran into a lot of opposition and you know it's a matter of just following the money something you know about it's paying attention to to where the greatest profit is and the biggest profit was going to be if farmers couldn't save their seed if they were prevented from saving their seed now they're legal preventions of course that you can apply through patents but that doesn't work as well in such a decentralized world of producers and so what the company's dreamt up was was an idea of what they call the technology protection system tps and it was a system which they described literally as being a way to help the farmers of south asia have access to the best possible seeds and technologies in a way which assured the companies who produce those technologies they wouldn't be robbed that the farmers wouldn't steal the technologies so that meant the seed had to be developed in such a way that it would die at harvest time they'd be able to take the those seeds to give you the end product but the seeds would die at harvest time so they couldn't be planted again so farmers would have to go buy back to the companies and buy seed every year they call it technology protection system we call it terminator seeds and there was such a reaction against that that the united nations came down with it with a moratorium against terminator technologies uh the companies themselves were forced to publicly say that they wouldn't use the technologies the biggest companies and that's held out they have not used the technology it hasn't been deployed into the marketplace but they didn't end round run around that again and we realized they would by by the end of the 90s we were saying that that well what they really want to have is not genetically modified crops they want to have crops that that will react to chemical use or can be changed internally you don't need to have genes move from one species to another you actually just simply change the the DNA itself within the existing species and that's now what we call gene drive technologies where you can go in and you can edit the DNA of plant variety or livestock species and alter it as you wish and there's no gmo involved as we traditionally know it so that's that's the next step of that control and and they are trying to get that into the marketplace they're saying that we can't have food security without it they're applying that to both health and to the food systems it works in both cases to malaria for example getting rid of insects that's that's that's part of of the approach they're now taking and again we don't know whether it will work we don't know if it does work for whether it will work too well be too dangerous what its longer term implications will be and we certainly know that we will not be the ones that control it Pat in your report you lay out two very different approaches to technology that as they run their course over the next few decades would map into two very different futures for food in a nutshell can you explain that there's two ways of looking at how they approach technologies they split or how we're looking at technologies that are making this probably quite unfairly simplistic but on one side we have high tech and the companies are saying they're the high tech gurus they know how to handle this they can go into their labs and they can do at the nano scale literally change life change dna manage systems in such a way that they can apply those those lab based technologies to the world on a macro scale and against that high tech approach we have what I would describe as a wide tech approach which is where you have production of food and systems at the level of of watersheds at the level of of ecosystems where peasants produce food and make changes create innovation but innovation which is set in that very specific narrow context that the the nano context of their community or their their farm area so one is wide in the sense that deals with everything in that ecosystem but but focused on the farm and the other one is is high in the sense that it has small application small innovations that can have little black global applications and I think the world is much much safer if we have a system where where the innovation comes from the 350 million labs that are farms around the world and the hundreds of millions more of scientists who are the producers around the world who can really be innovative with 7000 different crops not with the 12 crops of the companies work with with with 38 different livestock species not the five that the companies work with to get us through the problems of climate change and the threats of new pests and diseases and so on and biodiversity loss to to to have a decentralized system of of short short supply chains to me that's what makes sense for the future so for the common good for you what makes sense is policy frameworks that support and empower small farmers and peasants all over the world so from local to global that would reset the trajectory of food production research and financing systems to put people on the planet before profits so explained earlier under agribusiness as usual the opposite policy framework has prevailed for decades knowing that I was quite surprised to see you report smallholder production has performed so well it was even a bit of a surprise for us as well we knew that there was a lot we didn't realize how much it was and it's but conservatively speaking again peasant production smallholder production and that's fisheries as well as livestock keepers as well as as farmers together urban and and rural production was a lot is being produced in urban areas as well we put that all together then about 70 percent at least of the world's people depend upon that that smallholder production to to stay alive to to feed themselves and that also comes out to roughly the same percentage in terms of the amount of food not just the number of people but also the amount of calories and so on that are being produced which really begs the question of what are the other guys doing what's agribusiness doing the instance of not doing very much they're they're feeding perhaps 30 percent of the world's people they're doing that with more than 75 percent of the world's land and resources water etc and the food would use they're causing tremendous environmental damages and they're creating amount of over consumption of food because so much of the food in in the industrialized world at least goes to over consumption which causes health and environmental damages sum up briefly why you say history shows agribusiness has promised a lot and given a little and on the back of that what it's promising today well industry hasn't been successful agribusiness hasn't done what it said it was going to do its promises from the 1970s with biotechnology its claims around its capacity to manage the inputs to deal with long supply chains none of that has worked and it's manifestly true even to governments that that they recognize that that that so the promises haven't haven't proved to be valuable or to work for society so industry is is struggling at this stage trying to figure out what it does about that how do they make the case now that they they can they they've learned their lessons and can can come up with something which which really works for for governments and for people who want to eat food and they do that of course by claiming that they're really kind of doing what agriculture is doing that they have regenerative agriculture and the language they they grab onto is is that we get the message we're going to move towards climate smart agriculture we're going to work towards systems which have a full life cycle attached to them from cradle to cradle production we've understood those messages and we're doing it ourselves but we're attaching to that and improving it by having big data management by having our highly sophisticated supply chains by using block chains to track commodities from the field to the to the table they're capturing the language of of what was called the organic movement now the agriculture movement they're renaming it calling it regenerative agriculture and they're just saying they're going to tweak it with their proprietary technologies to make it better as we're now of course moving towards what's going to be a food summit so at the end of 2021 they're saying they will accept that all of these systems of different of agriculture can live together as possible for agriculture and peasant producers to be side by side with larger farms and the industrial processes of agriculture on the other side of course civil society levia camposina the world's largest umbrella of peasant organizations and and others are saying that we can't do this thing side by side if you're using pesticides you're using synthetic fertilizers if you're managing the marketplace for your purposes that destroys our livelihoods and our ability to to feed the 70 percent of the people that we are feeding in this context the report warns food security is under threat from agribusiness if governments rubber stamp what agribusiness want you've explained even governments now recognize the technological solutions for world problems promised by agribusiness have not worked out or been of value to society you talked about how in moving towards the summit at the end of the year that's the un food system summit to make a convincing case its new technologies are of value to society agribusiness has reframed its promises i'll just quickly quote a comment on that point and on what agribusiness wants in return for those promises at the summit this is from an interview you did at the launch of your report agribusiness has a very simple message the cascading environmental crisis can only be resolved by powerful new genomic and information technologies that they argue can only be developed if governments unleash the entrepreneurial genius deep pockets and risk-taking spirit of the most powerful corporations to do this the world needs a new governance model a multi-stakeholder round table where governments companies and civil society reason together if the summit embraces this governance model companies say they'll be able to apply artificial intelligence big data management digital genomics robotics and blockchain driven supply systems to sustainably feed two billion more mouths a quarter of a century from now so pat in return for those promises agribusiness wants the un food system summit to embrace a new governance model the multi-stakeholder model so that means a un stamp of approval to shift un institutions and food and agriculture so the existing governance structure of the world food system to the multi-stakeholder model of governance i should note for viewers that multi-stakeholder institutions promote the multi-stakeholder model as a vehicle to reset the world system of global governance a leading multi-stakeholder institution as reported in other segments is the world economic forum and these multi-stakeholder institutions are funded by the world's most powerful corporations and philanthropic capitalists like the gates foundation pat to unpack all this for us start with some of your thoughts on the multi-stakeholder model that's the model that we've seen i mean the world is walking up a little bit because of the cobit experience that we have covex which is the construction of the building the gates foundation together with welcome trust and where they've they've said let's have a multi-stakeholder group that brings together the pharmaceutical industry that are going to produce the the vaccines they should be there with those who are going to give the money to make this thing work so that's going to be the the foundations the big the the flat or capitalist foundations and we have to have the governments are going to give money as well we'll sit at the table we'll invite wh o to be there as an advisor so you have this facade of the world's governments participating in this process but they're not really decision makers in it and and those with the money and those with the technologies will make the decisions about how to distribute to vaccines around the world which has not worked very well for the vast majority of humanity it may not work well for humanity for for years to come so the world has seen that as a multi-stakeholder model but we're seeing that multi-stakeholder model also being proposed in the context of agricultural research in the context of how to restructure again the UN's normative functions for food and agriculture and investment and food aid and so on they're saying that that's that kind of models what they want to put in place there yet we're seeing the corporations making their through the world economic forum in particular saying here's how we want to restructure the food system in terms of these institutions at the United Nations level here's how we want to change the control of big data and manage big data for food and agriculture in our way and here's how we want to take agricultural research the through the international research body the the consultative group on international agricultural research and here's how we're going to change that to work for agribusiness and for the world they say and it comes down to this this language of multi-stakeholderism which i think is the most insidious and dangerous concept that we've seen and since world war two in terms of how the world will govern itself and companies are fundamentally saying let's all reason together let's all just sit around together and we'll just talk these things out and sort out how best to do things in the future we we have to recognize that we're all stakeholders here at the table together so let's talk and their definition of that is that we need governments at the table of course because they finally have normative functions we need to have the industry at the table because they got the money and the innovative capacity we need to have civil society at the table to sort of keep everybody honest but of course the civil society that they wanted at the table are kind of store bought civil society the ones that the companies have built themselves and funded themselves to to be there who have been co-opted into the system and they're really there for almost camouflage purposes the real negotiation is not multi-stakeholder it says a negotiation between governments and corporations and how will we how will the governments facilitate what the corporations say they need the resources they need to have and the regulatory systems they want to put in place to let them do their what they say is their job as corporations and so it's a complete falsity to call it multi-stakeholderism and that's just such a false description of the reality of the world that we think it has to be rejected in other words under that false description of the reality of the world that you were talking about powerful corporations are positioning themselves to directly call the shots on how the world will be governed and as the vehicle for this is multi-stakeholderism it's not so hard to understand why you reject that model your long food movement report maps out what the next 25 years have in store if agribusiness as usual gets the multi-stakeholder model of global governance that it wants and what that mapping shows is the keys of the food system are handed over to data platforms private equity firms e-commerce giants putting the food security of billions at the mercy of high risk AI controlled farming systems and accelerating environmental breakdown our conversation today is not so much to talk about the nitty gritty of the dystopian future for food people and the planet mapped out and the report is about how to prevent it in other words prevent the corporate takeover of global governance of the world food system by means of the multi-stakeholder model so in the time we have talked to us about immediate threats of this you point to three big agribusiness plays on structures of global governance of food and agriculture being pursued right now in 2021 those being the 2021 UN food system summit a play to get the summit and so the UN to mandate and embrace the multi stakeholder model for governance of food and agriculture and the other two fronts want to play on global governance on big data and food and agriculture and thirdly agricultural research so let's take them one by one in reverse order so first the play on agricultural research you talked earlier about how from the 1980s agribusiness got major governments to turn their public sector research institutions into a servant for the private sector so agribusiness the play in 2021 is to turn the world's international public agricultural research institution into a servant for agribusiness that research body is the consultative group on international agricultural research or CTIAR so who's spearheading that it really is I mean it's the Gates Foundation together with people who used to work at least for the Sinjenta Foundation which is now a Sino-Canvas property with the UK government and the US government a couple of others who are saying that we need to create a public international public sector research body which really is working hand in hand with the biggest private sector companies to deliver food security in the future and it's only the biggest companies that actually have the technologies again and the money for those technologies that can get us out of this mess so in the past whereas the CTIAR organization which I'm a critic of by the way historically has not been a great organization but still it was trying to do something in theory for the south and collaborating with governments in the south now that that body will really be a body which says here's what we want to do to you guys if you want our money and our technologies then you've got to go along with what we recommend to you it's really covex all over again but for agriculture it is the the the biggest companies with the biggest money pockets saying you can have our vaccines or you can have our our food technologies but only under our conditions and and that kind of control is really I think quite scary and that's what they are pursuing on your point that this play is covex all over again but for agriculture as we can't go into that here I'll just point out for viewers a good resource for finding out more about covex and so read-throughs to other sectors can be found online it's a report by harris leckman called covex a global multistakeholder group that poses political and health risks to developing countries and multilateralism so pat to get back to your comments about the world's international public sector agricultural research body cgiar the plan table as I understand it was for so-called unification of the cgiar system corporate framing uji code is meaning turning the system into a single corporate entity with stronger than ever connections to agribusiness so what's the state of play there and has this cgiar unification been achieved yes and again there's there's counter-transition as well a big that's what they're doing they've achieved it they've actually amalgamated the 15 institutes that are part of the cgiar system into one they've the gain the controls they want they're streamlining their technologies and research they're pushing out any smaller enterprises and marginalizing scientists in the south to be involved in their own food systems they're doing that but they're still stuck with a legal structure which is grounded in about 14 different countries around the world that any one of those countries can treat what's happening as a kind of merger as they would any other merger and acquisition and could stop it and there are many good reasons why for example Peru or the Philippines or Mexico who have these institutes in their own territory could step in and say no no no this this we're not allowing this merger to happen and under the headquarters agreements which exist now and have existed for some time those countries could literally take over those institutes and make them national property bring them entirely into the public sector of that country so all you need to break stop this this takeover of agriculture research is to to have two or three countries just say no do it and that i think is what we need to be pursuing in the discussions leading up to this food summit we need to say governments recognize you have power here exercise that power or you'll never have it again you'll lose control so mexico then is one of the key countries in this and mexico of course has been under intense pressure from agribusiness since by presidential decree they banned glyphosate and gm corn absolutely i mean mexico is where the international center for the production of maize and wheat takes place in the world it's right there in mexico just outside mexico city if mexico says that our headquarters agreement has been violated by this takeover by by the gates foundation and friends then that they can step in and and and take over all of those resources including the gene bank with the enormous diversity of maize and wheat seed in the gene bank and say now it's now it's the property of mexico and we'll cooperate with the rest of the world but we're not going to we're not going to surrender to this private sector initiative let's move now to another of the immediate threats to global governance the world food system from agribusiness led plays for a shift to multi-stakeholderism earlier you talked about the massive data and profit flows being generated as food and agriculture go digital so this play has to do with control over global governance of data in food and agriculture specifically the creation of an international digital council for food and agriculture so tell us about this first of all is it already a done deal no it's not it's still up for discussion i think it's encouraging that while we know what the companies want to achieve here they want their multi-stakeholder group to make the decisions for that the german government has stepped in and said we got to look at this more closely and they've gone to the united nations to the u.n. food and agriculture organization and they've said we need you to set up the government structure for this and this has to be a discussion with the world's governments so while there is a tendency to push in the same direction that they have with the world health organization marginalizing it and giving it sort of a a cameo appearance in the process i think there's still a hope that the digital council could be one which is is a intergovernmental body and which is a negotiated process with peasant producers around the world as well as with the governments to to decide what should be done it's not too late i am worried that the secretary general in new york has created this wider digital body that's looking at the use of digital information in every sector of the economy outside of agriculture as well and they've surrendered that process to a multi-stakeholder group led by the biggest companies but there still is a sub-sector around food and agriculture that's being negotiated and there's still some hope that we can protect the interests of of the food insecure and the food producers so then global governance of data in every sector of the economy outside of agriculture has already been surrendered to a multi-stakeholder group and that group's a body proposed by the u.n secretary general i should note for viewers that body's been dubbed big tech governing big tech in a civil society campaign to get it revoked by the u.n secretary general and that in several other contexts civil society continues to call on the u.n secretary general to rescind and desist from actions that surrender the u.n multilateral system to multi-stakeholderism the classic case of the role of the u.n secretary general in normalizing multi-stakeholderism inside the united nations was his signing of the united nations world economic forum strategic partnership agreement in 2019 other experts that i've interviewed report held that agreement was signed without internal discussion among u.n member states or public debate as reported by a transnational institute at the time an open letter sent to the u.n secretary general by over 400 organizations denounced the agreement for formalizing the corporate capture of the united nations in this conversation we've been talking about three big agribusiness plays bringing the threat of multi-stakeholderism to food and agriculture and you say when taken together put the entire structure of the u.n multilateral food system on the table in 2021 so far you discussed to the remaining play is the u.n food system summit and as context reviewers i'll very quickly note that this summit was convened by the u.n secretary general and as envoy to the summit the u.n secretary general appointed a recognized proponent of multi-stakeholderism and that of agribusiness that envoy agnes kalabata is a member of the world economic forum global agenda council now known as the world economic forum global future council she's the president of the alliance for a green revolution in africa agra a letter addressed to the u.n secretary general signed by 176 organizations working in africa and their allies called on the u.n secretary general to revoke that appointment to no avail in your words the summit is the brainchild of the world economic forum so comment now on the 2021 u.n food system summit it's really a shocking move we were we felt that there was a need for a food summit and one that really looked at the architecture of how food and air culture services are dealt with around the world but not one this is not the one that's being talked about by the world economic forum again which is this sort of multi-stakeholder strategy for governance which is behind the scenes sort of and the response has been from the world economic forum and those who are pursuing the summit from the secretary general's office is to say well it's really going to be a people's summit we're going to open up to absolutely everybody i likened it to being it's not a they call it the world food system summit to me it's much more like a disney world food system summit you can go to the you can go to the park you can get on any of the rides you want to the rides are bright and colorful there's never neverland there's frontier land there there's what else they have there all of those fantasy places you can go to but when you go on the ride and have enjoy the ride you end up exactly where you started when you get off it nothing has changed so we're all going to be on this ride moving towards the food system summit but at the end of the day it will only be those who are managing the process who will be able to interpret what came out of the process so much will happen there'll be so much discussion in so many different areas and there is no effort to actually create a final decision-making process where governments say here are the conclusions it'll be up to the organizers to say at the end of the day here's what we interpret to be the conclusions here's what we've picked out of this wonderful sort of potpourri of activities that went on here and and that's the scary part because they know what they want already and they will they will claim that they got it and they're they're welcoming all the noise and fanfare and activity along the way but but they did they decide there's been significant press coverage reporting controversy and protests surrounding the summit including out-and-out calls for boycott i've had it especially interesting to see the summit criticized in letters and statements not just from civil society and social movements but also un insiders and un independent experts for example i've his foods Olivier de chuteau the un special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights the former un special rapporteur on the right to food yes and Olivier and and others have tried to give it a chance of we all in in hypers food we felt that we should you know the very beginning of the process we were invited to be involved we agreed to be involved to at least see if it could go somewhere we're giving it the best effort i think there's an overwhelming recognition now from those in civil society and academia that have have tried to to to participate that that is not working and i think there will be an exodus away from the summit and i say that with knowing that having been around the un for more than half a century the un can paper over almost any disaster and governments are very good at making disasters look okay this is such a disaster in its organizational processes that i'm not sure it can survive it i don't think anyone's going to be able to paper over this this mess for me one statement in particular really seemed to capture a lot of what we've been discussing today and that was a statement made by the world-renowned economist and a former assistant undersecretary general at the united nations jomo ks he wrote big ag claims that the food ecological and climate crises has to be addressed with its superior new technologies harnessing the finance entrepreneurship and innovation only they can offer but in fact they have failed instead triggering more problems in their pursuit of profit as the new food system and corporate trends consolidate it will become increasingly difficult to change course very timely a long food movement is an urgent call to action for the long haul you still seem to think the long food movement can get to where it wants to be by 2045 that in other words it's not too late to turn things around i'm an optimist i think it's probably uh in my genes to be optimistic and i'm sure someone will offer to gene edit me to get it out of me but i i do think that that we're not too late in this again the surprise for us was that civil society is doing better and moving better than we thought uh is more coherent than we thought they would be they've got to do more but it is possible and the other surprise is that again 70 percent of the world's food system is produced by smallholder producers not by the big corporations as much as they'd like you to think otherwise the reality still is that 70 percent of the world's people are living from the the the bounty and and the work of peasant producers fishers and others around the world who are who are getting the food on the table so that we've got the majority of it still there is still an enormous amount of diversity beyond that which is held by science which peasants have in their fields they've been saving their own seeds they've been nurturing their own diverse livestock they're working again with 7000 crops with much more diversity than the industry is working with i mean just compare this one figure which i think explains it a lot about 45 percent of all agricultural research in the private sector focuses on one crop corn or maize one crop farmers are working again with 7000 crops so if you're trying to survive climate change who do you want to trust to get you through it you know you're just going to eat popcorn the rest of your life or you're going to be able to to in climate change or you're going to be able to to have that diversity of foods that couldn't get us through different growing conditions and different pests and diseases so there's a lot still on the side of the peasant producers pat mooney thank you no thanks for having me and from janeva switzerland thank you for joining us in this segment of gpe news docs