Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact akin to that of a “natural” disaster on the global capitalist food system. It has magnified and intensified the socio-economic cracks that compose its texture, and it has devoured people and their relationships (Viner, 2020). Since the beginning of 2020 the world has experienced skyrocketing levels of food poverty: in 2020, the number of people going hungry was 15 per cent higher than in 2019. Food shortages have been experienced in the Global North and the Global South, and the overexposure of underpaid food workers to the risk of infection has been widely documented (e.g. see Bogoeski, 2021). Worldwide, farmers and consumers dependent on international trade, along with informal and local food traders, have been hit by the temporary paralysis of the global logistic infrastructure. Producers have suffered as a result of reductions in global demand for particular products, the closure of informal and local markets, and the implementation of more rigid health and safety restrictions.

At the same time, climate change and the loss of social and biological diversity are ravaging the planet. The year 2020 registered the increasing probability of record-shattering climate extremes (Fischer et al., 2021), and it was one of the three warmest years on record, with a global average temperature of 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial (1850–1900) levels. There was heavy rain and extensive flooding over large parts of Africa and Asia. There were wildfires, droughts and 30 named storms in the North Atlantic hurricane season—the largest number of named storms on record (World Meteorological Organization, 2020). According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC, 2020), more than 50 million people were doubly hit in 2020 by climate-related disasters and by the pandemic, a situation that worsened food insecurity and added another layer of risk to disaster-related evacuation, recovery and relief operations.

Just a few months into the pandemic, it was clear to many that the global food system was incapable of providing adequate daily nutrition for the world’s population, let alone delivering a good life for those who participate in food production or a promising future for the environment and the planet. The intensity and transnational nature of the shocks felt on the ground were such that the time seemed ripe for the radical transformation that indigenous people, grassroots organizations and peasants’ organizations have been pursuing for decades. Suddenly, the need to address hunger, food security and the link between food systems, climate change and the loss of biological and social diversity were placed prominently on political agendas. From individual villages and cities to the United Nations, voices were raised in passionate advocacy of the need to rethink the future of the food system, the future for workers and the future of the planet. For many, the slogan “we shall not go back to normality because normality was the problem” that was projected on a building in Santiago de Chile during the first weeks of lockdown was equally applicable to the economic and food systems.

Might we suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is the straw that broke the capitalist food system’s back? Without any presumption of completeness, this chapter explores a recent set of events that reveal ongoing attempts by corporate actors, governments, academics and billionaire philanthropists to co-opt the climate change and health “emergency” in conjunction with the rhetoric of an “urgent need for change” in food systems. While they agree on the need to rapidly transform the food system, their goal is to implement paradigms, visions and “solutions” that reinforce the inequality and structural misery entrenched in capitalist food systems. This is the United Nations Food Systems Summit that took place on 23 September 2021 and that was anticipated over summer 2021 by the Science Days and the pre-summit. The summit represents an attempt by the global political and economic elite to highjack the dynamics of global food governance. The UN Committee on World Food Security and the High Level Panel of Experts reject bottom-up and radical solutions and rather promote a “multi-stakeholder” approach to food that deploys technological and digital innovations. In this approach, critical decisions about the future of food are depoliticized, distanced from peasants, indigenous communities and citizens and aligned with the interests of the status quo and their modernist and techno-optimist approach to systemic socio-environmental challenges.

The political and intellectual “violence” of the summit has not gone unnoticed. In the last months, it has been a catalyst for a multiplicity of social movements, indigenous groups, food workers, academics and others who oppose the domination of food systems by the state and capital interests (Van Apeldoorn et al., 2012). As the dispute unfolds, this chapter unpacks the circumstances under which the counter-movement is unfolding. It argues for the need to focus on the legacy of the summit and its promotion of a hegemonic vision that is pushed through the rhetorical and procedural mechanisms of disaster capitalism (Polanyi, 1944).

Multiple Pandemic Disruptions: An Opportunity for Whom?

Since the first months of lockdown in early 2020, a series of high-profile writers have offered critical commentaries on the relationship between the present and future subversion of people and the planet. While not specifically addressing the future of food, those commentaries are relevant here. In April 2020, for example, Arundhati Roi (2020) wrote that the pandemic offered “us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality”. For Roy, the virus that “made the mighty kneel” could have opened a “portal”, a “gateway between one world and the next”. For Naomi Klein, like a great depression or a war, the pandemic and the extension of the public financial interventions in the Global North possessed the radicalizing potential for big and positive changes; however, they would have to be fought for (Viner, 2020). For Achille Mbembe, on the contrary, the intensification of the state of emergency due to the spread of the pandemic had strengthened the logic of sacrifice that “has always been at the centre of neo-liberalism, which has always worked with the idea that someone is worth more than others” (García, 2020). Rather than an opportunity for emancipation, Mbembe suggests, recent events have seen the normalization of the most violent tendencies of contemporary society.

Each of these analyses could be deployed to describe processes unfolding in the context of food systems, in the North as well as the South. Globally, peasants, activists and their allies have been engaging in acts of solidarity. They have joined hands to provide protection against COVID-19 and carried out exchanges among peasants on the production of healthy food and “donated food, seed, produced and distributed hygiene and protective materials” (La Via Campesina, 2020) in countries where they are based, such as Zambia, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Haiti and Palestine. In several cities in the North, people organized food-solidarity activities to fill the gaps of the existing “short-term, scattered, top-down and under-funded initiatives [that] have been both the cause and the consequence of the current food poverty crisis” (Lombardozzi et al., 2021). People gathered momentum to promote local strategies of solidarity, often in contraposition with both market and state. At the same time, however, already in August 2020 La Via Campesina reported that governments had detained, beaten and harassed volunteers at community-led soup kitchens, implemented strict checkpoints that discouraged peasants from reaching their farmlands, collaborated with private actors to forcefully evict villagers, and reformed labour, land and other forms of legal protection in order to facilitate the flow of foreign investments and a quick economic recovery (La Via Campesina, 2020; Ferrando & Vecchione Gonçalves, 2020).

The struggles that are taking place on the ground are reproduced internationally and globally. Yet at a distance from the localism of solidarity and collaboration, the urgent need to transform food systems has been progressively co-opted within the dominant capitalist framework and has triggered political processes whose outcomes will run significantly at odds with the needs and rights of the billions of smallholders who produce most of the world’s food as well as the ecological needs of the web of life (Capra, 1997). This process of co-optation does not unfold evenly or homogenously. Often, co-optation occurs by replacing the political concepts promoted “from below” with “sterile” and technical ideas that sidestep issues of power, ecological justice and rights. In other cases, it happens through the strategic use of fear and imminence to legitimize policy changes that are blind to the socio-environmental complexity of food systems and serve to reproduce the capitalist mode of production. Even when narratives identify human rights and agroecology, these concepts are treated as addenda or “extra” or refigured as ideas about “nature positive food systems” and “carbon neutrality” that push the future of food away from the aspirations of peasants, indigenous communities and citizens and into the hands of corporations, financial investors and billionaire philanthropists.

The pandemic has seen the intensification of the global capitalist food system, amplifying existing critical social and environmental conditions and making more urgent the need for transformative intervention. In the same period multiple bottom-up and grassroots initiatives have been calling out the shortcomings of a system that treats food as a commodity rather than a public good, a right and a commons (Vivero Pol et al., 2018). However, the shocks to the food systems are not only opening new possibilities for radical transformation but also creating the rhetorical and material conditions for the intensification of processes of marginalization, commodification, dispossession and appropriation (Harvey, 2003). Echoing Naomi Klein’s (2007) analysis of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, instrumental narratives of “urgency” have been deployed to frame pandemic disruptions of the food system, consolidating the power of political, financial and food elites to the detriment of peasants, indigenous people and non-commodified food systems (Agamben, 1998, 2008). Global food governance appears to be experiencing an intensification of “disaster capitalism” wherein national and transnational governmental institutions instrumentalize the catastrophe “to promote and empower a range of private, neoliberal capitalist interests” (Schuller & Maldonado, 2016, p. 62). At the international and European level, the fight for the future of food has never been so intense.

Food Systems Summit to Put Corporate Priorities on the Menu

On 16 October 2019, World Food Day, the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, announced to the Plenary of the UN Committee on World Food Security that he would organize a high-level UN Food Systems Summit as part of the Decade of Action to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals. The summit had been jointly requested by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Food Programme and the World Economic Forum. Originally planned for autumn 2020, the summit was postponed to September 2021 as a result of the pandemic (One Planet Network, 2019). At the time of writing, a few weeks before the summit and few weeks after the July pre-summit in Rome, the processes, forms of participation, power dynamics and goals of the summit remain unclear and contested.

Since Guterres’ announcement, several things have changed in the world and in the narrative around the Food Systems Summit. A gathering that was originally aimed at creating a world free of hunger by:

affirming the centrality of food systems to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda, aligning stakeholders involved in food systems transformation around a common practical framework, strengthening evidence and developing tools for decision makers to make choices on trade-offs, promoting a science-policy interface on food systems, and accelerating multi-stakeholder actions at different levels. (One Planet Network, 2019)

is now presented as the last call to deal with the “urgency” of reshaping “food systems so they support healthy diets for all and do more to make food production and consumption aligned to sustainable development” (United Nations, 2020, p. 2). For the United Nations (2020, p. 4): “This crisis can serve as a turning point to rebalance and transform our food systems, making them more inclusive, sustainable and resilient”.

Although there is generalized agreement about the need to address the social and environmental injustices that stem from and affect the global food system, the question is whether the Food Systems Summit is the appropriate space and its invitees the right people to recognize that the “sickness” of the system is not a peripheral issue but a central issue of their own making (Mozo, 2013). To paraphrase Susan Marks (2011), it is important to question whether the sense of “urgency” and “emergency” will lead to comprehensive reflection on the state of misery entrenched in food systems and a commitment to interrogate root causes or whether structural incoherence and tensions will be overshadowed by calls for more technology, more manipulation of nature and the application of bandages to a “capitalist ecosystem” that is chronically ill.

The risk of co-optation of the disruptive effects of COVID-19 and the related state of emergency have not gone unnoticed. Since Guterres’ announcement, the summit has been challenged by civil society organizations and indigenous people who are part of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism for relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security. For them and their allies, the summit and its rhetoric represent a direct attack on the Committee on World Food Security and the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition as legitimate spaces that are accessible to the people who make food possible and that reflect the political nature of the global governance of food. Moreover, the summit has been presented as an attempt to highjack the “emergency” to promote an idea of “multi-stakeholderism” that puts foxes and chickens in the same coop (McKeon, 2017) and overlooks the structural incompatibilities between different visions of food systems. This rhetoric around the summit nurtures the false impression that “there is space for everyone around the table” while implementing an agenda based on a monolithic and Eurocentric understanding of progress, science and techno-fixes.

The co-optation is evident in the way the summit has been conceived, the boundaries of “expertise” defined and related knowledge produced. In mid-2019, a concept note circulated at the High-Level Political Forum indicated that the World Economic Forum would be involved in organizing the summit. Subsequently, the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa was appointed by Guterres as the special envoy to the summit. The fact that the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa is a leader in the promotion of a “modernist” and “productivist” conception of the future of agriculture, based on genetically enhanced seeds, patents, close interaction with corporate actors and digitalization, immediately revealed the close connection between the summit and those interests. Similarly, corporate-sponsored organizations are present across the five “Action Tracks” that have had carriage of brainstorming and defining the future of the system. Moreover, a Scientific Group was established under the coordination of Professor Joachim Von Braun that organized a two-day event in early July 2021 and reinforced “recognition of the pivotal role of science, technology and innovation for food systems transformation” and aimed to “offer an important opportunity to support the agenda setting process with scientific evidence and perspectives” (United Nations, 2021).

These political and power dynamics led more than 400 indigenous, peasant and civil society organizations to write to UN Secretary-General Guterres in March 2020, challenging the summit as a space that does not draw “from the innovative governance experiences that the UN system has to offer, [but] is helping to establish stakeholder capitalism as a governance model for the entire planet” (Letter to H.E. Mr António Guterres, 2020). In their statement, the food activists requested that the partnership between the World Economic Forum and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa be discontinued if the summit process was not to be derailed. In the absence of a satisfactory response, in February 2021, the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism reached out to Guterres and announced that it would have not “jumped on a train going in the wrong direction” and, in the absence of substantial change in the structure, governance and purpose of the summit, would not participate.

Facing these criticisms, the Food Systems Summit bunkered down behind its own narrative of “inclusiveness” rather than recognize the tensions and incompatibility between visions. In line with the idea of a “Great Reset” promoted by Klaus Schwab (2021), the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and special envoy to the summit, Dr Agnes Kalibata, responded to the criticisms of co-optation by stressing the open nature of the summit and that everyone had a seat at the table. She strengthened the call for “multi-stakeholderism” and the idea of a “new social contract” as tools to overcome the ongoing impasse. According to Kalibata, what was required was the quick implementation of solutions that would increase the productivity, availability and sustainability of food systems.

In early March 2021, Kalibata published an article in The Guardian (on a page sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the sponsors of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) where she claimed:

The entire purpose of the summit is to embrace not only the shared interests of all stakeholders but also—importantly—the areas of divergence on how we go about addressing the harsh reality humanity faces. If we are to build more inclusive food systems, we must be prepared to have inclusive debate. (Kalibata, 2021)

If everyone can speak, the social contract argument goes, the solution will inevitably be the one to benefit everyone—a compromise that takes everyone’s perspective into account and leverages common aspirations and needs. If everyone puts aside their preconceptions and walks together in the same direction, we can reach the goal that everyone desires.

However, critical race approaches to liberalism and egalitarianism (Delgado & Stefancic, 1993, p. 462; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), critical feminist accounts that read social contracts foregrounding inclusion as reproducing dualism and domination (Pateman, 1988), and recent accounts of the push towards “multi-stakeholderism” in food systems as an attempt to neutralize power dynamics (McKeon, 2017) teach us that such power-neutral visions of society lead to the misrecognition of existing inequalities, the consolidation of incumbent power structures, and the creation of new forms of exclusion and subordination. In the specific case of food systems, the idea that “coexistence” between capitalist and non-capitalist visions of food is possible is equally characterized by misrecognition of the expansionist and transformative impact of capitalism as a specific way of organizing people and nature. Genetically modified BT aubergines are promoted at the same time as agroecology. Gene editing and the restoration of the commons are discussed in the same context. Corporate power and its responsibility for the state of food systems are never discussed (Von Braun et al., 2021). In the context of radical power imbalances and competition over resources, what power has the subaltern to define the terms of this “coexistence”?

The need to address the role of corporations and corporate philanthropists in (not-so-silently) shaping the structure, agenda and future of food systems has become even more urgent in the events leading up to the summit. During the inauguration of the pre-summit, the chair of Imagine was invited to speak after heads of state, the European Commission and the World Bank. Imagine, the chair said, is an organization that helps businesses “eradicate poverty and inequality and stem runaway climate change” (the organization’s website says Imagine helps “C-suites see their business’ true place in the world” (Imagine, 2021)). He deployed the rhetoric that technology for change is available, that transforming food systems has the highest return from ecological, social and financial perspectives and that with relatively small investments ($300–400 billion) “we” can transform the food system into a positive economic force, doubling agricultural productivity with half the inputs currently used.

On the second day, a session on “Private Sector Priorities at the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit” included the president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and representatives of some of the largest food companies in the world (Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo). The session praised the publication of the Business Declaration for Food Systems Transformation as a vision that reinforces the role of corporate capital and its centrality in addressing social and environmental problems (as if these problems had been created by unknown forces or “natural” events). Discussion in this session summoned all the sustainability buzzwords to call for the urgent establishment of a food system that was “equitable, net zero, nature positive, resilient and capable of feeding all people”. Planetary boundaries, soil healthiness, living income for all, regenerative agriculture and other key terms that would usually be leveraged in critiques of the capitalist food system have now been integrated into corporate speeches. Citing “urgency” and “stakeholderism”, they shift attention away from questions of who is responsible for the ongoing misery of so many of the world’s population (Marks, 2011) and stress the transformative role of large-scale corporate players.

For the president of Unilever’s Foods & Refreshment division, for example, living income for all producers in their chain is a goal. However, corporations cannot achieve this on their own, a statement that clashes with Unilever’s US$6.3 billion net income in 2020 and the steady distribution of dividends to shareholders that has been guaranteed in the last years. Thus, the future is that of a corporate-led global food system where farmers who capture carbon in the soil, “smart agricultural practices to achieve net-zero and nature positive food systems”, digital technologies, innovations, collaboration among corporations around sustainability to maintain the same levels of financial return (Lombardi & Ferrando, 2021), and the adoption of policies and subsidies that support regenerative and nutritious agricultural practices, healthier consumption and reduced food loss and waste. Rather than the problem, corporations and their global power are presented as the solution. In the words of Nestlé’s CEO: “the private sector is the implementation machine”. For PepsiCo’s chairperson: corporations have the “unique power of talking to a billion-plus consumers and have to educate them” to buy commodities that are better for the planet and the workers (Kuljay et al., 2021).

At this time of multiple structural social and ecological crises, the Food Systems Summit and its prequels (such as the Sciences Day and the pre-summit) represent more than a falsely inclusive process that promotes partnerships among unequals (Canfield et al., 2021). They resemble a classic capitalist attempt to co-opt and internalize critiques (such as poor working conditions, undernourishment and obesity) and terminology (like “planetary boundaries” and regenerative agriculture) to promote a mix of old and new technological and digital solutions that reinforce the idea that humans can control nature and shape societies, distract from the political nature of the struggle, overlook questions of who benefits, and entrench the reproduction of global capitalism. In this context, members of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism for relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security, academics and other civil society organizations refuse to legitimize this “new food space” and instead are organizing an alternative people’s pre-summit and summit to debunk the procedure, narrative and outputs of the Food Systems Summit. However, resisting co-optation may not be enough. The new convergence of interests of private and public elites could represent an ominous further turning point in respect of the future of food and the web of life that makes it possible (Capra, 1997).

Conclusion

For billions of people around the world, COVID-19 and the climate emergency have shown that the capitalist and financialized food system is in a state of permanent emergency, a condition of intrinsic sickness that is inherent to its construction (Mozo, 2013). From the Global North to the Global South, the several months of compound disruptions have multiplied the reasons to think that the capitalist and financialized food system is not essential to the future of food but rather responsible for the social and environmental injustices that characterize its past and present. Who is essential to the future of the food systems? It is the billions of peasants and workers (mainly migrants) that farm, transform, transport, distribute and cook. It is the gift of nature and the regenerative capacity of soil and ecosystems to reproduce themselves (when they are not depleted). It is the predisposition of public policies that treat food as a public good (if not a commons), leverage responsibilities for social and environmental harms, redress historical inequalities and contribute to the establishment of democratic spaces of decision-making and governance.

The mainstream responses to the pandemic have contributed to the promotion of a particular rhetoric in relation to the present and future of food: the idea that urgency and misery are not structural and planned (Marks, 2011) but contingent upon and defined by an unfortunate combination of multiple factors that have little to do with capitalism and the idea that food is nothing but a commodity (United Nations, 2020). In this context, not only are the root causes of the problems overlooked but also the rhetoric and processes of the state of emergency are deployed to reinforce the status quo and promote solutions that do not challenge existing structures of power and accumulation. The United Nations Food Systems Summit, a “multi-stakeholder” event for digital and technological innovation, demonstrates this process in action.

At the same time, the political and economic violence of the summit has had a mobilizing effect on social movements, indigenous groups, food workers, human rights lawyers and academics and served to strengthen the interactions between those who oppose the domination of the food systems and their future shaping by contemporary configurations of state and capital (Van Apeldoorn et al., 2012). For them, the Food Systems Summit risks being the last nail in the coffin of food sovereignty, food democracy and food justice—a way of co-opting the moment of crisis while ignoring structural concerns around the circulation of power, inequality and profit. These groups expose the deployment of “urgency” and “emergency” to transform those who are responsible for misery into saviours, the use of quick fixes in place of long-lasting solutions and the marginalization of pivotal concepts such as the right to food and self-determination. As the dispute unfolds before our eyes, we need to be attentive and critically engaged. Will the summit prove Mbembe right and consolidate the idea that someone (financialized capital) is worth more than others? Or will the counter-movement (Polanyi, 1944) be capable of defying the hegemonic vision promoted by the summit and succeed in destabilizing the mechanisms of disaster capitalism? What is clear is that disruptions in the time of COVID-19 have intensified processes and dynamics that have been unfolding for decades. Whatever radical potential exists will have to be fought for.