With hunger growing across the globe during the pandemic, the United Nations is holding its first Food Systems Summit today. But the summit is facing fierce criticism for giving corporations an outsized role framing its agenda, with Big Food names like PepsiCo invited to fireside chats during a pre-summit in Rome. The U.N.’s own experts on food, human rights and the environment released a statement that, quote, “there is a risk the Summit will serve the corporate sector more than the people who are essential to ensuring our food systems flourish such as workers, small producers, women and indigenous peoples,” they said.
This comes as U.N. figures show the pandemic has increased the number of hungry people in the world by as many as 161 million, to 811 million, and nearly one in three people worldwide — almost 2.4 billion — lack access to adequate nutrition.
And it was bad enough before COVID. There were forces that were pushing up the number of people and the percentage of people around the world who were going hungry even before COVID. And driving that were climate — so, climate change has made farming much more precarious, particularly for frontline and low-income communities around the world. So, climate. We’ve got conflict. You’ll be talking later on about the U.S. complicity in the
— source democracynow.org | Sep 23, 2021