More than 500 civil society groups boycotted the United Nations Food Systems Summit in New York for giving corporations an outsized role in framing the agenda. We speak with leading food advocates in Ethiopia, India and the United States, who lay out their concerns: Million Belay, general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa; Raj Patel, journalist and research professor at the University of Texas at Austin; and Shalmali Guttal, executive director of Focus on the Global South. “There is growing hunger in the world, and there is growing inequality and growing poverty and unemployment,” Guttal says. “This industrialized, globalized, corporate-led food system is failing us.”
I think I would love to focus on the institution rather than on the individual. Maybe they have selected her because she’s a woman, she’s a Black woman, she’s an African woman, as a form of representing this as a global agenda. Maybe, you know, in terms of image, she fits that bill.
But the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa has 13 board members — one-three. And eight of them are from outside Africa. And it’s registered in the U.S. And the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, some companies are in the board of AGRA. So this is an outside-controlled institution. And this shows that, you know, the corporate world wanted to control this event.
— source democracynow.org | Sep 23, 2021