Politics

Biodiversity loss, climate change, rising fertiliser prices: these global challenges are highly influenced by food production and consumption. Agroecology addresses these challenges, shares many synergies with other systemic approaches and may even decrease governments’ dependencies on global markets. This is shown by the three policy briefs from the Agroecology Dialogues, published by Biovision and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in support of the Agroecology Coalition.

The influence of agriculture and the food system on the climate has been neglected in climate negotiations thus far. In recent years, Biovision has been advocating for an agroecological transformation to address climate change. It was also present this year at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. We spoke to Tanja Carrillo from our Policy & Advocacy team about whether this conference has brought us a step closer to climate protection.

Creating a more sustainable food system is an urgent task for all of society. A citizens’ council, composed to represent the views of the Swiss public, shows how it can be achieved.

Soil is the fundament for life on Earth, provides food and feed for all creatures above and below ground and plays a major role in climate protection! Soils bind atmospheric CO2, absorb rain water while prevent flooding, store water in long dry seasons, and buffer the extreme adverse impacts of the fast changing climate.

Reducing organic production to fight the food crisis would be disastrous. Much more urgent for overcoming the crisis is the transformation to a sustainable food system.

Too complex, too time consuming, not implementable on a large scale – these are common prejudices against agroecology. Nevertheless, research results are increasingly showing that agroecology provides a convincing path to a sustainable food system. But one crux is how to fund it. How Biovision is now getting things moving.

At the end of October, Biovision’s Policy and Advocacy team travelled to Glasgow to represent Biovision’s position at the United Nations Climate Summit (COP26). They brought along the latest insights into agroecology and climate plus the goal of making sustainable, agroecological agriculture part of the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The global forum has wasted the chance to consider real alternatives to our corporate-led, environmentally harmful ways of producing what we eat.