WEAPONIZING SCIENCE IN GLOBAL FOOD POLICY
By Maywa Montenegro, Matthew Canfield, and Alastair Iles, Inter Press
Service.
June 26, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Santa Cruz, CA - In July, the United Nations will convene "Science Days", a
high-profile event in preparation for the UN Food Systems Summit later this
year. Over the course of two days, the world will be treated to a parade of
Zoom sessions aimed at "highlighting the centrality of science, technology
and innovation for food systems transformation."
Nobody disputes the need for urgent action to transform the food system. But
the UNFSS has been criticized by human rights experts for its top-down and
non-transparent organization. Indigenous peoples, peasants, and civil
society groups around the world know their hard-won rights are under attack.
Many are protesting the summit's legitimacy and organizing
counter-mobilizations.
Scientists are also contesting a summit because of its selective embrace of
science, as seen in a boycott letter signed by nearly 300 academics, from
Brazil to Italy to Japan.
Through the Summit, "science" has been weaponized by powerful actors not
only to promote a technology-driven approach to food systems, but also to
fragment global food security governance and create institutions more
amenable to the demands of agribusiness.
Recipe For Elite Global Governance
The UNFSS was announced in 2019 by the UN Secretary General as part of the
Decade of Action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The
announcement came just after the UN signed a strategic partnership with the
World Economic Forum. It also elicited outcry from social movements when
Agnes Kalibata, President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa,
was chosen to lead the forum - a powerful signal of UNFSS allegiances.
The "multi-stakeholder" structure of the summit has raised concerns from
observers who recognize the privatization of multilateral public governance
it presages. While Kalibata describes the UNFSS as an inclusive "peoples'
summit," more than 500 smallholder and peasant organizations signed a letter
criticizing the summit's multi-stakeholder platforms: "Instead of drawing
from the innovative governance experiences that the UN system has to offer,
the UN-WEF partnership is helping to establishing "stakeholder capitalism"
as a governance model for the entire planet."
Through one lens, multistakeholderism looks like a set of "inclusive"
practices: the summit has five Action Tracks (e.g. "Ensuring Access to Safe
and Nutritious Food for All" and "Boosting Nature Positive Production at
Sufficient Scale"), an endless number of "dialogues," and an elaborate
online forum where anyone can participate.
However, this profusion of spaces obscures the fact that the UNFSS has no
built-in structures of accountability. This is particularly troublesome
because, as UN special rapporteurs have observed, the summit's process was
pre-determined by a small set of actors: "The private sector, organizations
serving the private sector (notably the World Economic Forum), scientists,
and economists initiated the process. The table was set with their
perspectives, knowledge, interests and biases."
The scientific ideas shaping those parameters, then, should invite our
curiosity and concern. What kinds of science are included - and excluded?
What are the implications for the future of global food system governance?
Defining Science As Investment-Friendly Innovation
A new Scientific Group of the UNFSS, created to support a "science- and
evidence-based summit," provides some clues. In theory, the Scientific Group
works to "ensure the robustness, breadth and independence of the science
that underpins the summit and its outcomes." In practice, the Group's
practices impoverish the scientific base on which the summit is meant to
make policies.
Unlike existing global science advisory panels where experts are nominated
through an inclusive and democratic process, the Scientific Group is
handpicking experts amenable to "game-changing" solutions - access to
gene-edited seeds, digital and data-driven technologies, and global
commodity markets.
As a result, key areas of expertise, such as agroecology, Indigenous
knowledge, and human rights are being excluded while industry and
investor-friendly viewpoints are promoted as visionary.
While the Scientific Group appears at first to be diverse in terms of
disciplines and geographies, it in fact reflects a set of overlapping, elite
networks. Partners include well-worn institutional champions of the Green
Revolution (the CGIAR), the central nervous system for "free trade" policy
globally (the World Trade Organization), and a powerful consortium of
wealthy nation-states (the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development), among others.
By drawing on these networks, the Scientific Group is serving as a
gatekeeper for determining the meaning and boundaries of "science." An
analysis of its publications reveals critical flaws stemming from the
Scientific Group's narrow approach to scientific expertise. These include:
Science, technology, and innovation are uprooted from their
political-economic and social conditions. As a result, structural drivers
that produce hunger even as they generate wealth (e.g. for Bill Gates) are
eclipsed in favor of boosting productivity with a twist of sustainability.
Biotechnology, Big Data, and global value chains are offered as the solution
to all agronomic problems and the crisis of overfishing.
Multicultural "digital" inclusion is redeployed to promote Black, Brown, and
Indigenous incorporation into an imperial model of Science, Technology, and
Innovation. This ignores the rich knowledge these communities already hold -
and obscures that Indigenous and agroecological knowledge cannot survive
without land.
Science can and should play a role in global food governance. But far from
the current UNFSS model, science can support in all its complexity and
breadth, alongside many other expertises with equal rights to shape the
future of food.
Maywa Montenegro works as an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in politics of
knowledge, biotechnology, and agroecology.
Matthew Canfield is an assistant professor of Law and Society & Law and
Development at Leiden Law School specializing in human rights and global
food governance.
Alastair Iles works as an associate professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, researching agroecology policies and sustainability
transitions.