This Open Session highlights lessons for movements struggling against the neoliberal domination of agriculture under Covid-19 and beyond. We aim to deepen cooperation between movements in Asia and Europe, and focus on policies that put food sovereignty over monopolies.
The COVID-19 has pandemic further exposed the unsustainability of the current corporate-led food and agriculture production and trade regimes. In Asia, policy changes in food and agriculture are increasingly hinged and dependent on technological solutions in solving social problems in food and agriculture. Meanwhile, the EU plays an important role in the international debate on the regulation of GM technologies, such as at the UN Cartagena Protocol negotiations on biosafety, which may well explain the funding of an EU level lobby by the Gates Foundation. Meanwhile, the UN Food Systems Summit (FSS) scheduled for later this year, one of the biggest policy change platforms in food and agriculture, is currently shaping up to be an extension of the World Economic Forum Agenda for the sector with the business-as-usual promotion of neoliberal policies and little space for meaningful civil society participation.
Thus, the activity aims to contribute to:
1. Understanding the impacts of the corporate capture of policy spaces in food and agriculture.
2. Sharing good practices which will highlight the lessons and challenges on how movements in Asia and Europe are able to survive the neoliberal domination of agriculture under Covid-19 and beyond.
3. Building solidarity and cooperation between movements and advocates in Asia and Europe in transforming food systems and agriculture. 4. Proposing policy recommendations on food systems and agriculture that put our food sovereignty over monopolies.
Organisers: Asia – People Coalition on Food Sovereignty, Stop Golden Rice Network, Asian Peasant Coalition, Council for People’s Development and Governance Europe – IBON International Europe, Corporate Europe Observatory, Solidagro
