Season 1 Ep. 1 - Should Corporations Govern Global Food Systems?

New Frontiers Podcast with Molly Anderson and Mark Williams

Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern.  Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.

Today, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—is joined by professor of Food Studies Molly Anderson, to discuss food systems, food security, and why the recent United Nations Food Systems Summit is unlikely to generate effective safeguards against global food insecurity.

Mark Williams
Molly Anderson is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies and the academic director of food studies at Middlebury College; much of her research is focused on food security, food systems, human rights and the food system, and the right to food here in the U.S. and other industrialized countries.

Today, I’ll be talking with Molly about one of her most recent projects, a coauthored article that appeared in the journal Frontiers and Sustainable Food Systems.
 
As a political scientist myself, one thing I find intriguing about this article is that it deals as much with political factors as it does with agriculture, ecology, or other factors that we typically associate with food production. The article is titled “UN Food Systems Summit 2021 Dismantling Democracy and Resetting Corporate Control of Food Systems.”

Molly Anderson, welcome to New Frontiers.

Molly Anderson
Well, thank you for inviting me to the RCGA podcast series.

Mark Williams
You’re quite welcome.

Molly Anderson
I’m honored.

Mark Williams
I’m glad to have you. Now, you hold a doctorate in ecology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So as a trained ecologist, how did you become interested in in food studies to begin with, and especially for our listeners who may not know, what exactly is food studies anyway?

Molly Anderson
Well, let me answer the second question first, because it has a lot of connection with what surprised you about that article that I’m writing about political issues, even though my training is in ecology. Food studies is fascinating to me because it deals with everything that food touches, which of course includes political dynamics. Political dynamics are extremely important in determining who’s able to eat, how much they can eat, what quality of food they can eat, how food is produced. And those actually are some of the things that entered into this question that we were considering in that coauthored article that appeared in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

But how I got into food studies. I originally wanted to work in Latin America, in international development and was in Peru, up on a hilltop in the Andes, 14,000-plus feet gasping for breath,
but also had a kind of apocalyptic moment where I realized that I should be working in a culture that I understood much better than the Andean culture. I had come there with this presumption. And in retrospect, it’s really presumptuous that I would have something to teach people in that culture about managing their landscapes. And this is a place where people have been managing their landscapes sustainably for millennia. They’ve done an incredible job of terracing in the Andes. And here I am, coming from North Carolina that was dealing with all sorts of environmental problems, coming from there with this idea that I had something to tell them.

And I realized I needed to go back to the United States and work within my own culture on the
problems that were really pressing environmentally and socially in our environmental milieu.
And one of the biggest problems in North Carolina at that point was the concentration of
hog manufacturing and chicken production in CFO’s confined animal feeding operations,
which were both terrible for the people who had gotten roped into being producers of hogs or chickens under these circumstances, but also terrible environmentally, as we saw soon after that, with hurricanes where the hog lagoons, as they call them—lagoons, connotes this beautiful blue tropical view—but hog lagoons are these nasty pits full of hog manure and urine. And with the hurricanes, the lagoons were breached, and the manure and urine spilled out into riverways, polluted them, did terrible things to the fish living in the riverways, and also created dead zones at the mouth of the river as they came out into the ocean, just like the dead zone that’s in the mouth of the Mississippi River, where it feeds into the Gulf of Mexico.

So I got into food systems because that was the big issue in North Carolina: what was happening with this transition from independent hog producers into basically cogs in an industrial system and causing huge environmental problems in the process. And then one thing led to another. I went to Tufts University and worked in the School of Nutrition Science and Policy, started a graduate program in agriculture, food, and environment while I was there,
and then left Tufts for various reasons. But was out doing independent consulting for about eight years and then decided I really missed academia, really missed working with students, went back to teaching and here I am at Middlebury.

Mark Williams
Well we’re glad to have you here at Middlebury, and we’re glad that you brought this expertise with you. When we talk about food systems again, what exactly are we talking about?

Molly Anderson
We’re talking about everything that affects how food is produced, distributed, and consumed, which includes all of the policies, all of the institutions that make the rules, the regulations, the laws that affect how producers operate, how input suppliers operate, inputs like pesticides and fertilizers. And then where the food goes, how much it’s sold for, who gets to eat it, who gets the best quality food.

Mark Williams
How it’s distributed and how it’s consumed.

Molly Anderson
Exactly. So everything that feeds into that system, the food system, is part of food studies.

Mark Williams
Just to follow up a bit. What are some of the common problems or threats that food systems typically face?

Molly Anderson
Well, right now there’s a battle going on in food systems. It’s a battle between industrialized food systems, which were started largely in the United States during the Green Revolution and the research money that we poured into the Green Revolution in Mexico, in the Philippines, all over the world, not in Africa. But the industrialized food system has been highly productive, and many people will say, well, it’s prevented starvation of millions of people. Yet that productivity came at a huge cost: environmentally, socially, economically, from the perspective of farmers. The winners are the corporations largely that have written the rules, the governments that have cozied up to the pesticide manufacturers and the fertilizer manufacturers, and the CEOs of those companies. But the losers have been people whose land has been grabbed in order to produce food with these industrialized food systems, the farmers who have lost income because they no longer have as much power and their livelihoods are being threatened, and the environment—the environment has been a huge loser. So we’re seeing all of those threats from the industrialized food system. The good thing is that there’re alternatives. That’s not the only way to produce food.

Mark Williams
OK, well let’s dive into your article and get to the focal point. The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit is what you’re writing about. Was this the first time that the UN had ever convened a summit on food systems?

Molly Anderson
The summit did take place. It was September 23rd through the 24th of 2021. It was not the first food summit, but it was unusual in many ways. There have been at least four food summits that preceded this, and they have all operated in a very different way than this one did. This one was organized by the UN Secretary General in partnership at the World Economic Forum, and the secretary general had signed an agreement. Actually his deputy, Amina Mohammed, had signed an agreement with the World Economic Forum just a few months before the launch of the UN Food System Summit. They had agreed to work in partnership, and this was quite unusual because the previous summits had all been organized coming out of the FAO, which is responsible in the UN food, in the UN system.

Mark Williams
FAO meaning?

Molly Anderson
Food and Agriculture Organization. It is responsible for all issues that have to do with food, food and agriculture. So this, which of course should be about food and agriculture—it’s a food system summit, after all—is coming out of the Secretary General’s Office with strong support from the World Economic Forum. It was not designed with any kind of strong input or an ask from member states, and the UN is really the place where member states of the United Nations come together and make decisions together. But this summit was set up in a way that diminished the role of the member states. It really elevated the role of the corporations that are part of the World Economic Forum, which is constituted of the thousand biggest corporations in the world. So they had a big role in this summit, and the member states relatively little. The organization was quite different. The conduct was quite different of the summit.

Mark Williams
Well, let me just stop you for a minute for point of clarification. If the United Nations had been more or less in the business of holding these types of summits periodically, and I think you said there were three or four that have preceded this one. Why was this one called? And you seem to be saying that it was called in a very atypical manner. Why was it felt that there was a need for a summit now? And what did the summit aim to achieve?

Molly Anderson
Well, let me answer that in two ways. From the perspective of the World Economic Forum, I think this summit was a continuation of what they call the Great Reset, which was an initiative that first came out of the World Economic Forum several years ago, in which they said member states operate too inefficiently, too slowly. And these UN processes that we’ve been relying on, we can’t rely on them to solve global problems anymore. They should be turned over to corporations, which are able to operate far more efficiently, far more effectively. So, they were arguing for this Great Reset. And that was one of the problems, and that’s how it played out in the summit—that it really was posing this Great Reset as the answer to world problems. The big problem right now is that we are facing the end of the Sustainable Development Goal period, 2030, when many different objectives, many different goals are supposed to be achieved. We are not anywhere near being on track with achieving the end hunger goal. In fact, for the last five years, we’ve been slipping farther and farther back in terms of food insecurity, and with COVID, that became much worse. As of last year, 711 to 820 million people are facing food insecurity. And this is a major jump from the previous year, which was 600-some million people facing food insecurity. So, a much larger number last year, because of COVID, are at risk of severe malnutrition than in the previous year.

Mark Williams
So there’s a perceived need for this summit then, to address these types of problems then.

Molly Anderson
The problems are real, but to have a food summit called in this way—this is so far from the way that civil society would have organized a food summit. And civil society recognizes that there’s a major problem.

Mark Williams
Well, this more or less gets to my next question that I wanted to ask you, and I think you may have addressed some of it. In your article, you and your colleagues criticize this particular summit, and actually you criticized it a lot. So what would be the two or three major critiques that you and your colleagues have about this summit?

Molly Anderson
Diminishing the role of multilateral institutions like the Committee on World Food Security. And what I mean by multilateral is that countries make decisions.

Mark Williams
The states themselves.

Molly Anderson
Yes, the member states are making decisions. What the summit replaced multilateral decision making with is something called multi-stakeholderism, where anybody can come to the table. It sounds great in principle. It sounds as if this is a very democratic way to negotiate problems.

Mark Williams
Sounds like an improvement.

Molly Anderson
Well, it sounds like an improvement. But in fact, it’s not because the multi-stakeholderism allowed the stronger institutions, the corporations, which had a lot more money, a lot more ability to participate in these negotiations, it allowed them to play a dominant role. And the people who should have been at the front, the people who were actually facing food insecurity—the social movements, the most marginalized people—their voices were cut out in multi-stakeholderism.

Mark Williams
So the people most affected by the problem of food insecurity, we might say were silenced or at least not given an opportunity to have input into solutions.

Molly Anderson
Exactly. And they’re the people who can say best, what kinds of solutions would work. So that was one of the big problems, replacing multilateralism with multi-stakeholderism. But some of the other problems had to do with the chaos, the lack of transparency in decision making that pervaded the Food Systems Summit, and the way that the CSM, which is the major body within the Committee on World Food Security.

Mark Williams
And the CSM means?

Molly Anderson
The CSM is the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism. It is the place within the Committee on World Food Security where the social movements and NGOs can participate and can speak directly in plenary sessions of the Committee on World Food Security and can negotiate in every way on any guidelines coming out of the Committee on World Food Security. They decided not to participate in the Food Systems Summit because they were knocked out, and they could see from the way it had been organized and the way that the CFS itself had been marginalized.

Mark Williams
Let me play devil’s advocate a little bit. If civil society organizations haven’t really joined in the summit and they’re not very enthusiastic it, is it really fair to blame the UN organizers for this? Wouldn’t it make more sense to blame the civil society organizations themselves? I mean, aren’t they basically shooting themselves in the foot by not participating in a summit that is directly related to a concern that they hold dear?

Molly Anderson
Some people have made that argument. And in fact, the organizers made that argument that they open the door, anybody who wanted to could participate. It was very inclusive. They even renamed the summit, the People’s Summit, which was a bit of an insult, honestly. And some civil society organizations did participate. The organizers cherry picked civil society, who they thought would support their views or be receptive, at least to their views, and wouldn’t object to multi-stakeholderism. But it was a very principled decision, a very difficult decision that was made by the CSM, and they actually went to the organizers and said we would be glad to participate in the summit if you would add an action track. Action tracks were the ways that it was organized. There was an action track on equitable livelihoods, an action track on nature-based solutions, for instance. They said if the organizers would add an action track on corporate dominance, corporate takeover of the food system that could be self-organized by civil society, they would be glad to join. That was one of the things that simply was not on the agenda of the Food Systems Summit, even though people who are pretty much in favor of what corporations are doing will say there’s corporate dominance of food systems now. So, they refused to participate, partly because the organizers would not work with them. So, it was not a rash decision by any means.

Mark Williams
I see.

Molly Anderson
They consulted with their constituencies and the constituency said we simply cannot participate in this. This is so far from what we believe needs to be happening in discussions of what’s wrong with the global food system.

Mark Williams
Let me ask you about something that I’ve been curious about, and it’s to gauge your thinking about an alternate way of looking at this scenario you’ve just described. And by this, I mean, shouldn’t we be happy? Shouldn’t we be glad that the big corporations seem to be playing a fairly significant role in the summit, organizing it and participating in it? Given the power and the influence that these corporations seem to have with global food systems, isn’t it really important to keep them engaged in helping to solve what’s clearly an important problem?

Molly Anderson
The problem is that they created the problem. So, by bringing them in and saying, yes, you can help us solve these problems of inequity, of lack of livelihoods for poor farmers, of fertilizer prices shooting through the roof, of seeds being held by rules that prevent smallholders from saving their own seed. By asking corporations in the door and saying, yes, you can help us solve these problems, you’re asking them to solve the problems they have created. And it just doesn’t make any sense. They do give lip service to solutions, but then they turn around and do the bad things they were doing all along. They just continue with that. There’s a fundamental disconnect here because the main purpose of corporations is to make money for shareholders.
It’s not to serve the public good, to increase the income of small-scale farmers. That’s not what they’re about. They even aren’t about increasing environmental quality, although the degradation of environmental quality is making their own corporations—it eventually, that’ll catch up with them; it’ll turn around and bite them because they won’t be able to continue in the businesses that they’re in if the environment degrades sufficiently. Yet in the short term, they are completely obligated to make as much money as they can.

Mark Williams
The business of business is business.

Molly Anderson
Yes. Yes. So they want to continue with business as usual, instead of some fundamental change in perspective.

Mark Williams
I see. Do you think that the folks who organized the Food Systems Summit are more or less just blind to the problems that that you and your colleagues are highlighting in this article? Hasn’t anyone tried to point these issues out to them so that they could be fixed? And if they had been pointed out, what has typically been the response?

Molly Anderson
That’s a real mystery because, as I said, the UN has been the bastion of multilateralism of member states coming together. So why the UN would suddenly be signing partnerships with the World Economic Forum and why FAO signing a partnership with Crop Life, which is made up of the major pesticide producers in the world? In some ways it’s a complete mystery. But it’s a direction that civil society is fearing very much: that corporations are taking over this space that has been the space of member states. And some member states don’t like this either. They can see that they are losing power to corporations. And of course, many corporations have a lot more revenue, a lot more to invest than member states do. So, the UN is turning to corporations hoping that they will finance solutions to the problems because they don’t have the money at their disposal to pay for these solutions. So it’s a kind of devil’s bargain. They are saying, well corporations, you can be involved and we trust that you will come up with solutions in partnership with civil society and other voices that are at the table that will serve the public good, but that’s not what corporations are about, and they have the major say.

Mark Williams
Given the disempowerment that seems to be happening, in this case with respect to the member states, how have the states responded to this or has there been a response? Have they recognized this as a disempowerment or have they, have they not?

Molly Anderson
Some of them definitely recognize that it’s disempowerment, particularly the African nations. And one of the issues with the UN Food Systems Summit, the special envoy, who was appointed by the director general of the secretary general of the United Nations was Agnes Kalibate, who is the president of AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa—very close ties with corporations and with philanthropic organizations that have a lot of corporate buy-in, like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—so, because with Brazil’s change in government, with a far-right government coming into play with Jair Bolsonaro in power in Brazil, they are basically aligned with corporate interests far more, so they have become an ally of the private sector mechanism, which is the way that corporations come together in the Committee on World Food Security, just like the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism is how social movements and NGOs come together. The PSM is far more powerful in Brazil, and Brazil is not opposing this at all.

Mark Williams
What about some of the industrialized states?

Molly Anderson
Many of them have not supported the CSM in the way that we, and by we I mean the CSM would have hoped that they would support.

Mark Williams
Let me get back to the civil society organizations who were disappointed with the way this summit was organized and not enthusiastic participants. What kind of summit would these organizations have liked to see?

Molly Anderson
They would have liked to see a summit that was organized by the people who are not benefiting from the global food system now. The very people who are suffering that increase in food insecurity, that are suffering from land grabs, having their land taken away, having their fishing rights taken away by industrialized fishing fleets, having the consequences of climate change. They are bearing the brunt of that, and they didn’t cause it. So what they would have liked to see would be a summit organized by the people who are suffering most from food insecurity instead of the people who are benefiting now in the global food system. And that’s what the Food Systems Summit was all about. A summit by the winners.

Mark Williams
Would an argument against that type of summit be that those who are most disadvantaged by the problems of food insecurity are also in the least likely position to be able to solve that problem because of a lack of resources, or lack of organization, or lack an inability to grapple with something that is of the magnitude of the kind of crisis that you’re talking about?

Molly Anderson
Well, they know what the solutions need to be. They know better than anyone else what needs to be done in order for them to be food secure, for them to have tenure rights over the lands that they have been farming or fishing, the seas that they’ve been fishing for generations. They know best what needs to change. They know what needs to change in terms of addressing climate change. We’re just coming out of the COP26 and again, a highly non-representative summit where people from the global south were not able to travel to Glasgow. They did not have as much of a voice because of connectivity issues with internet, because they are still struggling with COVID immensely, because of this vaccine apartheid that’s been imposed by the wealthy nations where we are still getting far more booster shots. So yes, they do not have the financial resources, but they are incredibly articulate and they know the solutions, and it’s the member states who have the responsibility to listen to them to uphold their human rights. That’s the obligation of member states. So, the member states should be listening to social movements and civil society, and upholding their human rights, and then engaging with corporations in whatever way is necessary to, or with philanthropic organizations, in whatever way is necessary to bring in resources, for instance, having very strict limits on what corporations are able to do in their country, or very strict limits on how corporations can engage in negotiations. A corporation that’s abusing human rights and degrading the environment should not have a seat at the table to talk about solutions to environmental degradation and the violation of human rights.

Mark Williams
Thank you. I’d like to ask you to try and look ahead now and help us understand what might be coming down in the future. What do you think the long-term impact of the UN Food Systems Summit will likely be? Do you think that there’s going to be lasting effects on how food systems are actually governed, or maybe even on how much gets invested in different solutions to the food insecurity problems we’ve been discussing?

Molly Anderson
There may well be, and that’s exactly what civil society feared at the very beginning. They feared that there would be far more of a focus on the high-tech solutions, the kinds of solutions that bring benefits back to the venture capitalists in wealthy nations, than on the kinds of solutions that would benefit poor people—things like agroecology, like food sovereignty. And true enough, there was almost no mention of agroecology or food sovereignty in the Food Systems Summit. Agroecology did come up toward the end and there were member states that advocated for it, several in the EU, several in Latin America.

Mark Williams
Could you briefly tell us what agroecology means and food sovereignty?

Molly Anderson
Agroecology is the system of food production, distribution, and consumption that is counterbalanced against the industrialized food system. It’s a way of producing food in far more harmony with nature, not using pesticides, eschewing the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers because they are damaging the environment. They are leading to the incredible loss of biodiversity that the whole world is facing right now. And the ecosystem services that biodiversity provides are things that are essential for human survival. So if we are killing biodiversity, destroying it, and degrading the natural environment, there’s a limit to how long humans will be able to survive and certainly a limit to how long the kind of civilization that we’ve created will be able to survive. So agroecology also has a focus on improving farmer livelihoods, on improving the nutritional status of people. So farmers are planting far more crops, which allows them to diversify; they have a better chance of getting an income from whatever crops do survive under the consequences of climate change, and the family—the household—has better nutrition because they’re eating a bigger diversity of crops, or eating animal products and crops, instead of planting cash crops to feed a global economy.

Mark Williams
And food sovereignty.

Molly Anderson
Food sovereignty is having control over your own food system, and that’s something that corporations have been threatening immensely through investing in things like AGRA, but also through imposing regulations on farmers that prevent them from saving seeds, that prevent them from farming in the way they want to be farming: regulations that say you have to be growing cash crops. If you want a loan from the World Bank or a loan from the IMF, you need to be growing cash crops and not investing in things that are useful for your household. It’s a continuation of structural adjustment.
 
Mark Williams
This has been really fascinating. The whole topic has been fascinating. Looking ahead, what’s next, what’s next for you? The article we’ve been talking about today was published back in April of 2021. The summit took place this fall in September. Are you going to continue to monitor what comes out of the UN Food Systems Summit? Or do you have another research project that you’re going to be conducting?

Molly Anderson
Well, I’ll continue to work with the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism. I have been attending the CFS to the greatest extent possible over the last 12 years, and I find it fascinating to see these very articulate smart people coming from the global south and trying to present their case to their governments in this Committee on World Food Security that allows them to speak directly to their governments. And when their governments say, oh everything’s going fine, the people from the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism can say, well actually, they’re not. We are suffering incredible hardship and particularly with COVID, that’s been something that was nowhere on the agenda of the Food Systems Summit, even though that was the big problem leading to an acceleration of food insecurity. So, I will continue working with the CSM, and I’m also starting a project of narratives of food system transformation.

Mark Williams
Oh, really.

Molly Anderson
Yeah. I have a book contract with Routledge to develop a book to look at this narrative of the industrialized food system and its supporters, vis-à-vis agroecology and the kinds of narratives that are coming out of the global south. So I’m hoping to go to Mexico and interview people who have been involved in agroecology research.

Mark Williams
That should be fascinating. I look forward to reading what you publish based upon that research.

Molly Anderson
I hope you will. 

Mark Williams
Molly Anderson, thank you very much for talking to us today on New Frontiers.

Fun Facts about Molly Anderson
Professor Molly Anderson lives in Middlebury, Vermont. Besides her passion for food studies, she enjoys reading, bicycling, and gardening; specifically ornamental, perennials, vegetables, and herbs. She also loves her two Manx cats, Anya and Ethos. Once upon a time she was an avid long-distance bicyclist, and in tenth grade, this future professor was a finalist in the Texas State spelling bee. Outside of the classroom, students often bump in her at the library or food co-op.