The UN Food Systems Summit: Disaster Capitalism and the Future of Food

AbstractCOVID-19 has brought to light the multiple cracks in the logistically integrated, financialized and commodity-based capitalist food system. As with other aspects of social life thrown into disruption amid the global health, economic and environmental downturn, the early weeks of the pandemic seemed to offer the hope of transformative possibility, a “portal” towards different food systems. The time seemed ripe for the kinds of radical transitions that social movements and peasants’ organizations have requested for decades: subverting the “conventional” food system without going back to “corporate normality”. However, when the multiple crises are characterized as exceptional rather than structural, a narrative of emergency and urgency is deployed to reinforce the power of the incumbents. The overlap between the pandemic and the climate crisis can be an opportunity, but hardly for peasants and indigenous people. As in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, corporate actors and billionaire philanthropists are using the rhetoric of urgency to push for changes that reinforce the status quo and do not address the root causes that have brought us here. In order to spark debate and reflections, my contribution engages with one example of ongoing co-optation of the state of climate and sanitary emergency: the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit as a new food policy arena where decisions are distanced from peasants, indigenous communities and citizens and put in the hands of corporations, financial investors and billionaire philanthropists.