From the 3rd to the 5th of September 2024, the agri-food industry is holding its so-called “Regenerative Agriculture & Food Systems Summit” for the third time. At a critical time of climate chaos, environmental degradation and malnutrition crises, we, social movements, civil society organizations, academics, farmers and engaged citizens, once again denounce this Summit’s attempt to greenwash participating corporations’ devastating ecocidal and neocolonial practices. Instead, we call for support for farmer-centred agroecological and regenerative food systems that truly nourish current and future generations.
The Summit programme facilitates corporate capture, greenwashing and co-optation of regenerative agriculture. The term “regenerative agriculture” is abused to give agrochemical and fossil fuel intensive industrial farming a green image. Corporate actors are rebranding themselves so they can continue the consolidation of their economic and political power and their marginalisation of small-scale and diversified organic, agroecological and grassroots regenerative farmers. By adjusting their narratives and platforms, big corporations cling to their market share and profits without making significant changes to their destructive business activities.
Under the aegis of “decarbonisation”, “sustainability” and “green growth”, agribusinesses patent and sell bioinputs next to their chemical products or produce “green” fertilisers by including carbon capture in their strategy. These false solutions focus on digitalisation and data-driven technology for large-scale industrial farms and are based on empty promises of innovating our ways out of the crises industrial agriculture has created, without fundamentally challenging the power imbalances in the industrial way of food production. This could not be further from the vision that guided the original thinking on regenerative agriculturein the1980s which called for a fundamental social and political redistribution of power in the food system and centered small-scale producers, processers and distributers.
The Summit contains no recognition of the indigenous, black and peasant origins of the organic and agroecological farming practices that are foundational to real regenerative agriculture. Attendance is priced at €240 for farmers, €361 for academics and €1329 for NGOs.
Black, indigenous, peasant and Majority World farmers and food workers are leading the fight for agroecological and organic regenerative agriculture. Around the globe, small-scale farmers and peasant, fishers and pastoralists are the ones who really feed the world. Announced Summit speakers, however, are almost exclusively white and employed by some of the most environmentally and socially destructive actors in the agribusiness sector.
Participating agri-food corporations and allied research institutions and consultancy and marketing businesses are at the root of our interconnected crises of health, ecology and climate and cannot be trusted to lead system change with their false solutions. They are fuelling human rights violations, structural poverty, unhealthy diets, and destructive agricultural methods while co-opting the language of regenerative agriculture:
We stand for regeneration of the planet and people power and call out fossil fuel-addicted corporations that sustain exploitative and destructive industrial agriculture. Governments have failed to protect us from the promotion of capital-intensive proprietary agro-technological development. Consequently, powerful corporate actors control global value chains and are deeply entrenched in food governance at the cost of civil democratic participation and local control over food, nutrition and agricultural decision-making. But the real solutions to the environmental, social, economic and political crises in our food systems will not come from conforming to the industrial corporate-led model.
In contrast, the principles of agroecology offer guidance on how we can transform our food systems in harmony with all of life, for the wellbeing of present and future generations. Agroecology is a way of life. Diverse forms of smallholder food production based on agroecology restore ecosystems, nourish communities, generate local knowledge, promote social justice, nurture identity and culture, and strengthen the economic viability of rural areas. This requires putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons back into the hands of the people who feed their communities.
Activists, farmers and researchers in the Dutch agroecology movement have been protesting against the Regenerative Agriculture Summit ever since its arrival in Amsterdam. We will continue our tradition of building resistance and community resilience against greenwashing, by promoting healthy and just food systems through demonstration, conversation and art. This year we will come back even stronger and we invite you to join!
Join the movement
Join the conversation on how to resist corporate abuses and become part of the movement to regenerate soils and societies towards an alternative food future that truly nourishes all peoples and the planet. Take part in events organised by the Agroecology Network NL, and its members Toekomstboeren, XR Landbouw, ASEED and many other associations, groups and collectives in the Netherlands who are promoting agroecology and food sovereignty.
Additional organisational endorsements can be sent to info@agroecologie.nl