INCLUSION, JUSTICE, AND PEACE
PLACING VALUES AT THE CENTER OF FOOD SYSTEMS
2021 began with big responsibilities and ambitions: the years of thoughtful intentions have set the pace for urgent actions, long-lasting solutions, and cooperative dialogues.
The global pandemic has accelerated the perpetual food crisis, the ongoing biodiversity challenge, and the polarization generated by unsustainable production and consumption patterns, revealing the dynamics regulating nature and life itself: everything works in close interdependence and interconnection.
Therefore, with extractive economies having exacerbated the state of natural resources, with for-profit leadership having amplified the repercussions generated by climate change, and with increased risks for the global population to face food insecurity, malnutrition, poverty, and even conflicts, we have reached the tipping point.
But it is at the time of greatest need that societies reveal their resilience and strengths.
The urgency to re-instill the sense of ecological integrity guides the world towards new forms of prosperity able to merge people and planet, culture and economy, tradition and innovation. New forms of leadership that favor care over profit, ensuring essentials over superfluity are emerging, just as expertise contamination is shaping bridges of dialogues.
Within this context, food has again become the undisputed key player, not only as a primary need for survival but also because food production is the first form of interaction between man and nature, it embodies cultures, traditions, sociality, it ensures nutrition, it originates with the rights and work of man. Through food, it is then possible to alleviate the paradoxes and fragilities of the current system, and this explains its central role in this year’s appointments: the G20, COP26, the Food System Summit, but also the plurality of interdependent dialogues to engage and increase momentum on more resilient and sustainable food systems. Like those held by the Secretariat of State of the Holy See, the Permanent Mission of the Holy See to FAO, IFAD & WFP, the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and the Vatican COVID-19 Commission during the week of the Pope Francis’s Encyclical Laudato Sì: three webinars entitled Food for Life, Food Justice, Food for All.
“What world do we want to leave to our children and youth? Our selfishness, our indifference, and our styles are threatening the future of our children. I then renew my appeal: let’s take care of our Mother Earth. Let us overcome the temptation of the selfishness that makes us predators of resources. Let’s continue to respect places on Earth, the places of creation. Let’s inaugurate a way of life for a society that is eventually sustainable. We have the opportunity to prepare a tomorrow better for all.” — HH Pope Francis
THE FOOD SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE REQUIRE INCLUSION
We cannot yearn for more resilient, just, and nutritious food systems without inclusion.
There is a desperate need to embrace the complexities of the food system, leave no one behind, empower key players within food systems, and include those who are most invisible. Women, youth, minorities, indigenous people: policies should also create an enabling environment, letting them be seen, heard, and represented in their specific contexts.
To “reduce the concentration of market power” and “transform food systems in sustainable pathways,” as Sister Alessandra Smerilli, Under-Secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, reminds us, it is crucial to restart from common values, bringing back the centrality of the human person and a culture of care.
It is a matter of recognizing human value, ensuring complementarity of experience and skills, but also ensuring orientation, training paths, closing the digital divide, when necessary, to guarantee employment.
Sustainable development also passes through people’s work and diversity.
Yet, data reveal that it is the places with the highest human biodiversity, with a greater diversity of cultures that are the areas where nature reaches its maximum richness, in terms of crop diversity and food diversification, which are at the basis of more nutritious diets, more resilient food systems, often supporting local markets. Win-win solutions for all.
INCLUSION CALLS FOR JUSTICE
The prerequisite for ensuring effective inclusion of all food system actors is grounded in clear and universal roots: individual human rights and dignity before market and profit.
Having access to sufficient and nutritious food, clean and drinkable water, proper nutrition, decent work, and a decent life are fundamental rights that the global pandemic has inevitably shaken and, with them, the grounds for social justice, food justice, food security, and food sovereignty.
Leaping forward towards equity, fairness, and dignity implies eradicating forms of illegal recruitment, guaranteeing equal pay for work of equal value, and ensuring universal access to technological advancements in the agricultural sector.
To build back better, food justice must also be conceived within new financial systems.
“The reorientation of the economy towards finance has transformed the food system. The growing focus on financial profitability and financial deregulation has turned agrifood products into commodities, assets for financial speculation.” — Prof. Stefano Zamagni, President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences
Removing the obstacles to universal access to finance is central to achieve universal access to nutritious, affordable, and culturally appropriate food for all.
FOOD JUSTICE: THE ROOT FOR PEACE
“Hunger comes from a lack of solidarity. Peace of the world depends on how we deal with food. […] Once we live as one human family, then there will be food for all.” — H.Em. Card. Peter Appiah Turkson, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development
If conflicts are the other side of hunger, also hunger and poverty often feed conflict.
To cease these self-sustaining phenomena, it is crucial to act starting from the root causes of food insecurity, ensuring access to natural resources at fair prices, and guaranteeing constant food production and distribution, especially for small-scale farmers and local communities who are often the most affected. To build a solid architecture of peace, it is crucial to understand the root causes of conflicts within their specific contexts, and aiming for constant collaboration and cooperation to ensure geopolitical balances.
“Love inspires justice and is essential for achieving a just social order between different realities that want to run the risk of a mutual encounter. […] Love means thinking about new models of development and consumption and adopting policies that do not aggravate the situation of less advanced populations or their external dependence. Loving means not continuing to divide the human family between those who have the superfluous and those who lack the necessary.” stresses HH Pope Francis
We can turn the usual narrative of food predominance into food diplomacy, finance into the ecological economy, our relationship with the environment into manifestations of environmental ecology, able to value our traditions, identity, and circular lifestyles.
Only by healing the food system from its foundation and understanding the importance of considering the integral human dimension, would we no longer need to preserve food safety, food security, adequate nutrition, food justice as standing alone, because they would already be part of a broader and entangled circle of life: where people, planet, society, peace, and prosperity merges.
It is this kind of education, an “integral human education,” that we desperately need. An urgency that has led us to Pollica, the cradle of the Mediterranean diet, to learn to see all these interconnections and enhance a method of constant learning, “paideia,” a training that places man within the surrounding environment.
The Future Food Institute is an international social enterprise that believes climate change is at the end of your fork. By harnessing the power of its global ecosystem of partners, innovators, researchers, educators, and entrepreneurs, FFI aims to sustainably improve life on Earth through transformation of global food systems.
By training the next generation of changemakers, empowering communities, and engaging government and industry in actionable innovation, FFI catalyzes progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Learn more at www.futurefoodinsitute.org, join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Or attend a program through the FutureFood.Academy!
