Stakeholders vs. Steak-eaters
Between now and late 2021, the World Economic Forum, agri-food conglomerates, IT companies and philanthropists (led by the Gates Foundation) have teamed up to spearhead three separate initiatives which could converge and utterly transform the multilateral agricultural system.
At stake is influence over four institutions with a combined annual budget of $11 billion and 5100 scientific/professional staff.
- A rumoured summit to be cooked up by the World Food Systems Summit (WFSS) could transform the old public-private partnerships into a new bilateralism between agribusiness and governments.
- Consolidation of the CGIAR (international agricultural research system) will ensure the delivery of so- called Climate-Smart Agriculture.
- Third, an International Digital Council for Food and Agriculture will entrench Big Data (including digital DNA) as the solution to everything.
The Summit provides the framework; CGIAR is the delivery system; and Big Data is the product.
Download pdf of Communique no. 117 here
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ETC GROUP
MISSION OF THE ETC GROUP
…or Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration
ETC Group works to address the socioeconomic and ecological issues surrounding new technologies that could have an impact on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. We investigate ecological erosion (including the erosion of cultures and human rights); the development of new technologies (especially agricultural but also other technologies that work with genomics and matter); and we monitor global governance issues including corporate concentration and trade in technologies. We operate at the global political level. We work closely with partner civil society organizations (CSOs) and social movements, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Pat Mooney – Founder
Pat Mooney has more than four decades experience working in international civil society, first addressing aid and development issues and then focusing on food, agriculture and commodity trade. In 1977 Mooney co-founded RAFI (Rural Advancement Fund International, renamed ETC Group in 2001). He received The Right Livelihood Award (the “Alternative Nobel Prize”) in the Swedish Parliament in 1985 and the Pearson Peace Prize from Canada’s Governor General in 1998. He has also received the American “Giraffe Award” given to people “who stick their necks out.”
The author or co-author of several books on the politics of biotechnology and biodiversity, Pat Mooney is widely regarded as an authority on issues of global governance, corporate concentration, and intellectual property monopoly. Although much of ETC’s work continues to emphasize plant genetic resources and agricultural biodiversity, the work expanded in the early 1980s to include biotechnology. In the late 1990s, the work expanded more to encompass a succession of emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, geoengineering, and new developments in genomics and neurosciences.
ETC remains a nano-CSO with offices in Canada, the United States, Mexico, the Philippines and Ethiopia and works in close cooperation with many civil society partners around the world.
