Manish Swarup/AP Photo
A farmer protests near New Delhi, India, March 8, 2021. Thousands of female farmers have held sit-ins and a hunger strike in India’s capital to protest against the country’s new agricultural laws.
This year heralds a historic moment—one in which we must ensure an equitable and more effective global approach to climate change. It’s time to review and strengthen past global agreements to use every ecologically sound lever to reverse the climate crisis and achieve climate justice. To that end, we must ensure that every relevant party is at the table, including local small-scale food producers and Indigenous communities that are close to the land. We must understand that transforming how we raise, grow, cultivate, and distribute what we eat is essential to achieving climate justice.
From an environmental, economic, and social perspective, the new administration of President Biden must reject global corporate agriculture and support local, small-scale farmers and fishing communities. Small-scale food producers create sustainable food and jobs across the globe. They cool the planet’s climate, regenerate biodiversity, and nurture land and water quality through agroecological practices like agroforestry and crop rotation.
By empowering and protecting local food producers, we can tackle climate change at the root. Anything less than putting local agriculture at the center of climate justice will fail.
We need to rethink the very notion of what it means for communities and nations to prosper.
Lesser efforts will fail because unbridled corporate-led development leads to ever more extraction of natural resources—land, water, forests, minerals—which leads in turn to increased global warming. This is true when land is grabbed for industrial agriculture or monocrop plantations, when water is diverted and overconsumed by these corporations, and when forests are cut for timber, plantation and monocrop agriculture, and mining. Any of these types of practices that rob small-scale farmers and Indigenous peoples of their resources increase global warming, drive climate change, and make long-term sustainability impossible.
This is why, as the U.S. re-enters global pacts and recommits to regulation, we cannot continue environmental-policy change with the same old players, if we are to advance toward climate justice. We need to rethink the very notion of what it means for communities and nations to prosper. This necessitates diversifying the decision-makers leading such efforts. We must ensure that new ideas are brought to the table by leaders from the most severely affected communities in the global South, like small-scale food producers—especially women—and Indigenous communities, whose water, land, and ways of life are at risk.
The participation of the U.S. is key to global progress, but the quality and direction of its participation must change. The United States’ current stance is to interlace pro-corporate domestic and international agricultural policies, which are exacerbating the climate crisis and punishing local food producers worldwide. Instead of supporting the eradication of the family farm and the further corporatization of food production and distribution, the U.S. must transform its own food policy by adopting the Food From Family Farms Act: Ensuring a “Living Wage” for Family Farmers, which is supported by the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC). Strengthening family farms requires reversing today’s U.S.-led global trend to replicate the current U.S. model of corporatized domestic agriculture in countries like India, Thailand, and elsewhere. Corporatization of agriculture has robbed small-scale food producers of agency and dignified livelihoods and pushed them into dangerous debt traps. In India, hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers have mobilized in the middle of the COVID pandemic against recent pro-corporate agricultural laws. It is these farmers and others like them who must be at the table when we shape new approaches to climate justice.
Until now, global trade, investment policies, and other market mechanisms have commonly been used to dispossess Indigenous peoples and small-scale producers from their territories and lands, including through carbon-trading mechanisms such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). Carbon trading perversely allows industrialized countries to continue to pollute, while the most marginalized groups in the global South take on the burden of not increasing their already low consumption (and emissions).
What changes of direction should the Biden administration embrace?
To begin, the Biden administration must re-engage the United Nations as one among equals. It must anchor its commitment to address climate change in the international human rights framework, especially through such critically important instruments as the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP), the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and relevant obligations laid out in the Commission on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the International Labour Organization.
Second, it needs to support broadening the circle of decision-makers. Presently, wealthy countries and corporations dominate global forums on climate change. Instead, the countries most vulnerable to climate disasters, such as Kenya, El Salvador, and the Philippines, must have far greater sway in reformulating global agreements.
Third, it must help create a Global Green New Deal that is grounded in principles of human rights, equity, justice, and reparations, much like the feminist Green New Deal championed by the U.S.-based Climate Justice Alliance. As this approach makes clear, we cannot rely on traditional economic accounting that does not factor in the impacts of historical, multigenerational inequalities and inequities in local community sustainability. Markers like the gross domestic product (GDP) hide the environmental destruction, natural-resource depletion, and indebtedness that undermine local livelihoods. Instead, we need new markers that highlight environmental health along with social and economic markers, including gender and race.
Fourth, the Biden administration must engage social movements, labor unions, and civil society to create an equitable and just Global Green New Deal. It must do this as much to inform its policy initiatives with the experience and knowledge of frontline communities as to build the requisite political capital for initiatives that will be fought tooth and nail by corporate agriculture and energy sectors. It won’t be enough just to partner with the usual Beltway organizations. It will need to partner with Black, Brown, Indigenous, and working-class communities in the U.S. and around the world—groups like the Climate Justice Alliance, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, La Via Campesina, and the Indigenous Environmental Network.
Rather than organizing global policy tables for powerful states and corporations, the United States has to bring others to the table—small-scale producers, Indigenous peoples, women and youth—whose ecological agricultural practices are among the greatest untapped tools for achieving climate justice. This resetting of the global table will not only empower local communities. It will enable nations, banded together, to have a better shot at addressing the planetary crisis humanity is facing.
