Each presenter and organization that participated in the People's Food Summit has helped bring awareness and education about regenerative agriculture to an international audience.

We are dedicated to advancing regenerative agriculture and food sovereignty. By presenting this summit, we are visualizing the stories and serving as a platform for small-scale food producers and social movements striving for a healthy future, regenerating earth, societies, and local economies.

OCA and Regeneration International will continue to provide space for conversations and educational enrichment like the People’s Food Summit, but we can’t do it alone.

We appreciate how our network has supported this work and ask you to keep this going and help fund the projects, movements, and campaigns like these to bring these ideas to the forefront of the global conversation.

If you are able, please consider making a donation to Regeneration International, so we can keep up this important work.

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Watch the People’s Food Summit 2023 here

Watch playlist from the Asia-Pacific sessions

Watch playlist from the European sessions

Watch Dr. Seralini's keynote session from Europe
 

Joint Statement Rebutting Distorted Media Lies About Sri Lanka’s Organic Pathway

Agribusiness cartels and media articles stated that Sri Lanka’s economic chaos was caused by the government forcing the country to go organic.

These articles’ familiar false narratives, untruths, and language style show spin doctors wrote them from a PR company employed by pesticide/big agriculture cartels. They were cut and pasted by poor-quality journalists who did not fact-check.

The narrative was that the government forced farmers to become organic by banning chemical fertilizers. This caused crop failures and food shortages, which caused the riots causing economic chaos.

This is a gross distortion of the truth by falsely connecting dots. The economic chaos was not caused by the country going organic, as it hadn’t gone organic. The government was only planning to do so in the future.

Sri Lanka’s Economic Troubles

Sri Lanka was in severe economic trouble due to the build-up of financial debt caused by a combination of factors that began with the crippling financial drain, infrastructure damage, and social disruption of the decades-long civil war.

On top of this, tax cuts in 2019 reduced government revenue and deepened that country’s national debt. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic decimated the tourism industry. All these factors caused a significant increase in inflation, contributing to shortages of food and essential goods and increasing food insecurity in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka was in severe economic and social trouble by the beginning of 2021.

The Import and Export Control Department banned the importation of chemical fertilizers on April 27, 2021, because they contributed over $400 million to the trade deficit. This was the start of a range of measures that would be proposed to create an economic recovery.

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The New Colonialist Food Economy

This past summer, the global trade regime finalized details for a revolution in African agriculture. Under a pending draft protocol on intellectual property rights, the trade bodies sponsoring the African Continental Free Trade Area seek to lock all 54 African nations into a proprietary and punitive model of food cultivation, one that aims to supplant farmer traditions and practices that have endured on the continent for millennia.

A primary target is the farmers’ recognized human right to save, share, and cultivate seeds and crops according to personal and community needs. By allowing corporate property rights to supersede local seed management, the protocol is the latest front in a global battle over the future of food. Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds. The resulting seed economy would transform African farming into a bonanza for global agribusiness, promote export-oriented monocultures, and undermine resilience during a time of deepening climate disruption.

The architects of this new seed economy include not only major seed and biotech firms but also their sponsor governments and a raft of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. In recent years, this alliance has cannily worked to expand and harden intellectual property restrictions around seeds—also known as “plant variety protection”—under the fashionable policy mantra of “climate-smart agriculture.” This broad rhetorical phrase conjures a suite of practical, climate-driven upgrades to food production that conceals a vastly more complicated and contentious effort to reengineer global farming for the benefit of biotech and agribusiness—not African farmers or the climate.

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Exploring the Connections Between Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture

Food security is one of a human being’s most basic needs, and the threat of food insecurity causes primal anxiety. Food insecurity is among the main causes of climate-related migration and, in turn, one of the main causes of the growing insecurity of nations.

With these vulnerabilities so raw, it’s no wonder people worldwide are questioning their food supply or that worldwide concern is surging about an industrial food system that feeds climate change and causes political instability – not to mention a system that weakens our immune systems and causes serious nutrition-related health conditions and diseases.

It should also be no surprise that there is rapidly scaling curiosity about alternative food systems that don’t ride roughshod over human rights; about systems that keep people and the planet safe and healthy. And yet it can be confusing to understand the similarities and differences between these alternative systems. Let's take a look at two approaches: Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture.

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