22/March/21

 

At a critical juncture on the road to the UN Food Systems Summit, three UN rights experts warn that it will fail to be a 'people's summit' unless it is urgently rethought. They say the Summit's organisers initially bypassed the bodies already doing the hard work of governing global food systems. For instance, the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) already has the structure that the Summit organisers have been hastily reconstructing. The Food Systems Summit has flagrantly – and perhaps deliberately – shifted governments’ attention away from the CFS. The Summit’s rules of engagement were determined by a small set of actors. The private sector, organisations serving the private sector (notably the World Economic Forum), scientists, and economists initiated the process. That has meant a focus on scalable, investment-friendly, ‘game-changing’ solutions. Reading between the lines, this means artificial intelligence (AI)-controlled farming systems, gene editing, and other high-tech solutions geared towards large-scale agriculture. [GMW: There's a Tweetorial on these issues on the Twitter feed of IPES-Food (@IPES-Food).] IPS

 

 

Learn about the effects of glyphosate herbicide spraying on wildlife in New Brunswick, Canada. Speakers include wildlife biologist Rod Cumberland, who says the heavy use of glyphosate has had a devastating impact on white-tailed deer. Support Team for Rod Cumberland

 

 

The notion that more than 2.7 million deaths worldwide – so far – could be the result of a lab accident has been met with skepticism and derision by many journalists and scientists who often portray it as a crackpot conspiracy theory fueled by former President Donald Trump’s China-bashing rhetoric. Without question, the lab-leak theory has been politically and racially weaponized in ugly ways. But that rhetoric needs to be separated from legitimate questions about lab safety that are deserving of investigation. USA Today