The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) has said that the prospect of “anything meaningful” emerging from the UN Food Systems Summit this week is “virtually nil”.
Tomorrow (Thursday, September 23) the summit will take place virtually during the UN General Assembly in New York.
The aim of the summit, according to the UN, is to deliver progress on all 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through a food-systems approach, “leveraging the interconnectedness of food systems to global challenges such as hunger, climate change, poverty and inequality”.
Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue will represent Ireland at the summit.
Un Food Systems Summit ‘national pathways’
Pat McCormack, ICMSA president said that Minister McConalogue carries “the best wishes of Irish farmers with him to the summit, but there was no corresponding confidence that the core problems around food system reform would even be addressed – let alone solved”.
“Until the dominant role of multinational retail corporations in global food systems was addressed, there was no chance whatsoever of introducing the kind of fundamental shift towards environmental and economic sustainability that these kinds of grandiose summits advertised,” McCormack said.
After 600 member state dialogues involving more than 45,000 people, some 80 countries have submitted their ‘national pathways’ ahead of the event.
McCormack said that the Irish pathway paper does not “reference in it to the pricing of food, the one element without which it’s not possible to understand either the challenge or possible solutions”.
“I’ve said this before and I’m going to say it again: if we continue allowing the retailers to use their market dominance to sell food at below its real cost, then we just don’t have a chance of doing anything as regards reform of the food systems.
“If government won’t insist on the market paying the real cost and continues to allow retail corporations to underpay their suppliers and undercharge their customers, then everything else is just pointless and this summit can just join the already lengthy list of irrelevant events that make officials feel better but achieve absolutely nothing.”
Economic and environmental cost
The ICMSA president said that it was “becoming more and more obvious that the only group who were singled out for regulation and mandatory measures were farmers”.
“For everyone else it was just a case of: ‘see what you can do there – if you can be bothered, if you don’t mind’,” he said.
“We’re very aware of the dangers of oversimplification on this dizzyingly complex and overlapping issue.
“But farmers would feel that if there was ever a case for reverse-engineering our way to the starting point of an answer, then reforming the food systems to make them more sustainable has to be the most feasible option.
“We have to start with the fundamental fact that there is a real economic and environmental cost to producing sustainable food and that once this price has been established, then it has to be paid by the consumer.
“If we can’t even get to that self-evident truth, then, honestly, we haven’t a hope of getting to where we all know we need to get to.”