Food systems hold slender but firm place on finance-focused COP29 agenda

‘We cannot achieve nutrition targets without a consideration of climate, and we cannot achieve climate targets without transforming food systems for healthier diets,’ said Afshan Khan, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement. (Photo: EPA / Martial Trezzini)

By Adèle Sulcas

2 Dec 2024

Despite a sense within the global food systems community that food’s presence at COP29 was in some ways substantial but lacked the pioneering spirit of food systems at COP28, some important initiatives were launched and agreements reached.

At the start of COP29, this year’s global climate summit, United Nations secretary-general António Guterres addressed world leaders sternly, calling 2024 “a masterclass in human destruction”. This was a big statement but one that, if anything, softens the impact of humans’ damage to our earthly environment, which continues to make itself known with ever more deadly floods, hurricanes and droughts, wreaking havoc on human lives and livelihoods.

Overall, this COP was headlined as being all about finance – the summit’s official theme was “finance, investment and trade” – and behind this clinical “theme” was a surge of frustration and urgency felt by developing countries to get developed countries to be held accountable and pay for their disproportionately large contributions to overall greenhouse gas emissions, mainly through their rampant exploitation of (and profits from) natural resources.

The focus of the talks was to reach a deal on the overall amount as well as the types of financing that will help (mainly) developing and low-income countries, which are already the hardest hit by climate change and can least afford to adapt to and recover from it, to shore up their food and agriculture systems to cope with the climate crisis and its future impacts.

Another new term was coined at COP29: the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG), which is technocratic language for the amount of money all countries agree is needed to help all of them (but especially developing and low-income ones) adapt to and recover from climate impacts.

There’s a big problem, though, with the NCQG, which was clear before negotiations at COP29 began and became starkly and bitterly more difficult as attempts to reach a deal nearly ran out of time: The world’s countries don’t really agree on how much money is needed, nor where it should come from. (Poorer countries are afraid of getting further into debt, if most of this money needs to be borrowed.)

The final agreed amount for the goal – $300-billion – is a full trillion dollars short of the sum that scores of countries were pushing for before the meeting began in Azerbaijan on 11 November. This means that the $300-billion is just a baseline for wealthier countries to raise (not necessarily “give”) a minimum agreed amount, and is a starting point for a collective, much more ambitious aspiration for all countries, organisations, development banks and the private sector to get to the $1.3-trillion needed annually by 2035.

Climate activists protest at COP29 on 23 November 2024. (Photo: EPA-EFE / COP29 Azerbaijan)

In the end, reaching the nominal $1.3-trillion annually – with negotiators agreeing that the total sum would be raised from a range of public and private sources – involved bitter haggling before finally being pushed across the line one day beyond the meeting’s official end.

According to Carbon Brief, a UK-based, go-to website covering climate science, climate policy and energy policy, some countries, such as Nigeria and India, accused the Azerbaijani COP29 presidency of steamrolling their objections, “pushing the deal through without their proper consent, following chaotic last-minute negotiations”. The development news website Devex said the $300-billion climate finance goal “feels more like a compromise than a triumph”. COP29 “moved forward many important conversations”, ranging from food systems to carbon markets, Devex said a few days after the summit’s close, “but the race to meaningful action still seems stuck at the starting line”.

As Daily Maverick reported in 2023 after COP28, where food officially appeared on the climate COP’s main agenda for the first time, what we eat (all eight billion of us) is a “huge, underrated, underemphasised part” of the climate crisis so far: food systems account for one-third of all global greenhouse gas emissions. And therefore how we manage our food systems has massive potential to be a positive and influential lever in actions to mitigate climate damage in the future.

COP29 Activists demanding that rich countries pay up for climate finance for developing countries of the Global South protest at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, on 22 November 2024. (Photo: Sean Gallup / Getty Images)

So, where does food fit into what happened (or didn’t) at COP29?

At COP29, food systems held a slender but firm place on the overall agenda – 19 November was “food, water and agriculture”, just one day of the two-week meeting. Given that food and water are daily necessities to sustain life for every human and animal on the planet, this seems like not much – but it is a lot more than just a few years ago. It took 27 years of COP meetings for food and agriculture to even make it onto the agenda. (COP28, held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2023, initiated a “global stocktake” of where the world stood overall on climate change, including on and from food systems. This was considered groundbreaking and essential.)

Despite an overall sense within the global food systems community that food’s presence at COP29 was in some ways substantial (there were hundreds of food-related events and discussions dotted throughout the programme) but lacked the pioneering spirit of food systems at COP28, some important initiatives were launched and agreements reached.

The Baku Harmoniya Climate Initiative for Farmers, launched with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), is intended to harmonise – and make more easily accessible – support and funding programmes for farmers by bringing together, via an online portal, more than 90 existing food initiatives, to streamline collaborative efforts, amplify learnings and reduce duplication. Harmoniya highlights “the fundamental role of farmers as agents of climate action” – that is, the potential farmers have to make major improvements in the sustainability and productivity of agriculture.

Methane emissions, which have up to 80 times the planet-warming potential of carbon dioxide, come from livestock, food waste, agriculture and the oil and gas industry. The Global Methane Pledge, launched at COP26 in 2021, set out to reduce global methane emissions by 30% from 2020 levels, by 2030. After COP29, 159 countries (and the European Commission) had signed this pledge.

Seeing as a full 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions comes from methane emitted by food waste (30% of all food produced globally is wasted), the COP29 Declaration on Reducing Methane from Organic Waste represents an important step: 30 countries, which together are responsible for 47% of global methane from organic waste emissions, have endorsed COP29’s commitment to reducing methane from organic waste. South Africa has not signed this declaration. Each signatory country (including seven of the world’s 10 largest organic-waste methane emitters) has committed to set targets for methane reduction (for their food and agriculture systems, specifically) in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

Protesters demand grants rather than loans for climate sustainable development for poor countries during the COP29 summit on 15 November 2024. (Photo: Sean Gallup / Getty Images)

The NDCs are countries’ individual climate plans to meet their emissions-reduction targets, part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty committing to limit global heating to below 2°C (preferably not more than 1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels. All countries, including South Africa, have a deadline to update their NDCs by February 2025, and to achieve them by 2035.

The Livestock and Climate Solutions Hub for low- and middle-income countries, led by the International Livestock Research Institute, will develop and scale up “climate-smart livestock innovations”, focusing on enhancing resilience and productivity in different kinds of livestock systems, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (for example, with methane-reducing feed technologies) in support of countries’ meeting their climate goals under the Paris Agreement.

Though not a large-scale initiative yet, the Alliance of Champions for Food Transformation (ACF) is a group of five countries – Brazil, Cambodia, Norway, Sierra Leone and Rwanda – that committed at COP28 to taking stronger action and setting an example for food systems transformation. One of the key tasks of the ACF countries is to integrate food systems into their updated NDCs for February 2025. At COP29, Tanzania announced its intention to join the ACF.

Back to financing, the World Bank confirmed that it would double its funding for agriculture – from $4.5-billion to $9-billion per year – by 2030, with increased focus on climate change adaptation. More broadly, the multilateral development banks said their collective climate finance each year would read $120-billion by 2030, with more than half of that ($65-billion) coming from the private sector and 35% ($42-billion) dedicated to adaptation efforts.

food COP29 ‘We cannot achieve nutrition targets without a consideration of climate, and we cannot achieve climate targets without transforming food systems for healthier diets,’ said Afshan Khan, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement. (Photo: EPA / Martial Trezzini)

Where are the gaps?

Food systems is still a newbie at the climate COP, but its presence on the agenda – where it will feature again at COP30, to be held in Belém, Brazil, in 2025 – confirms a by-now widespread global acknowledgement that climate and food are inseparable: “We cannot achieve nutrition targets without a consideration of climate, and we cannot achieve climate targets without transforming food systems for healthier diets,” said Afshan Khan, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement. “We need to work in a way that mutually reinforces progress towards both targets,” she said at an event in the COP29 Health Pavilion.

In the meantime, grassroots advocates such as Danielle Nierenberg, the founder of Food Tank, are calling for more attention – and money – to go to smallholder farmers, who are responsible for 80% of the world’s food. “When it comes to the types of financing and financial instruments discussed at COP29, these smallholder farmers are, in many cases, being left out,” Nierenberg wrote in a newsletter from COP29, stating that smallholder farmers receive only 0.3% of climate financing (less than one-third of a cent per dollar). “Meaningful financial investments in smallholder and family farmers,” she said, “are the only way to build a future that nourishes people and the planet”. DM

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So, where does food fit into what happened (or didn’t) at COP29?

Where are the gaps?