Agriculture

The coming set of Sustainable Development Goals will seek to protect ecosystems, conserve resources, and, as with the Millennium Development Goals, lift millions of people out of poverty. Now that solid legal ground must be developed further.

Factory-style livestock production is a critical driver of agricultural industrialization. Its remorseless expansion is contributing to climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and human-rights violations – all to satisfy Western societies’ unhealthy appetite for cheap meat.

Since it is time to reconsider and redefine the regulation and flow of international agricultural trade against the backdrop of severe global crises (such as the climate, food and economic crises) the conference seeks to bring together expertise to address these issues.

A maize shortage has led to an unprecedented price hike in Kenya; government has declared the food insecurity a national disaster. Many Kenyans attribute food price inflation to mismanagement and corruption. But to what extent does it result from actual scarcity? Do food crop producers - many of them small farmers - profit from high food prices?

Higher and more stable agricultural commodity prices are a necessary condition for the agriculture sector to become an effective force in the socioeconomic growth of the less and least developed countries. Trade liberalisation cannot deliver this. What are the alternatives?

The current global agrifood system is slowly going from a "bottleneck situation" to one of "hourglass", wherein a few dominant agrifood retailers control both the supply side / numerous producers and demand side / numerous consumers.