A “call to arms” for the agroecology movement to join the fight to change finance

If you haven’t done so already, we highly recommend you read a new article by long-time food sovereignty activist and thinker, Michel Pimbert on agroecology and finance. In this “call to arms for the agroecology movement”, Pimbert’s central message is that a transition to agroecology is never going to be financed without seriously taking on the structures of finance itself. To finance change, we have to change finance, he says.

Pimbert makes clear that governments are lying to us when they say that there’s no money in public coffers to fund a transition to agroecology and food sovereignty. And efforts to try and get the private sector to fill the void, whether corporations, philanthropies or development banks, only lead to more corporate control and greenwashing. While efforts to move limited, current public budgets and donor funds to support agroecology are important, Pimbert says this will never be enough to roll-back the industrial food system and really transition to what he calls “territorial agri-food systems”. We have to get bold, he says, and focus on the vast untapped potential of the “financial elephants in the room”.

This means working with other social movements and organisations to take back the wealth that the super rich (i.e. the “elephants”) are amassing. Pimbert lists some good initiatives already under way that the agroecology movement should join in fighting for: wealth taxes on billionaires; a global minimum tax and windfall taxes on corporations; taxes on polluting and damaging industries; abolishing tax havens; taxing speculative financial markets; cancelling debts of low-income countries; reducing military spending; and reparations for slavery. These initiatives, he says, would free up more than enough money to fund a global transition to agroecology and local food systems.

Taking Pimbert’s argument a step further, we must also consider the struggles to keep money out of the hands of the financial titans in the first place. New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has surged in popularity with a plan to build publicly-owned grocery stores to keep prices down (on top of proposals for free child care and rent freezes). Burkina Faso’s new government is nationalising its gold mines. Or bear in mind that much of the money managed by financial corporations, which then goes to fund agribusiness, actually comes from worker’s pension funds. Universal, publicly funded retirement systems could put a stop to this flow of money, while providing everyone, including people working in the food system, a dignified old age. There are many important struggles around the world already pushing in this direction, not only for pensions but other social programmes, like the efforts to establish a Social Security for Food in France that Pimbert highlights.

Pimbert knows that there will be fierce resistance to any such changes. “History shows that governments have faced massive economic disruption—and often military coups—when their policies threaten the profits and privileges of corporations and the hyper-rich.” To protect against this, Pimbert says that public finance also needs to go into “expanding democracy and citizen participation in policymaking and institutional choices”. This means rejecting multi-stakeholder governance structures like the UN Food Systems Summit that are favored by corporations and financial institutions. It means dismantling investment agreements and free trade agreements that give transnational corporations extraordinary rights without binding obligations. It means stopping public development banks from funding agribusiness companies and projects that take land and natural resources away from local communities. And it means supporting large-scale citizen participation in bottom-up decision-making, “giving people more power and agency in the governance of money” and “enabling gender and ethnically diverse participatory processes in which people are centrally involved in rethinking finance for the common good.” Examples given include farmers' workshops on food futures in India, citizens' assemblies on GMOs in Mali, and similar climate repair initiatives in the Netherlands.

It is a tall order. But, as Pimbert says, unless the agroecology movement fights to change finance, it will “ultimately support the status quo by deepening consolidated power in the dominant agri-food regime”.

The upcoming Nyéléni Global Forum in Sri Lanka this September will be a great opportunity for social movements from around the world to answer Pimbert's call to arms.