While the world debates energy transition targets and carbon neutrality, one essential element continues to be neglected in global climate policy: food. Food systems are, at the same time, one of the main causes and the greatest victims of the climate crisis. Recognizing this is urgent.
Data from FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) show that 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked to the production, transport, consumption, and waste of food. In South America alone, 90% of deforestation is related to the expansion of livestock farming.
One-third of the food produced is wasted. And 70% of the planet’s freshwater is used in agriculture. We can no longer pretend that food has nothing to do with climate.
But the contradiction deepens when we analyze who suffers the most from the impacts. Heatwaves, floods, and prolonged droughts have compromised harvests worldwide, destroyed livelihoods, and put millions of people’s access to food at risk.
In 2022 alone, more than 148 million people were affected by extreme events that directly impacted their production or access to food. It is the climate collapse knocking at the kitchen door.
In this context, Brazil has just sent a signal to the world: it has officially left the UN Hunger Map. The new FAO report, released this week, shows that the country managed to reduce its severe food insecurity indicators, going against the global trend of worsening.
This is an achievement of civil society, reactivated public policies, and collective mobilization in defense of life. But it is also a reminder that there is no sustainable solution if we do not place food at the center of the climate debate.
With this goal, Ação da Cidadania, in alliance with other civil society organizations, launched the international campaign Forests4Food. The initiative was born to reposition food as a structuring axis of the climate agenda and to ensure that COP30, in Brazil, will be remembered as the Food COP.
Protecting forests means ensuring food resilience. It means conserving fertile soils, rain cycles, pollinators, and ways of life that have historically fed communities without destroying ecosystems.
At the same time, it is urgent to expose the hypocrisy of a system that allocates most of its grain production to animal feed, biofuels, and ultra-processed products — and not to directly feeding people.
A system that invests more than US$ 500 billion per year in predatory agricultural subsidies, while agroecology and local food systems remain underfunded.
That is why we are taking to COP30, in Belém, a manifesto with concrete proposals, so that food systems are incorporated in a binding way into countries’ climate commitments (the so-called NDCs).
We also advocate that food sovereignty be recognized as a climate right, that food waste be reduced by 50% by 2030, and that Indigenous territories and traditional communities be recognized as living infrastructures of food and climate security.
Adapting to the climate crisis is, above all, ensuring real food on people’s plates. It means transforming a collapsing production model. It means stopping treating hunger as a side effect and starting to see it as a central part of the solution.
Because those who are hungry are in a hurry. But they also have the right to a future.