Fair Food Futures: Notes from Dar
Centring justice in the transformation of our food systems
First off, a shoutout to the Lighthouse Reports’ Food Systems team, of which I’m a proud member, for snagging the “Environmental Reporting Award” at the One World Media Awards 2025 for the Poison PR investigation. Special kudos to Margot and Elena who led it.
This week, I’m in Dar es Salaam for ANH 2025, a biennial gathering of researchers working on the nexus of agriculture, nutrition, and health. The days were packed and long, but the thoughtful discussions both on- and off-stage sustained us.
These conversations also made me see the parallels between researchers and investigative journalists: we spend a lot of time and effort on topics of public interest that can be quite niche and technical, are often unsure of the final outcome at the beginning of the projects, and tend to agonise over if and how the findings will resonate.
But it’s always great to listen and talk to people who are passionate about their work, and I learnt a lot too. So I wanted to share some takeaways from a plenary session I moderated. I’ll share the link to the session as well as two others once they’re online.
On Wednesday, I moderated a panel discussion at ANH2025 on what it means to have “Just Transition” in building climate-resilient food systems.
This is a key principle in the climate dialogues when we talk about decarbonising our economies. It means this shift must be fair for communities who will be most affected. Say coal miners, and workers for combustion engine vehicle manufacturers.
It is much less invoked in the context of food systems, however, despite the fact that shifting our farming, consumption, and trade practices to low emission practices will affect millions of people, from smallscale farmers to ordinary folks already struggling to put food on the table.
The UNDP defines Just Transition as “ensuring the whole of society – all communities, all workers, all social groups – are brought along in the pivot to a net-zero future”.
But I also like how two farmers, one from an industrialised nation and another from a developing country, see this principle.
“Just Transition is one that’s fair to current generations wherever they live, and future generations, and maybe even to non-human inhabitants of our planet.” - Guy Singh-Watson, farmer and founder of Riverford, a very successful organic vegetable business in the UK
“(Just Transition is) ensuring… that (marginalised communities) are not forgotten but in an equal way share in the benefits of the transition.” - Meshark Sikuku, Kenyan regional coordinator for sustainable agriculture with Ripple Effect
All Aboard
It is very likely there will be winners and losers in any transition, but to me, the essence of Just Transition is to ensure ordinary people are the winners, not corporations whose sole focus is shareholder returns, and that’s where our attention should be.
That also means paying particular attention to groups that have historically been neglected, like smallholder farmers and fisherfolk, pastoralists, women, and people living with disabilities, Meshark said.
For Neema Lugangira, a member of the Tanzanian parliament, it also means calling out the double standards in trade.
“I’m a believer that we shouldn’t produce in a safer way to meet a foreign market as opposed to the local markets. It should be the same. It should be universal,” she said, referring to the stricter food safety standards for foods that will be exported to rich nations.
A lack of infrastructure, extension support, and general awareness often lead farmers in poor countries to rely on toxic pesticides to protect their crops and produce.
But another twist in this double standard - and the complete opposite of Just Transition - is that these pesticides are banned in the EU, UK, or the U.S., but are still being produced in these countries and heavily marketed in developing nations. See here, here, here, and here.
We also need to ensure that Just Transition for food producers, which is essential, does not end up unintentionally harming consumers. Guy’s experience of turning Riverford into a 100% employee-owned business provides much food for thought.
He’s an eloquent and thoughtful speaker so I’m going to let his comments speak for themselves.
“My thinking is that any sort of environmental justice has to be linked to social justice and I found myself running a business with a thousand plus employees, where, essentially under stakeholder capitalism, I was the beneficiary of that.
“That just seemed all wrong. So starting 7 years ago Riverford progressively became employee-owned…. I’m one of 1500 co-owners today. That just coincides with my philosophical beliefs about how we should live together.
“We’re not a smallscale producer. We farm hundreds of acres. We’re reasonably mechanised. Even with that scale we find it very difficult to compete with an industry which is absolutely brutal, the way the prices have been driven down by our supermarkets and that’s left people cutting corners in all sorts of ways.
“Absolutely abhorrent employment practices… and farmers being driven to farm in a way that many of us know is wrong, degrading our soil, leading to loss of biodiversity and massively contributing to climate change.
“We are able to buck that trend a bit by virtue of the support of our customers. We are now probably something like 50% more expensive than a supermarket by virtue of farming in a way that most people would like to see farming in the UK but that is becoming very difficult and as we live in a more economically stressed time, I have to say, I don’t think we can be any more expensive.
“So whilst we have all the costs of climate change and biodiversity loss being externalised and farmers are paying them, it’s very difficult to see how farmers can improve their practices. We are able to farm differently through the support of our customers but it is becoming increasingly difficult even there.”
How to Achieve Just Transition
“Trying to do the right thing increases the cost of production. It needs not be so,” said Aditi Mukherji, Director of the Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Impact Action Platform at the CGIAR, in response to Guy’s comments.
CGIAR is the world’s largest network of agricultural research institutions.
She outlined three key pillars that could help us achieve Just Transition
Increased investment in R&D
She pointed to how it’s now cheaper to produce electricity using solar panels compared to thermal energy and said agriculture and food need similar tools. But renewables didn’t get to this position by accident, Aditi said.
“That happened because there have been investments in renewable energy for the past 30, 40 years, driving down the cost of solar panels. Such commensurate research of how do we actually make the low-emission technologies most cost-effective has not happened in the food and agriculture sector.
“Right now, if a farmer wants to adopt any kind of low-emission technology, grow crops with less fertiliser or don’t use fertiliser, the cost gets pushed up. If it’s not cost-effective there’s no way we can ask farmers to adopt those things… and in the context of the global south (farmers’ livelihoods) are already quite precarious.”
“How do we make these low-emission technologies cost competitive with the conventional Green Revolution-kind of chemical intensive agriculture?”
Provide transitional support
Even if the investment in R&D happens, there would still be a lag effect.
“While agroecological approaches can compete, it takes time. It takes up to 6 to 7 years before the yields are on par with chemical agriculture. So during the transition time… who supports the loss of income?” she asked.
During this time, governments should provide support and finance for farmers so that consumers don’t end up having to foot the bill. While conscious consumers are helping Guy and his co-owners, it will be challenging to replicate this, especially in developing countries where the cost of food is already a big item in a household budget, said Aditi.
Coherent policy change
“There is incoherent policies in pretty much all the countries. On the one hand, we have committed to climate change 1.5 degrees. On the other hand, (we’re) basically providing a lot of subsidies to chemical agriculture.”
Making policies coherent
Robert Kibugi, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Nairobi, and Tanzanian MP Neema agreed that policy coherence is critical, pointing to how communities are already exposed to impacts of global warming despite contributing very little to climate change.
Robert is particularly concerned about the consistent and prolonged droughts in the Horn of Africa that devastated agricultural livelihoods, and wants to see policies to protect and support those who have been affected.
At the same time, governments are embarking on projects or activities that threaten fragile ecosystems, he said.
“We see governments approving the construction of roads through mountain ecosystems, we just had an environmental impact assessment challenged in court, and while we recognise that we’re facing problems with soil fertility and damage, we continue to subsidise mineral and chemical fertilisers,” he added.
For Neema, achieving Just Transition need “national strategies in place that are both multi-sector and multi-stakeholder”. That includes having spaces where researchers, policymakers, and farmers come together, much like the forum we were in.
Personally, I’m ambivalent about the term “breaking the silo”: it’s both jargon-y and overused, but it is very appropriate in this case.
“Folks in agriculture sector or academia will be discussing among themselves, talking about policy related issues, or legislative related issues without politicians. There’s an assumption that politicians are not gonna get us. Politicians are not gonna understand,” she said.
“But you're forgetting that it is those very same people you’re leaving aside that are the ones who’ll be discussing and creating those policies and creating that environment that you want.”
Land as a Lever
At the core of Just Transition for food systems is Just Transition for food producers, and for Robert and Meshark, that will be difficult to achieve, if not impossible, without access to land and secure land tenure.
“From a farmer level, one of the common things that I’ve seen is an increasing worry about land restoration, land restoration, land restoration because land degradation has taken away the quality of the land and the ability of the land to support farming and… the growth of nutritious foods,” said Robert, adding that the excessive use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides is a key reason for the deterioration.
A vast majority of the population in East Africa is dependent on agriculture, so land degradation has repercussions beyond productivity and is one reason for rising malnutrition, said Meshark, who has been training land restoration techniques to smallscale farmers in the region.
So clarification and protection of land tenure rights could be a key starting point, according to Robert. This will encourage farmers to invest in land restoration, prevent them from using marginal lands (often of poor quality and vulnerable to natural hazards), and protect them from land grabs that could further impoverish them.
Common But Differentiated Responsibilities
Again, this concept, established at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), comes up a lot in climate discussions.
It refers to how developed countries that have historically been much more responsible for climate change and should also take the lead in combating it and its adverse effects.
To me, this is also applicable when it comes to food systems.
Farmers and consumers in industrialised nations are disproportionately responsible for greenhouse gas emissions that are heating up the planet, so they should also be responsible for reducing their emissions first before pointing their fingers at others.
Which is why rich countries’ attempt to use GWP* as a key metric for livestock emissions fly in the face of fairness and equity. But that’s for another newsletter.
For Farmers
Guy had a couple of suggestions for farmers in Africa: don’t follow in the footsteps of farmers in industrialised nations including the UK where the obsession is about scale. He also told African farmers to keep up the good work on using agroecological approaches and invest in knowledge.
He said he was “very inspired” by farmers he met while travelling in East Africa with Meshark and took these approaches back home and employed them on his own farm.
“I have seen that it can be win-win-win. Win for biodiversity, win for climate change, and win for productivity. But it is incredibly difficult and knowledge intensive. And that’s what we need to be investing in: knowledge,” he said.
“The frustrating thing is that 70% of British citizens are prepared to pay more for their food and support this sort of agriculture. So the fact that we’re not getting it through our market is really an example of market failure I would say.”
For Consumers
A similar dynamic is at play when it comes to consumption but this isn’t adequately addressed in some of the global discourses around just transitions, according to Aditi.
For example, there’s a lot of talk about how growth in the consumption of animal proteins and food will come from Africa and how such consumption has stagnated in Europe. This has led to concerns over rising emissions from Africa. But that’s not the full story.
“What those graphs and story is not telling is the story of absolute numbers. Even with reduction or stagnation in consumption of meat, an average European would still be consuming 60 to 70 kilos of meat per capita per year, while even with all the growth in Africa, by the end of 2050, an average African would still be consuming less than 30 kilos,” said Aditi.
“The point I’m trying to make is that there are deep inequalities in the way we consume food. Right now the main course discourse for much of the developing world is, “Fossil fuel use will happen in your country, it’s stagnating elsewhere. Meat consumption will happen in your country, it’s stagnating elsewhere.” But where is the stagnation level?
“So I think for a Just Transition to happen we would have to actually not only talk of stagnation but consumption in rich countries, we have to talk about the reduction in consumption in rich countries, and leave that room for increasing consumption in the lower- and middle-income countries because this is where there are real nutritional deficiencies.
“I think we really need to deal with that consumption inequality before we say Africa needs to reduce emissions because let’s face it, with everything, Africa’s overall historical emissions have been only 4 to 5% of the total emissions.
“So the moral and responsibility is not here to reduce. But having said that, I also agree with Guy there’s no reason to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can forge a new pathway which is more sustainable.”
Who Will Pay for This?
As with all things related to climate action, the big question is finance and where that is coming from. Or at least, we all know where the money should be coming from: the rich nations and folks who got us here. The question is how do we get them to pay?
“This is the heart of the issue: who pays for just transition? While we’re all disenchanted with the international processes, these core processes are still some of the best bets in which the developing countries can actually get finance from the developed countries,” said Aditi, pointing to the Loss & Damage Fund and other financial mechanisms being discussed at the global level. “Africa as a whole negotiates as one united group and I think the pressure has to be kept up for the climate finance to come through.”
“The other would be realigning some of the fossil fuel subsidies that countries provide. So how do we realign those subsidies and put them to less environmentally damaging things? How do we subsidise good practices instead of subsidising bad practices? Where does the money come from?”
Here, discussions including taxing the top 1% who have caused a disproportionate amount of climate change.
“Finance is something that needs to be tackled and advocacy, research, everything has to go towards keeping up that pressure in those international spaces.”
Thin’s Pickings
Fuel to Fork - IPES-Food
A report on the missing link in the discussions on weaning ourselves off fossil fuels: the food systems’ dependence on oil and gas and petrochemicals. Much of the focus has been on energy and transport, but this timely report breaks down why we need to talk about how to tackle our “addiction problem”.
For starters, food systems consume 40% of all petrochemicals (mostly for synthetic fertilisers and plastic packaging) and at least 15% of fossil fuels, while 99% of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and pesticides are derived from fossil fuels.
“Today’s fossil-intensive industrial food systems cannot be tweaked or ‘fixed’: the challenges are so vast and the power imbalances so great, that only changes of a more fundamental nature – changes that remake food systems and redistribute power – will do,” the authors wrote.
There’s also accompanying podcast whose host Thin Ink has interviewed.
Lawsuit Alleges Deed Restriction Gave Albertsons a Local Monopoly - Food & Power
Claire Kelloway on an oft-used form of property control by supermarkets that imposes hardships on consumers. The practice involves putting a restrictive covenant on the deed of a property preventing it from having any future rival businesses operating there.
It’s permitted by the courts but leaves consumers to pay higher prices from nearer supermarkets or travel further for more affordable ones.
After Trump’s Election, a Troubled Meatpacker Makes a Stunning Comeback - The New York Times
How does a company accused of price fixing, child labour, and environmental crimes, and implicated in a vast bribery scheme, get the green light to list on the New York Stock Exchange?
“The timing is raising eyebrows,” wrote Ana Ionova. “A U.S. firm owned by JBS made the single biggest donation, $5 million, to President Trump’s inaugural committee, and the Brazilian company also doubled its spending on lobbying in the first three months of the year, a New York Times analysis of public records shows.”
“The donation and subsequent approval of JBS’s listing by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, headed by a new chairman appointed by Mr. Trump as the president reduces the commission’s independence, have fuelled concerns from Democrats and watchdog groups that the firm’s gift may have helped it win favour from the administration.”
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