The concept of a just transition has a long history, coming out of the labor, climate justice, Indigenous peoples, and fossil-fuel dependent communities. More recently, policymakers and civil society organizations in different parts of the world are proposing a just transition for agriculture and food systems. The UN climate negotiations have launched talks on a broad Just Transition. In September 2024, a multi-stakeholder Strategic Dialogue in Europe resulted in a proposal for a Just Transition Fund for food and agriculture. Civil society groups like Action Aid, the Stockholm Environmental Institute, and the Institute for Economic Justice are putting forward principles and ideas for a just transition. Below reflects current thinking from IATP on what a just transition for food and agriculture should include. We will update as new proposals and ideas arise in this emerging and critically important space.
Multiple crises, including climate change and the loss of biodiversity, are forcing a transition for our food system. The dominant, industrial food system in many parts of the world, including the U.S. and Europe, is both a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and highly vulnerable to climate disruption. This industrial system, designed largely for and by global agribusiness companies, also contributes to biodiversity loss, threatens food security and public health, treats animals poorly and pollutes the water and air. It is a food system that depends on the economic exploitation of farmers and workers, and the extraction of natural resources and wealth from rural communities.
Climate related drought, heat waves, damaging storms, flooding, and the rapid spread of plant and animal disease are already affecting our food system. Current trends in food system emissions will prevent us from reaching a 1.5-degree target. If we don’t change our food system, catastrophic climate change will change it for us. A transition is inevitable, but whether it is just and well managed is not.
Tweaks to the current industrial system, allowing its many exploitive and extractive elements to survive, remain or worsen, will not reduce emissions fast enough nor will they build the resilience our food system needs. Instead, a path toward a just transition for our food system must reflect the urgency of the climate and agro-biodiversity crises, requiring major new policy directions and corresponding investments at the local, national and international level. Policies supporting a just transition for our food system would:
- Provide long-term support for agroecology-based systems through:
- Remunerative farmgate prices and wages for farm work.
- Technical and financial support for greater on-farm resilience and biodiversity.
- More farmer and community control over food production and consumption.
- A more decentralized food system that is less dependent on global markets.
- Curb excess corporate power and control of the food system:
- Appropriately regulate agribusiness emissions and reject false climate solutions.
- Ensure companies responsible for emissions pay their fair share for climate finance.
- Ensure markets are competitive and reject unfair trading practices that adversely affect farmers and workers.
- Transition out of the damaging, corporate-controlled factory farm system of animal production toward more diverse and resilient agroecological systems.
- Prioritize clean water and air over a corporate-controlled agricultural system.
- Create opportunities for new farmers with access to land and fair markets. And new work opportunities for farm and food workers transitioning out of the industrial food system.
- Democratize the food system to ensure farmers, farmworkers and food system workers have agency in helping to set policies that affect them.
- Improve rural economic, social and health well-being and community-building that reverses rural population declines.
- Address and not exacerbate injustices in the food system, ensuring that everyone benefits in the transition by ensuring food environments that make healthy and sustainable food accessible and affordable while protecting food security and human rights.
- Enable global cooperation between countries. Climate action, including through trade policies, should not increase inequities between countries. Countries responsible for climate emissions must contribute their fair share of climate finance.
