After the Rio Earth Summit: Will Agriculture really get any Greener?

If last week's Rio+20 Earth Summit made anything clear to those of us at home, it's the degree to which the world's developed nations have been sitting on their hands since the original Earth Summit 20 years ago.

June 26, 2012 | Source: Grist | by Twilight Greenaway

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If last week’s Rio+20 Earth Summit made anything clear to those of us at home, it’s the degree to which the world’s developed nations have been sitting on their hands since the original Earth Summit 20 years ago. As Grist’s Greg Hanscom reported from the summit, the “outcome document” was negotiated before the week started, and “the overwhelming feeling [there], even as world leaders and celebrities rolled in for the official pomp and circumstance, was that the summit was over even before it began.”

Meanwhile, Bill McKibben called the event a “formulaic bureaucracy-fest” wherein the only real excitement was a walkout staged by young activists.

So where was food and agriculture in all this? Food was one of seven “critical issues” identified by the U.N. before Rio+20 began, as population growth (we’ll have another 2 billion people on the planet by 2050) and climate change have put the question of food access into sharp focus. But a quick look at the “issue brief” prepared before the summit will tell you most of what you need to know about the vast chasm that exists between the kinds of goals articulated in meetings like this and the level of real change occurring on the ground. “Global delivery of the food security and sustainable agriculture-related commitments has been disappointing,” the brief reads. And it’s easy to see why; a table reporting on target goals set as early as 1995 is filled with stalled progress, lack of funding, and a general dearth of political will.