A3. Agroecology

In Central Kenya, the Kandara Residents Association has sustained decades long struggle for land restitution with little success.

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For decades, Kenyan farmers have faced exposure to pesticides banned or restricted in their manufacturers’ home countries.

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The world cannot continue negotiating the future of biodiversity while the communities who sustain it struggle to protect their seeds, lands, knowledge and livelihoods. This was the conviction that guided the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) throughout the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17) in Yerevan, Armenia. Over two intensive weeks, our six-member delegation stood alongside African farmers, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, youth movements and civil society allies to defend a simple but fundamental principle. Biodiversity justice must put people, rights and nature before corporate interests.

COP17 delivered the Yerevan Pathway and completed the first global review of progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The findings were sobering. The world remains off track to meet its 2030 biodiversity targets, while inadequate financing, harmful subsidies and gaps in implementation continue to undermine progress. For AFSA, this reinforces a central concern. Global commitments mean little unless they bring meaningful change to the communities conserving biodiversity every day. We cannot continue financing the destruction of nature while promising to restore it.

Throughout the conference, AFSA carried Africa’s priorities into negotiation rooms, high-level panels, side events and public mobilisation spaces. We defended farmer-managed seed systems and the right of farmers to save, use, exchange and share their seeds. We championed agroecology as a practical pathway to biodiversity conservation and food systems transformation, consistent with Target 10 of the Global Biodiversity Framework. We challenged the promotion of false solutions, including approaches to synthetic biology that fail to adequately address equity, precaution, sovereignty and community rights. We called for fair and transparent benefit-sharing and a Cali Fund that genuinely serves the farmers and communities whose stewardship of genetic resources makes scientific and commercial innovation possible.

A major highlight of our engagement was AFSA’s side event on 24 October, titled “Digital Sequence Information (DSI): Understanding the Debate and Defining an African Civil Society Position.” Organised in collaboration with African civil society partners, the event brought the critical questions of equity, biodiversity sovereignty and community rights to the centre of the DSI debate. It provided a platform to examine how the growing use of digital genetic information affects Africa’s biological resources and the communities that have conserved them for generations. At the heart of the dialogue was a fundamental question. Who benefits when biodiversity becomes digital, and who has a voice in deciding how those benefits are shared? The event reinforced AFSA’s call for fair, transparent and accountable benefit-sharing arrangements, stronger protection of traditional knowledge and farmers’ rights, and coordinated African civil society advocacy to ensure that scientific innovation advances biodiversity justice rather than deepening existing inequalities.

Our delegation amplified these demands through strong interventions, strategic alliances and collective action. From the call to “Stop financing destruction!” to the pan-African campaign “Seed Is Life”, AFSA reaffirmed that Africa’s agricultural biodiversity is a living heritage, not simply a resource for commercial exploitation. Our engagement with the Just Transformations Network and other civil society allies strengthened solidarity across movements. As negotiations reached their final stages, we stood with young people inside the Blue Zone, raising our voices against false solutions and reminding world leaders of a truth too often forgotten. “You cannot eat money!”

We leave Yerevan with renewed solidarity, stronger alliances and a clear sense of the work ahead. Progress in global biodiversity governance must be judged not only by negotiated decisions, but by whose rights are protected, who controls resources, who benefits from their use and whether communities have the power to shape their own futures. AFSA will continue working with its members and partners to translate these demands into national policies, community action and sustained advocacy.

COP17 may have concluded, but our message remains uncompromising. No future in false solutions. Yes to real, rights-based solutions. Protect farmers’ seeds. Invest in agroecology. Uphold community sovereignty. Make biodiversity justice a reality.

The story we are often told about Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of replacement, particularly in agriculture. The machines are coming for the tractor, the picker, and then eventually, the farmer. But the real potential of AI in agriculture isn’t replacement but what happens when technology serves the people already in the system, extending their sight rather than overriding their judgment. Successful innovation starts with local knowledge and widens it.

Agriculture, while obviously important to our economies, is one of the slowest to integrate new technology. I learned this lesson in 2017 when I joined an AgTech startup called Artemis Ag, a software company focused on bringing people, processes, and farm data into the cloud. Our initial premise was that software could increase a grower’s view of the farm and drastically improve their efficiency. Initially, user adoption was slow. We learned that we hadn’t fully accounted for the farmer’s experience. We didn’t consider the level of knowledge that comes with years of growing in their local environments, nor the impact that tiny changes to input costs could have on their planning. We especially didn’t account for physical design decisions that affect how and where technology can be used or the fact that farmers, broadly speaking, are more likely to be outside and less likely to be on a computer. And this was just in the U.S.

Globally, it’s a different set of problems. On the ground, technology uptake is uneven and intensely local. In rural areas, 21 percent of people in Africa use the internet, compared with 75 percent in the Americas. Access is only one hurdle. A synthesis of 30 studies found that smallholders run into several barriers at once: capital, credit, weak supply chains, and plain doubt about whether a new tool will ever pay off. The technology itself is rarely the bottleneck.

A food system rests on six interdependent foundations—natural resources, production, manufacturing and supply chain, logistics, a strong consumer base, and effective governance and policy. When one gives way, the others feel it. For example, last year Hurricane Melissa destroyed Jamaica’s agricultural base, destroying many of its farms, roads and logistics infrastructure. In the aftermath, the government went to work to figure out the best policy and long-term plan needed, but it raised questions. How do you restart food production and manufacturing? And how do you rebuild the supply chain and logistics while balancing some of the country’s more foundational needs, such as new, more resilient homes, a better electricity infrastructure, and new roads? These questions present an opportunity for AI and innovation to help connect the dots between the six foundations.

A great example can be found in Aquaconnect, a startup my company SecondMuse worked with in 2019, when they joined our Seafood Innovation Project in Indonesia. We supported them as they explored bringing to Southeast Asia what it had built for shrimp farmers back home in India. Most of the shrimp eaten in India are not caught at sea but raised in farm ponds, a livelihood that supports whole coastal communities. The farmers who run those ponds carry real expertise, much of it learned by hand and kept in notebooks. When pond conditions slip, yields fall and the runoff can harm nearby waters. The farmers were not short on knowledge or effort. They were short on sight: a way to see what was happening in the water before it cost them a harvest.

Aquaconnect set out to close that gap by building on what farmers already knew. The company pairs local, on-the-pond expertise with AI and satellite remote sensing, using geospatial data and deep learning models to read a pond’s condition and stage remotely, without a site visit. The technology widens what the farmer can see and act on. Aquaconnect has grown from roughly 3,000 farmers when we first met them in 2019 to more than 90,000 aquaculture farmers across six Indian states today.

It’s here that AI proves its worth, not by doing the work, but by showing the worker the whole field and helping to close the trust-and-risk gap. It offers a bird’s-eye view across foundations, connecting a decision in one part of the system to its consequences in another.

AI and prediction technology lets us ask sharper questions of messy data. This was the power of Artemis when it was acquired by Iunu. Iunu wrapped Artemis’s technology into a Machine vision product that helped growers make stronger, more insight-driven decisions.

So how can we use AI to build a better future in agriculture? AI is not a substitute for engaging trusted local institutions and local growers. They are the key to providing the right mix of meaningful data. Often, farms have outdated legacy software. Be willing to do the hard work of collecting and cleaning up the data before introducing AI. It becomes the difference between building something truly useful and sustainable versus not.

In addition, don’t forget the humans behind the work and the expertise they’ve cultivated over generations. This is the step that enables u to bring in insights that may be obvious to a 30-year veteran farmer who is irreplaceable when they retire.

This idea builds on years of groundwork. In 2019, The Rockefeller Foundation launched the Food System Vision Prize, inviting teams from around the world to propose transformational visions for the year 2050. These were visions that would enable local communities to describe, and ultimately attain, a regenerative, equitable, and nourishing food future. The Foundation distributed US$2 million in prizes to 10 winning teams, whose stories are featured in a series of documentary shorts. The Prize proved that communities everywhere, given the right framework, could imagine their own food futures with rigor and ambition.

We are working together on the next step in enabling ambitious ideas for future food systems. It is a platform SecondMuse is building, supported through a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation. It takes a proven food-system visioning methodology and puts it directly in the hands of communities, so they can build hope-filled visions of their own food future without needing outside facilitators or institutional backing. It is the thesis in working form: communities author their own visions; the structure helps them see the whole system rather than one slice; and it adapts to local context by design.

Aquaconnect works because it did not ask farmers to abandon what generations had taught them. It read their notebooks, added satellites and algorithms, and handed the result back to the same people who had been managing those ponds all along. Iunu did the same thing from a different angle, wrapping machine vision around what Artemis had already built, so growers could see patterns in their own fields they’d been too close to notice.

Do that across a whole food system and the picture changes. The grower sees not just the field but the weather bearing down on it and the market waiting past it. The founder fighting food waste sees whether the real problem is spoilage or a selling radius drawn too tight. The advisor sees which pond’s trouble is about to become the problem of the district. None of them stops relying on what they know. Each of them can finally see past it. That is the food system worth building with AI. Not one run by machines, but one where the people already inside it are no longer working in the dark.

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As supply chain disruptions and tariffs continue to strain farmers, producers like John Boyd, Jr. are calling on eaters to use their vote to protect the future of agriculture in the United States. 

Diesel prices are hovering around US$6.35 per gallon—just below the record high of US$6.53 seen in September—according to AAA. Boyd, the President and Founder of the National Black Farmers Association, reports that it recently cost him around US$1,000 to fill his combine. 

“I found myself letting some bills go right now, and I made the choice to get my crop harvested out of the field while I can,” Boyd tells Food Tank. “Healthcare had to go.”

Boyd points to the Trump-Vance Administration, whose trade policies and decision to launch a war in Iran are pushing food producers to the brink. A report from North Dakota State University’s (NDSU) Center for Agricultural Policy and Trade Studies finds that market disruptions are resulting in significant costs to farmers, causing greater instability. 

Most producers, Boyd says, are “really working in the red.” 

The conditions are reminiscent of the 1980s farm crisis. Boyd managed to keep his farm afloat as debt soared and many families were forced from their land four decades ago. “But this is different,” he says about today. “It’s intentional.”

To Boyd, American agriculture can’t survive if the country stays on course. “There is no way that you continue to support this type of agriculture for our country because there won’t be any left,” he tells Food Tank. “There’ll be a handful of corporate farmers and a lot of data centers if you don’t change your thinking and look the other way.”

As the midterm elections approach, he urges people everywhere to vote, arguing the future of the country’s agriculture sector depends on it. “That’s the only way to put any sort of pressure on this runaway train,” he says. “So my message is: Go out and vote, vote early, and let’s put some checks and balances back in our country.”

Listen to the full conversation with John Boyd, Jr. on Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg to hear more about the urgency Boyd sees, his advice to Black farmers frustrated with the political system, and what it will take to stop farm foreclosures.

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La Vía Campesina alert the world to the grave situation facing Ecuador.

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La Vía Campesina stands in solidarity with the peoples in Haiti who are fighting for their sovereignty and dignity.

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Dolores Huerta, a labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the organization that became the United Farm Workers (UFW), died on October 28, 2026, at her home in Bakersfield, California, according to the Dolores Huerta Foundation. She was 96.

“Her life’s work was to empower her community to face and overcome injustices, and she has left farm workers and the entire Latino community stronger and more organized than she found it,” UFW President Teresa Romero said in a statement.

Born Dolores Clara Fernández on April 10, 1930, in Dawson, New Mexico, Huerta grew up in Stockton, California. After earning a teaching credential, Huerta began working as an elementary school teacher in the San Joaquin Valley.

Witnessing the poverty experienced by her students and their families, she decided to pursue community organizing. “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children,” she recalled in a 2017 PBS Independent Lens documentary about her life.

Huerta became involved with the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Latino civil rights group. She organized voter registration drives, advocated for improvements in underserved neighborhoods, and founded the Agricultural Workers Association.

She met fellow organizer César Chávez in 1955, and in 1962, Huerta and Chávez established the National Farm Workers Association. The organization later merged with the Filipino-led Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to form what became the United Farm Workers.

During the Delano grape strike in 1965, Huerta helped organize a nationwide boycott that brought millions of consumers into the campaign and put economic pressure on California grape growers. In 1970, after five years of strikes and boycotts, Huerta helped negotiate collective bargaining agreements which secured higher wages, health benefits, pensions, and protections against unsafe working conditions.

In 1963, she helped secure disability insurance and Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits for California agricultural workers. She later helped build support for the state’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975. The law established farmworkers’ right to union representation and required employers to bargain in good faith with unions chosen by their employees.

Beyond wages and labor rights, Huerta fought to protect farmworkers from hazardous pesticides and helped organize a boycott to pressure growers to reduce their use. She also advocated for immigration reform, reproductive rights, and greater political representation for women and Latino communities.

“As a Latina in the labor movement, she challenged the norms that kept women of color out of those spaces and brought women and families onto picket lines and up the ranks of unions and community organizations,” Neidi Dominguez, Executive Director of Organized Power In Numbers, said in a statement. “She showed that women were and are central to the farmworkers and all workers’ collective struggle.”

She coined the phrase “Sí, se puede,” or “Yes, it can be done,” which became a rallying cry for labor and civil rights movements.

Huerta was jailed 22 times during labor demonstrations and endured threats and violence throughout her career. In 1988, while protesting then-Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, Huerta was struck by a police officer’s baton, breaking several ribs and rupturing her spleen. Following her recovery, she continued organizing and increasingly focused on women’s rights and encouraging Latinas to seek elected office.

In March 2026, Huerta bravely disclosed in an interview with the The New York Times that Chávez had sexually assaulted her twice during the 1960s. Both assaults resulted in pregnancies.

Huerta explained in a statement that she had remained silent for decades because she feared revealing the abuse would undermine the farmworker movement. “The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual,” Huerta wrote.

After stepping down from her leadership role at UFW, Huerta established the Dolores Huerta Foundation in the early 2000s. The organization supports community organizing and civic participation, particularly in California’s San Joaquin Valley. It has trained thousands of community members to advocate for improvements in education, environmental health, public services, and political representation.

Huerta’s contributions earned numerous honors, including the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. She was also the first Latina inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Schools are named in her honor in California, Texas and Colorado. She received 15 honorary degrees.

Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg had the chance to meet Huerta several years ago in California and remembers that “she was magnetic and so full of energy. Her leadership inspired so many people in the food and agriculture movement.”

Huerta continued participating in demonstrations, registering voters, mentoring young organizers, and advocating for underserved communities into her 90s. Throughout her life, she emphasized the importance of empowering people to organize and advocate for themselves.

“I hope that my legacy will be one of an organizer that organized to fight injustice,” Huerta said in the 2025 documentary Seeds of Change: The Life and Legacy of Dolores Huerta. “We want to give our children an inheritance of justice, right, not jewels or property or money.”

Huerta is survived by 14 children, 24 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren, and 7 great-great-grandchildren. Her legacy continues through the United Farm Workers, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and generations of organizers working to advance labor rights and social justice.

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We reaffirm our recognition of their legitimate struggle for self-determination, territorial autonomy, and the defense of their ways of life, culture, and community organization.

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We reaffirm our commitment to stand with the struggles of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, to defend their sovereignty and self-determination, and to denounce the policies of interference, dispossession, and criminalization that violate their rights.

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We express our deep solidarity with the peasant, indigenous, and Garifuna organizations of Honduras, as well as with the communities, women, youth, families, and defenders of land and territories who face violence, threats, criminalization, and dispossession.

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A vertical farm in the Camille Graham Correctional Institution in South Carolina serves education space for incarcerated women, where women gain skills in farming and workforce development.

The 20-week program teaches women how to plant, grow, and harvest hydroponic lettuce, along with other skills in food handling. Around 15 inmates participate, producing over 3,000 heads of lettuce every week. South Carolina’s Department of Corrections (DOC) then sells the lettuces back to the facilities, where they are served to inmates across Camille Graham and two neighboring women’s prisons.

The goal is to equip women with skills for life after incarceration and support their wellbeing through hands-on connection with agriculture and more nutritious meals.

In addition to being the first controlled agriculture operation in a U.S. prison, the Camille Graham farm is the pilot program for the Growing Justice initiative, operated by criminal justice nonprofit Impact Justice. This summer, Camille Graham began its third cohort of the program, and Impact Justice also launched a Growing Justice location at a correctional facility in California.

“Access to fresh vegetables and locally grown produce is pretty rare” in prisons, Kristina Bell, the Growing Justice Director at Impact Justice, tells Food Tank. “We’ve seen tremendous positive feedback around the fact that they have access to this lettuce, and tremendous pride as well. The participants know that others in the facility are benefiting and enjoying the produce that they’ve grown.”

The technology is sourced by vertical farm company AmplifiedAg. CEO David Flynn tells Food Tank that the farm is a repurposed shipping container with an HVAC system and LED lighting that allow multiple stacked rows of lettuce to grow.

One container has the capacity to produce 40,000 pounds of lettuce every year. Rick Doran, the Division Director of Agriculture for South Carolina’s Department of Corrections (DOC), says that around 4,000 servings of lettuce are harvested each week.

Doran remembers being “blown away” by the technology’s high output, low water intake, and logistical ease for a correctional facility. He was also inspired by the growing potential of controlled environment agriculture in South Carolina, which he said could create job opportunities for participants of the program, who train in this field, after their release.

“Any time we can show people how to be more self-sustaining and understand where their food comes from and what goes into producing and harvesting and being safe with that food—it fits terrifically into the whole idea that when the ladies finally move out of the institutional setting,” Doran tells Food Tank. “It helps keep the recidivism lower, and that’s one of the big goals.”

The Growing Justice curriculum has three main pillars: hands-on work at the farm, classroom instruction on agriculture and food production, and workforce development, which includes resume writing and interview preparation. Participants spend around 10 hours with the program each week, over the span of five months. By the end, they receive a U.S. Department of Agriculture Good Agricultural Practices food safety certification, as well as a US$1,450 stipend after their release from the facility.

As water depletion becomes a growing issue in farming-forward South Carolina, the DOC continues to seek newer technologies, like vertical farming, to build efficiency in its agricultural operations. Tom Osmer, one of the department’s Assistant Deputy Directors, is excited by the Camille Graham farm’s model. He believes the combination of resource-efficient production, revenue generation for the DOC, nutritional value for inmates, and its potential to improve participants’ wellbeing and livelihoods make it an all-around win.

Impact Justice and South Carolina’s DOC describe the program’s influence as immense. “When they’re a part of something, they take more interest in rehabilitation, and it’s a form of therapy for the inmates to work and see their work come to fruition,” Osmer tells Food Tank. “We want them to live a fruitful life on the outside, so these are skills and disciplines they’re learning to keep them productive.”

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Photo courtesy of Impact Justice

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In Cuba, land has always meant talking about food production, sovereignty and the future. Agriculture is at the center of national priorities to produce more and better to feed the people.

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Argentina’s experience unmasks the IMF’s liberal narrative and makes it clear that its sole objective is to subordinate countries through the extortion of foreign debt.

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We demand an immediate end to the U.S. blockade against Cuba—a silent genocide that violates human rights and condemns our people.

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Pax Silica represents a model of development that prioritizes the interests of global capital and geopolitical competition, over food sovereignty, democratic control over land and water, climate justice, and the rights and livelihoods of Filipino communities.

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A "national interest" won by giving away people's right to survival and their food sovereignty is no national interest at all.

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La Via Campesina expresses unwavering solidarity with the peasants and working people in Myanmar and their revolution against the military dictatorship and their resistance against capitalist exploitation

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Climate change is becoming a major threat for farmers globally, impacting communities everywhere. States and the UNFCCC (Climate COPs) have failed us, driving our planet towards a +3/5 °C by the end of the century, in an accelerating phenomenom.

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Baltimore, Maryland is leveraging a historic US$11 million grant to invest in holistic solutions that build resilience in the city’s food and agriculture systems.

The city’s Food Policy and Planning (FPP) Division received the funding through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to improve access to healthy food without depending on brick-and-mortar grocery stores. Taylor LaFave, Baltimore’s Chief of Food Policy and Planning sees the strategy as innovative thanks to its comprehensive approach. In total, it spans five programs covering food access, Food is Medicine, and urban agriculture education.

The strategy builds on lessons from Baltimore’s COVID-19 emergency food response between 2020 and 2022. The city led an almost US$40 million effort to distribute more than 180 million servings of fresh fruits and vegetables to residents in what it calls “healthy food priority areas.”

That experience reinforced the importance of providing foods residents needed. “They not only needed it, but they also wanted it, they valued it, and it made a significant improvement in their lives and in their health,” says LaFave.

The pandemic also highlighted the shortcomings of traditional food retailers. For more than 10 years, Baltimore operated a tax incentive program to attract and retain grocery stores. But when stores shuttered, they realized that it may not be possible to bring a supermarket to every neighborhood.

“We can’t continue to rely on large private corporations that are ultimately only interested in profit to solve our healthy food access issues, and to improve our city’s food system,” LaFave tells Food Tank.

The ARPA investment instead supports programs available across the city, with the goal of reaching residents through multiple channels.

One initiative is the Black Butterfly Teaching Farm, supported through a partnership with the Farm Alliance of Baltimore. Located in a residential neighborhood near an elementary school and a high school, the farm combines food production with community engagement. It also offers mentorship and training for emerging farmers of color.

Neighbors have responded positively to the program, asking how to get involved and where they can buy the produce, says Najahla Olumiji, Baltimore’s Food Systems Planner.

The farm is also encouraging students to learn about urban food production. One group Olumiji saw during a recent visit was “shocked at how little space it takes to grow thousands of pounds of produce,” she tells Food Tank.

Another program under the strategy is Food Rx, hosted at MedStar Harbor Hospital and Good Samaritan Hospital. It provides enrolled patients with enough produce for 10 medically tailored meals per week to improve diet-related health outcomes and reduce the costs of care.

The city is also expanding access to fresh produce through the Produce Box Distribution Program, which connected residents with the equivalent of 195 million servings of produce since 2020. And with the B’More Fresh Program, they are able to provide US$30 in monthly fruit and vegetable vouchers to recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) when they shop online at Amazon and Safeway. The fifth program of the city’s strategy expands the use of electronic nutrition incentives at Baltimore City farmers markets.

Despite the successes that FPP has celebrated, the city is preparing for the end of ARPA funding at the end of October. “None of these programs will be able to continue how they’ve been operating by relying just on city funding,” LaFave explains.

But FPP doesn’t want these programs to disappear. They have secured some funding to put toward programs including Food Rx and Black Butterfly Teaching Farm. And each fiscal year, they receive US$150,000 from the city’s general fund, which they plan to use to help cover funding gaps and leverage additional grants.

In June 2026, the Division also received a grant from the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. As part of this, the team will work with researchers from the Center for a Livable Future over the next year to evaluate the programs and explore options for continuing them.

Public-private partnerships will be particularly important to sustain this work, LaFave believes. “We need national funders to step up and work more collaboratively together across the food system.”

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Photo courtesy of the Black Butterfly Teaching Farm

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