With thanks to Louise Davies from Scottish Fair Trade for this piece.
‘Where is the food?
It became a running joke among delegates in the early days of COP30 – but the question applied to more than lunch queues. Food systems, agriculture and diets remain surprisingly peripheral to the climate negotiations, despite being responsible for roughly a third of global emissions and central to resilience, justice, and biodiversity.
Food on the margins
While energy dominated headlines, the food content at COP sat scattered across a handful of side events and small, easily missed pavilions. As others have noted, the final agreement emerging from COP30 mentioned “food” just once: as a narrowly framed indicator under “climate-resilient food production” in the adaptation section. There was no meaningful recognition of food systems overall, no roadmap to tackle emissions, deforestation, or industrial agriculture’s role in the climate crisis.
Important discussions were happening – on agroecology, smallholder rights, school feeding programmes, food waste, and shifting diets – but tucked away in pavilions, they lacked visibility and political momentum.
Even where food systems were discussed, the real drivers of harm were often absent. Multinationals responsible for deforestation, intensive livestock systems, and globalised commodity chains were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the panels were filled with smallholders, cooperatives, and grassroots leaders, the very people already delivering sustainable solutions with almost no support.
Key themes: justice, transition and accountability
What came through strongly was a shared call for a fair, just transition in food and agriculture. Speakers from Kenya, Gambia and across Latin America emphasised:
- the importance of traditional knowledge and community leadership
- the need to protect the rights of women and Indigenous peoples
- the need for land rights, self-determination and a rebalancing of power
- the huge vulnerability of small producers to climate disruption
- and the uncomfortable truth that our current food system is still shaped by colonial patterns of extraction.
Brazil offered some important inspiration: strong policy coherence, localised procurement, integrated development planning, and a commitment to serving sustainable, family-farmed food at the conference itself.
Diets and demand: signs of a shift
One of the most dynamic spaces was the Denmark Pavilion, which took a confident stance on plant-based diets and government responsibility to shift consumption. Danish and Québec MPs openly discussed reducing harmful subsidies, designing policy frameworks that bring farmers into the transition rather than blaming them and even promoting tofu as a climate solution.
This kind of leadership was refreshing, and largely missing elsewhere.
Where the Scottish Food Coalition can step in
COP30 showed clearly that food will not rise up the agenda without organised pressure. There is a strong opportunity for the Coalition to:
1. Continue to push for food systems to sit centrally in Scottish climate policy
Policy coherence is something Lula’s government in Brazil have embraced, and remains a weakness for Scotland. Integrating climate, food, agriculture, procurement and public health could be a powerful focus for advocacy.
2. Champion a just transition for food
Voices from the Global South emphasised rights, equity and community control. Scotland can amplify these messages and explore what a genuinely fair transition looks like for farmers, workers, and consumers here.
3. Learn from others’ success
The Denmark Pavilion hosted practical discussions rooted in their national action plan for plant-based foods – covering chef training, school meals, research funding, export support and targeted subsidies, plus a commitment to make plant-based policy a European priority in 2025. Perhaps we could arrange a knowledge exchange session to understand how they are creating the shift towards healthy, sustainable, less resource-intensive diets.
4. Engage on procurement as a climate tool
With 13–20% of GDP flowing through public procurement, and food being a key part of it, using this lever to support fair, local, ethical and sustainable food is a major climate opportunity.
5. Join the food movement for COP31
Food needs a far stronger, louder, more coordinated presence. The Coalition could help mobilise Scottish organisations, researchers and producers to play a bigger role in future COPs.