- Climate
The Cop30 decision failed to mention the food industry despite the sector being responsible for one third of emissions. Nick Ferris reports
Friday 28 November 2025 12:57 GMTComments
CloseCocoa farm in the Amazon suffering devastating climate impacts
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Food and nature experts have expressed dismay at the outcome of Brazil’s recently-concluded Cop30 climate conference, after the final text failed to make any mention of the impact of climate change on food systems.
A plan to address food systems emissions is critical to decarbonisation, with the sector responsible for around one-third of overall emissions, which originates from areas including livestock, waste disposal, food processing, as well as rice paddy fields, which produce large quantities of methane.
From a climate adaptation point of view, food systems are also considered crucial, given that an estimated 500 million people around the world are smallholder farmers, whose livelihoods are put at ever greater risk year after year due to extreme weather.
These smallholders are estimated to have a further two billion people dependent on them - while studies suggest that they produce around one-third of the world’s food.
“It is deeply disappointing that the [outcome] did not explicitly mention food systems and agriculture,” says Haseeb Bakhtary, who was following the negotiations closely for the consultancy Climate Focus. “We were all hoping for and advocating for an explicit inclusion of food systems… but that has not happened.”
Seb Osborn, who was doing the same for the nonprofit Mercy For Animals, shares a similar view. “I think it was a disappointing outcome,” he says. “The fact that there are mentions of energy, deforestation, and a lot of other sectors – but not of food systems – is surprising.”
open image in galleryA smallholder farmer in the Afar Region of Ethiopia. The world’s 500 million smallholders are among the most vulnerable people to climate change (WFP/Michael Tewelde)A UN report released during Cop30, meanwhile, found that disasters have led to agricultural losses worth $3.26tn (£2.49bn) over the past 33 years, amounting to around 4 per cent of global agricultural GDP.
With agri-business giant Brazil hosting this year’s climate summit, many had hoped that Cop30 would lead to a stronger outcome for agriculture and food than previous years.
As to why that wasn’t the case, Bakhtary believes that this is largely due to the fact that food systems are very context-specific, with different countries having very different agricultural sectors.
“We still could have had an outcome recognising the need for food system transformation across countries, which acknowledges that the change needs to be driven by local contexts,” he says.
Raj Patel, research professor at the University of Texas, believes that the outcome has the fingerprints of industrial agriculture lobbyists all over it. “This is not failure. This is capture,” he says. “Until we name it for what it is, and until governments choose people over corporate interests, these negotiations will continue to betray the very communities they claim to serve.”
The farmer with a devastated cocoa crop
Cop30’s location in Belém, a city on the edge of the Amazon Rainforest, means that you did not have to go far to find evidence of food systems under threat from the climate crisis.
A short boat ride from the city centre takes you to Combu Island where Dona Nena farms cocoa beans on land owned by her family for more than a century, and also produces artisanal chocolate.
Speaking among her cocoa trees, which lie among native forest trees on the edge of the rainforest, she told The Independent that previously-unseen extreme weather had been significantly disrupting her harvests by disrupting the harvest time and reducing the size of her crop.
open image in galleryDona Nena inspects cocoa beans on her farm on Combu Island (Nick Ferris)“We’ve been noticing we don’t have as much rain as before - we are supposed to be in a rainy season already - but they haven’t come,” she said. “By now we should have many more fruits, so that we can start our harvest in December.
“But since last year, we have been realising that the harvest has been changing. The production has been decreasing, and sometimes there are deformed fruits.”
There are clear asks that Dona Nena would have if more money was available from authorities to address the climate crisis, particularly around improved water-access infrastructure like water pumps and local damming systems.
“We hope that at Cop30 they will pay attention to us smallholders with better policies - and also work to grant us better public services around sanitation, education and security,” she added, speaking to The Independent just ahead of the final deal being agreed.
open image in galleryCocoa beans grow on the trees of Dona Nena's farm (Nick Ferris)According to Florence Collenette, a senior technical manager on climate at The Fairtrade Foundation, Dona Nena’s story is typical.
“Every day, we hear from smallholder farmers and agricultural workers who are already grappling with the harsh realities of climate change,” she says. “One cocoa farmer in Côte d’Ivoire recently shared how erratic rainfall patterns caused yields in his cooperative to plummet by more than 50% last year.
“Smallholder food producers in developing countries grow over a third of the world’s food and are on the frontlines of climate adaptation. Yet, their voices are too often missing from the global conversation.”
Climate adaptation letdown
The key Cop30 negotiating area that would help Dona Nena is climate adaptation, which is all about financially and technically supporting people as climate impacts intensify.
The other key negotiated document at Cop30 beyond the Mutirão was the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), which is a framework through which countries are supposed to be measuring climate adaptation under the Paris Agreement, based on a number of core indicators.
Food systems were mentioned here, with areas highlighted including the management of food yields, research and development, food supplies, and land degradation. However, Mercy For Animals’ Seb Osborn, the outcome on adaptation was inadequate.
“We did not see any real discussion of the specifics of indicators until quite late in the Cop, and then only in closed sessions,” he says. “And what we have on food systems is quite unclear, and I think countries are going to struggle to monitor and report on these as they are supposed to.”
For Bakhtary, just the fact that food systems are mentioned is a “small win”, even if it is not what advocates had been pushing for. The big disappointment for him is instead the aid plan that has been negotiated alongside the goal - to triple financing for climate adaptation for poorer countries by 2035 - and the low likelihood that this will filter down to farmer communities.
“The financing goal is vague and has an unclear baseline - and it comes in the context of agriculture and food systems only receiving around 1 per cent of climate finance currently,” he says. He adds - as The Independent has previously reported - that the systems through which the money is accessed need to be “completely transformed” if there is any hope that it will reach the smallholder farmers most in need of the money.
Bakhtary’s comments come as a report published ahead of Cop30 found that smallholders with 10 hectares of land or less will require $443bn a year to adapt to climate impacts: A figure lower than the $470 billion a year that the UN estimates are currently spent on environmentally-destructive agricultural practices.
Smallholders are currently spending an estimated 20 to 40 per cent of their annual income on adaptive measures - which can range from irrigation channels to climate-resistant seeds to new equipment - despite having done next to nothing to contribute to the climate crisis.
This article was produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
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