70 Scientific American, March 2022 Illustration by Hanna Barczyksands of delegates it represented
had given up on attending it.
It was double trouble for dele-
gates from nations red-listed for
COVID, who had to quarantine in
hotels for days on arrival in the
U.K. After passing the hurdles of
obtaining visas and covering ex-
pensive travel costs, many negotia-
tors were excluded from the con-
ference halls and had to watch the
proceedings from screens in their
rooms—which they could just as
well have done from their home
countries. COVID protocols re-
quired some side events to have
only panelists speaking beforeVa c c i n e
Inequality Shut
Vulnerable
People Out
of Plans to
Save the Planet
F
or decades a global econom-
ic system based on the con-
version of nature into profit
has been accelerating inequality,
environmental destruction and
climate change. Hundreds of mil-
lions of people are vulnerable to
(seemingly) natural disasters, in-
cluding pandemics caused by the
emergence of novel pathogens. By
exacerbating xenophobic national-
ism and precipitating vaccine
apartheid, COVID-19 has intensi-
fied these dangerous trends.
People from the Global South
have always been underrepresented
at international conferences where
road maps for the future are etched.
Now the barriers to participation
are prohibitive. With the voices of
those worst impacted by biodiver-
sity loss and climate change being
muffled by COVID-related con-
straints, corporate and other win-
ners of the neoliberal order are
seizing decision-making processes
on these crucial and urgent issues,
to the detriment of people and
the biosphere.
The one major event since the
pandemic began that was not im-
pacted by COVID-related restric-
tions was the United Nations Food
Systems Summit, held on Septem-
ber 23, 2021. That is because it was
shunned by more than 300 civil-Those with the most at stake
were heard the leastBy Nnimmo Bassey
society groups representing scien-
tists, farmers and Indigenous peo-
ples for being at best indifferent,
and at worst hostile, to their views.
As the Alliance for Food Sover-
eignty in Africa (AFSA), which rep-
resents more than 200 million Af-
rican food producers and others,
observed, the summit had been
structured to give undue influence
over global agricultural systems to
multinational corporations and
their allies. As such, the summit
was bound to “echo the busi-
ness-as-usual, quick-technofix pol-
icy prescriptions of the agribusi-
ness agenda,” AFSA argued. The
boycott, along with an alternative
summit that focused on food sov-
ereignty, may have fended off what
many observers feared was an at-
tempt by global capital to control
the future of agriculture.
But COVID constraints en-
sured that civil society was barely
represented at the U.N. Biodiversi-
ty Conference last October, where
delegates from 195 nation-states
and the European Union met to
discuss a plan to protect 30 per-
cent of the planet by 2030. Many
Indigenous groups, who have am-
ple reason to fear violent eviction
from and dispossession of the eco-
systems they protect as nation-
states use “30 by 30” as an excuse
to seize their territories, opposed
the plan. But with their partici-
pation limited to brief online
appearances, they were unable
to explain their concerns or pro-
vide their alternative visions for
biodiversity conservation.
Most disastrously impacted by
the pandemic was COP26, the
26th Conference of Parties to the
U.N. Framework Convention on
Climate Change, held in Glasgow,
Scotland, last October–November.
Climate activists condemned the
conference as the most exclusion-
ary COP ever, with delegates fac-
ing severe COVID-related restric-
tions for entering the U.K. and ac-
cessing the venue. The COP26
Coalition, representing grassroots
activists from around the world,
announced as the conference be-
gan that two thirds of the thou-Nnimmo Bassey
is director of the
Health of Mother
Earth Foundation,
based in Nigeria.
His books include
To Cook a Continent:
Destruct ive Extraction
and the Climate Crisis
in Africa (Pambazuka
Press, 2012).