Devex Dish: Could COP30 be a watershed moment for food systems?

It’s almost time for the biggest global development gathering ever on the outskirts of the Amazon rainforest. More than 45,000 people are expected to descend on the northern Brazilian city of Belém in the coming days for the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, which officially kicks off Monday. A high-level leaders’ summit starts tomorrow.

All eyes are on Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse and home to the world’s largest tropical forest as well as other critical ecosystems such as the Cerrado tropical savanna. As the host of COP30, Brazil has placed food systems high on the agenda: “Transforming agriculture and food systems” is one of the six pillars of the official COP30 Action Agenda, which is meant to guide negotiations and speed up efforts to meet global commitments made at previous climate summits, as well as the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Since taking office in 2023, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has shown he means business on food insecurity: Just months ago, Brazil was officially removed from the U.N.’s hunger map, a historic achievement driven by social policies such as cash transfers to vulnerable families, universal school meals, and increasing the minimum wage.  

So at COP30, can Brazil lead the world to make food systems more sustainable? 

That’s the hope, and momentum is everywhere. Emissions from livestock and methane from rice paddies are often cited as reasons that agriculture is “one of the problems” behind climate change, Sandra Milach, chief scientist at CGIAR and a Brazilian native, tells my colleague Ayenat Mersie. But “if we do this right, agriculture can serve as a very important solution,” she adds.

Here are five things we’re watching in Belém:

1. Will climate financing shift from mitigation to adaptation? Agriculture sits at the center of both, as Ayenat writes. It drives about a third of all global emissions but is also under threat from increasing heat, drought, and flooding. At COP30, groups such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development hope to change perceptions of investment in adaptation to an economic opportunity rather than a sunk cost.

2. Who will pay for the Baku-to-Belém road map? And how will agriculture and food systems feature in this pathway to scaling climate finance to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035? Will it include ways to channel finance to smallholder farmers? And what about nature-based solutions, which the U.N. Environment Programme estimates require more than $400 billion annually by 2030 — double current levels?  

3. Will countries feature food systems in their NDCs? So far 69 countries have submitted updated “nationally determined contributions,” also known as NDCs — or climate action plans — required ahead of COP30. Food systems feature very differently across them, often depending on whether they’re high or low emitters.

4. How do we balance anti-deforestation with food production? Keeping forests standing is a worthy goal via Brazil’s flagship $125 billion Tropical Forest Forever Facility, but can it be done while increasing food production — and thus, land use — to meet the needs of a population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050?

5. Declarations on hunger, fertilizers, and land use. This week, global leaders are expected to adopt the Belém Declaration on Hunger, Poverty, and People-Centered Climate Action, which builds on the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty that Brazil launched while it held the rotating G20 presidency last year. Meanwhile, the Resilient Agriculture Investment for net Zero land degradation initiative, or RAIZ, aims to channel investment to restore up to 250 million hectares of degraded land by 2030.

All of this comes as Brazil’s own agricultural systems are under the microscope. At COP30, its powerful agriculture industry is trying to project a green image — though it’s both the highest emitting sector of Brazil’s economy and the main driver of deforestation, with a part of the Amazon rainforest in Pará state being handed over to illegal cattle ranches just as COP30 gets underway.

Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock has joined Embrapa, the state-sponsored agricultural research agency, to host a COP30 AgriZone pavilion that will showcase climate-friendly agricultural research and innovation, sponsored by major agribusinesses such as Nestlé and Bayer. A new report today from the Changing Markets Foundation shows how the world’s biggest meat companies, such as JBS, are positioning themselves as champions of climate action at COP30 while lobbying behind the scenes to avoid regulation — a greenwashing campaign that the report says jeopardizes Brazil’s climate leadership. Brazil’s own NDC makes no mention of reducing methane from meat and dairy.

Read: Food and climate at COP30 — 5 things to watch in Belém

See also: US officials to skip COP30 as local leaders vow to fill the gap

And don’t miss: The power and pageantry of the COP presidency 

+ Will you be in Belém next week? Ayenat will be on the ground and would love to meet Dish readers. Drop her a line at ayenat.mersie@devex.com.

In preparation for the landmark summit, Ayenat will also be hosting a Devex Pro Briefing tomorrow to preview the major talking points at COP30 with Karen Silverwood-Cope of World Resources Institute Brasil and Marcene Mitchell of the World Wildlife Fund. Register here to join the conversation.

Number munching

That’s the number of people worldwide living in areas where crop yields are falling because of land degradation induced by human activity, according to a new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization. It defines this “pervasive and silent global challenge” as a long-term decline in the land’s ability to deliver essential ecosystem functions and services.

This edition of FAO’s flagship annual report — called the State of Food and Agriculture and known in the development sector as SOFA — focuses on land degradation as a growing threat to agricultural productivity, food security, rural livelihoods, and ecosystem resilience. It can result from natural factors such as soil erosion and salinization, but more often it now results from human activities such as deforestation, overgrazing, and unsustainable cropping and irrigation processes. And it affects people of all regions and income levels, though Asian countries are most affected due to the scale of their degradation and high population densities.

The findings highlight how land degradation “is not an inevitable consequence of agriculture but rather the result of specific management choices and policy failures,” the report states. But it also offers some hope, showing how reversing 10% of degradation on existing cropland — such as via crop rotations and cover cropping to preserve soil health — could restore enough production to feed 154 million more people each year.

Bring on the birthday cake

The Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty just turned 1, and it’s quickly shifting into action. The initiative, launched last November during Brazil’s G20 presidency, bills itself as a kind of matchmaking service where a global secretariat helps countries connect with one another —  along with international organizations, financial institutions, and nonprofit organizations — to implement programs to end hunger.

The alliance marked its first birthday Monday with its inaugural leaders’ meeting in Doha, Qatar, just as the Second World Summit on Social Development got underway. There, the alliance’s director Renato Godinho told my colleague Elissa Miolene that the first year hasn’t been easy amid strained budgets and bureaucratic hurdles. “We’ve done all the matchmaking and put them in contact,” with the right partners, he said. Now, “the country takes the front seat and starts to drive the process.”

As of Monday, 12 countries have released plans to fight hunger, while four have taken steps to put them into action: Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, and Zambia. Kenya has spent the past year adapting learnings from a Brazilian safe water project, with philanthropic support from The Rockefeller Foundation and a commitment from the African Development Bank to raise $77 million for the project. Zambia, for its part, is expanding its flagship social cash transfer program by integrating nutrition support, with the help of multiple partners. Meanwhile, nine other countries have devised food-focused plans and are now “opened for partnership,” according to the alliance.

Read: One year on, global hunger alliance shifts into execution mode

Background: Brazil launches a G20 plan to slash hunger across the world

See also: World leaders adopt Doha Political Declaration as US stays silent 

Real food, artificial intelligence

At the AI for Development conference in Barcelona, Spain, late last month, Nasim Motalebi, AI lead at the World Food Programme, shared insights on WFP’s AI strategy amid the gap between AI hype and reality.

While predictions for AI uptake suggested 60% task automation and massive productivity gains, current data shows only 5% of tasks have been automated, with over 95% of organizations failing to scale AI effectively, she said. At WFP, the focus has shifted to practical applications: WFP “wanted to start somewhere to see fast and scalable impact,” Motalebi said. After 18 months of development, the agency is deploying an internal ELM, or Enterprise Language Model — a platform enabling staff to access scattered, messy organizational data in real time. The agency also released its AI strategy earlier this year, a first for a U.N. agency.

Read: How the development sector is finding its own way with AI

Related: 4 ways AI is changing the development job market (Career)

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Chew on this

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the U.N.-backed global hunger monitor, found that famine has gripped two more regions of Sudan as fighting intensifies. [The Telegraph]

The Green Climate Fund approved $1.3 billion in new project commitments, bringing its total climate finance approvals to a record $3.26 billion for 2025. [Devex]

What the One Acre Fund has learned five years after an infusion of $20 million in catalytic capital. [Impact Alpha]

Whole Foods, MAHA, and the battle over healthy eating in America. [The New York Times]

Honesty Pern contributed to this edition of Devex Dish.