ProVeg participates in Global Youth Food Workshop

During the recent Earth Week, ProVeg’s Lana Weidgenant traveled to Nairobi and Naivasha in Kenya for the Act4Food Act4Change workshop, which gathered young people who are active in food-systems work from over 20 different countries around the world. Act4Food Act4Change is a global campaign led by young people that mobilizes the power of youth to call for a global food system that provides everyone with access to safe, affordable, and nutritious diets, while simultaneously protecting nature, tackling climate change, and promoting human rights.

Act4Food Act4Change was launched in May last year and has already gathered more than 160,000 signatures committing to individually act for food-systems transformation and to “demand urgent large-scale action from others, especially from decision-makers in government and business”.

During the workshop, the young leaders reflected on past work, including at the UN Food Systems Summit and UN Climate Change Conference last year (you can read more about ProVeg’s work around UN Climate Change here and our work around the UN Food Systems Summit here). The young advocates also reflected on goals and a pathway forward, particularly for turning international visions into localized implementations.

This year Act4Food Act4Change launched the following 10 priority youth actions on food systems:

1. Everyone should be able to afford healthy and nutritious food.
2. Back sustainable farming in order to regenerate our soils and reduce damaging chemicals.
3. Every child should eat a healthy and sustainable meal at pre-school, school, and college.
4. Educate everyone about food and its impact on our planet and our health.
5. Stop and reverse land-use conversion, including deforestation.
6. Ban single-use plastics in food and drink packaging.
7. Place value on local and indigenous food knowledge.
8. Create employment for young farmers and agri-preneurs.
9. Protect food production from political disruption, conflicts, and the effects of climate change.
10.  Support local growers and food producers with subsidies and tax incentives.

Lana Weidgenant from ProVeg is the youth champion for the action on reversing land-use conversion, including deforestation. As a Brazilian-American advocate, Lana highlights the fact that “to make animal farming more sustainable, changing the ‘how?’ is not enough to keep us within planetary boundaries, we also need to change the ‘how much?’”.  She emphasizes that  “a reduction in the production and consumption of farmed animals is necessary to maintain a livable future for youth, and to reach an end to the deforestation that is harming local communities in countries such as Brazil.”

ProVeg is also leading the way in youth-action priorities, including sustainable school meals, which you can learn more about here, and education regarding food’s planetary impacts.