COP30 in Belém has ended. Yet what lingers is not what was agreed, but what was conspicuously absent. The Just Transition Mechanism was announced, and the Global Mutirão was celebrated, but agriculture, food systems, land, and the farmers who sustain them were once more excluded from the center of climate decision-making. Their absence hangs heavily, an omission that becomes a presence. One is left asking: How can climate justice be imagined while those most affected are rendered invisible?
The Global North’s Constructive Silence
In the official narrative, pledges were made. Adaptation finance was promised to triple, though the long-promised USD 120 billion per year was pushed to 2035. Fossil fuels were barely mentioned. Industrial agriculture, despite its well-documented climate footprint, was left untouched.
Brazil introduced initiatives outside the UN system, including a tropical forest fund and a fossil fuel transition plan, but the central COP30 decisions avoided reckoning with the agrifood system. The Global North in particular resisted naming industrial agriculture, GM seeds, monocultures, and land grabs as climate drivers. By excluding food and farming from the Global Mutirão, emissions were framed as a problem solvable without challenging corporate agriculture. But that silence shields ongoing harm.
Agrifood systems accounted for 37 percent of global emissions in 2023, equivalent to 16.5 billion tonnes of CO₂. Yet the sector received only 4 percent of climate finance while more than 300 agribusiness lobbyists shaped the negotiations. The violence of monocultures, deforestation, and soil collapse continues to exacerbate the crisis, returning stronger in every cycle of inaction.
The Just Transition Mechanism was approved with inclusive language but without assured funding. The emissions gap persists, and the so-called accelerator program offers little more than a promise to report again next year. Agriculture, ultimately, was silenced at COP30, giving the impression that climate solutions can be crafted without reckoning with food systems. The consequences of this silence are already visible: biodiversity loss deepens, emissions rise, and rural vulnerability expands.
The Philippine Government’s Silence
The Philippine delegation could have intervened in this global erasure. Representing a country repeatedly battered by climate disasters, it had the mandate to highlight farmer-led agroecology, land rights, seed sovereignty, and the urgent need for a fossil fuel phaseout. Instead, it reproduced the prevailing omission.
By declining to foreground agriculture and by failing to support a just energy transition, the delegation allowed the long-standing marginalization of rural communities to persist. The silence of the Philippine delegation is not abstract. It translates into weakened livelihoods, unprotected farmers, and a deepening vulnerability of Indigenous and rural peoples who already live at the edge of climate reality.
What Must Be Done?
From Below
Strengthen farmer-led agroecology as the basis of climate resilience by supporting community seed banks, diversified farms, and knowledge systems that regenerate soil and biodiversity while reducing dependence on fossil-fuel inputs.
Build bottom-up, people-led climate councils so farmers, Indigenous peoples, women, and other frontline communities can articulate what states routinely ignore and shape climate policy from the ground up.
Defend seeds, soils, and land from corporate capture to protect the commons on which food sovereignty and climate justice depend.
From Above
Use the UNFCCC’s core principles to center agriculture. Its aims to prevent dangerous warming, uphold equity, ensure adaptation and loss-and-damage support, mobilize finance, and conduct a meaningful global stocktake all point to one imperative: transform food systems.
Demand real, grant-based climate finance directed not toward corporate supply chains but toward strengthening farmers’ capacities.
Reform the agriculture workstream away from input-heavy “climate-smart” corporate models and toward agroecology, biodiversity, and farmer-led innovations.
Establish clear conflict-of-interest rules so agribusiness lobbyists cannot determine the future of food, land, and climate policy.
The Haunting That Remains
Climate justice will remain haunted as long as the agrarian question is deflected. The land remembers. The farmers remember. The bodies of the hungry remember. It is time for the negotiations, and the governments behind them, to remember too.