Regenerative Agriculture at COP30

Hugh Locke, with many years' experience in rural agriculture in Haiti, has prepared an important paper for climate change COP30 in Belem, Brazil, 10-21 November 2025. The paper discusses two different worldviews and perspectives on the reform of agriculture to simultaneously build soil health, enhance biodiversity, eliminate chemical inputs and create more resilient farming systems faced by climate change.

Agroecology based on Indigenous values of wholeness with the natural world and local community responsibility for producing food in sustainable ways, connects farming practices to broader questions of social justice, land rights, food sovereignty, and challenging corporate control of food systems.

Regenerative agriculture also emphasizes social outcomes like community wellbeing, farmer profitability, and improved livelihoods, but tends to see these benefits as intrinsic to the farming methodology, making it more accessible to corporations and mainstream institutions, which can adopt the framework and pursue its social benefits without necessarily aligning with a particular political agenda or challenging existing ownership patterns and power structures. Since it is not well defined, it lends itself through purely environmental and economic measures to greenwashing to hide deeper corporate interests. He asks who defines regenerative agriculture? Will it be just another marketing tool within the present economic system, or a deeper organic approach rooted in local community experience to rebuild the productive capacity of the planet?

Hugh explores the promises and contradictions of these approaches, the kind of transformation they might lead to, and the challenges of implementation. You can access the full paper here.