Abraham Jayariyu grew up in La Guajira, a dry stretch of northern Colombia. His indigenous Wayúu community has lived there for generations. La Guajira is one of the hungriest places in Colombia. Surveys show that roughly two thirds of people there don’t have enough to eat.
Three thousand miles away, off Semarang in Indonesia, Ahmad Marzuki is out on the water most mornings by three. He’ll tell you plainly that the sea doesn’t give what it used to. A few years ago, twenty or twenty-five kilos a day was nothing. Now four or five can be a struggle.
And in Uganda, Anna Mbabazi tends cattle and grows maize on a small plot, watching a sky that keeps getting the timing wrong. Rain too late, too hard, or not at all.
Three continents, three languages, three entirely different ways of witnessing progressive climate disruption. It’s very likely that these people would have never crossed paths.
And yet, earlier this year they did. Twice a week, for seven weeks, Abraham, Ahmad and Anna joined 102 others from more than 60 countries and territories on video calls, as part of the Global Citizens’ Assembly on Food (Systems) and Climate, a process that brought together people from across the world and asked them to help find solutions for the global food systems crisis.
The timing could not be sharper. Last year, 266 million people across 47 countries faced high levels of acute food insecurity, nearly double the figure a decade ago. Since elected officials could not be trusted to tackle this long-looming crisis, time had come for people to take the lead.
For seven weeks, twice a week, 105 participants from 60 countries deliberated online
Here is how a citizens’ assembly works. A group of people is selected by a type of lottery called sortition. It’s an algorithm that’s built to mirror the population. In this case it was in regards to its geography, its ages, its genders, its exposure to a warming planet, with a slight favour to the Global South and more vulnerable geographies. Then they are given space to sit with the problem. Weeks of hearing scientists and practitioners out, discussing, deliberating and weighing difficult trade-offs, before landing on recommendations.
None of this is new, exactly. Ireland used it to break the political deadlock on same-sex marriage and abortion. France ran a national climate assembly that produced 149 proposals, several of which are now law.
What was different here was the scale, and the nerve of the subject. This was the first assembly of its kind to go global, aimed squarely at transforming the food systems, responsible for roughly a third of the emissions heating the planet.
Over 42 hours, these 105 people took on topics such as land use, agriculture, diets, the exact territory governments have spent decades tiptoeing around because it’s politically radioactive.
And crucially, the expertise in the room didn’t run one way. For every scientist’s slide deck, there was a smallholder farmer or a fisher who could tell you, in plain language, what a changing climate does to a harvest, a herd, a household budget. Put those two forms of knowledge in a room together and conversations become solutions.
The assembly agreed to 22 Calls to Action
By the end, the assembly had agreed to 22 Calls to Action. Every one passed with at least 85% support. This level of agreement is almost unheard of in many other spaces and somehow 105 strangers, from Uganda to Nepal, from small island states to major agricultural exporters, found common ground anyway.
The call that took longest to reach was about subsidies: who gets the money, and why. Right now, most public farming subsidy rewards scale. The bigger the operation, the bigger the cheque, whatever it’s doing to the soil, the water table or the climate. The assembly voted to flip that logic entirely, demanding that at least three-quarters of subsidies reward sustainable practice rather than sheer volume or output.
Underneath that sat a harder argument still, about land. Industrial animal food production is the single biggest driver of tropical deforestation, which means protecting forests requires shrinking the room for that production to expand.
The assembly voted to protect forests and to phase down industrial animal food production alongside it. Support for that position shifted by 29 percentage points over the course of their deliberations, including among people from livestock farming communities. Nobody engineered that. Nobody could have envisioned/anticipated such outcomes. But it proved that when given time and evidence, people get there by themselves.
Systemic reform is needed instead of merely changing consumer choices
What the assembly refused to do was let anyone off the hook by turning this into a lecture about individual shopping choices. They explicitly rejected the idea that the burden belongs to consumers picking differently at the supermarket. Instead they understood that this change needed to come from supply chain reform, corporate accountability, deforestation-free sourcing rules, binding standards, real penalties for the companies and governments profiting from forests cleared for feed and grazing.
The set of priorities from the people who will actually live with the consequences of getting this wrong will aim to feed into the UN Climate Change process, and that process has been endorsed by a coalition that includes Brazil, holder of the COP30 presidency.
Whether every proposal survives contact with the rooms where these decisions actually get made matters less to me than what the exercise itself proves. It demolishes the quiet assumption that food and climate are too complicated for the public, and that we’re an audience rather than participants. We are not.
That assumption, frankly, is a large part of why trust in political institutions has collapsed as far as it has. People didn’t switch off because they can’t handle a difficult trade-off. They switched off because nobody bothered to ask them to try.
No set of Calls to Action, however strong, will protect Anna Mbabazi’s plot of land on its own, or Ahmad’s seas. But this assembly is proof that there is a tested, credible way of putting the people most exposed to this crisis in the room where its future gets decided.
Whether governments listen now is up to them. The people affected have already done their part.
