Sessions
50 years of struggles for system change and alternatives to industrial growth civilization. What we did, what we learnt, what we do now
1:00 PM - 2:45 PM Tue
Biodiversity, climate justice and the risks of dangerous distractions – UNFCCC and the Convention on Biological Diversity
3:00 PM - 4:45 PM Tue
Pat Mooney half a century of experience working in international civil society, first addressing aid and development issues and then focusing on food, agriculture, new technologies and corporate concentration of power. The author or co-author of several books on the politics of biotechnology and biodiversity, Pat Mooney is widely regarded as an authority on issues of agricultural diversity, global governance, and corporate concentration.
He is the co-founder of ETC Group (Action group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration), for which he was Executive Director for several decades. Under Pat’s leadership ETC's work expanded from plant genetics and agriculture to in the early 1980s include biotechnology, pioneering international mobilization against GMOs. In the late 1990s, the work expanded further to encompass a succession of emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, geoengineering, and new developments ranging from genomics and neurosciences to robotics and 3-D printing.
Pat Mooney and ETC group (www.etcgroup.org) are known for having coined the term “Biopiracy” and discovered and named The Terminator seeds – Genetically-modified seeds designed to die at harvest. He received The Right Livelihood Award (the "Alternative Nobel Prize") in the Swedish Parliament in 1985.
Since he retired from ETC Group management he spends his time writing and engaging with the issues as much as ever before. He was most recently heavily involved in the work by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-FOOD) on the report “A Long Food Movement: Transforming food systems by 2045” (https://www.ipes-food.org/_img/upload/files/LongFoodMovementEN.pdf)