Global Youth Statement 2026: Food & Agriculture

I. Executive Summary

YOUNGO's Food & Agriculture Working Group developed this Global Youth Statement for COP31, building on the Working Group's demands at COP30 and SB64. It brings together the collective voice of young people through an inclusive, global consultation process: five open consultations in four languages (Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Arabic), three open calls for written input from Local and Regional Conferences of Youth (LCOYs/RCOYs — organized across 112 countries and 6 regions in 2026), partner organisations and youth groups, and two policy hackathons.

Agrifood systems sustain over 4 billion people, with 1.3 billion young people aged 15–24 and 44 percent of working youth depending on them for employment — yet small-scale agrifood systems received only 0.8 percent of tracked global climate finance in 2019/20, with smallholders receiving less than 0.3 percent overall. In 2025, up to 645 million people faced hunger, two-thirds of Africa's population could not afford a healthy diet, and human-induced land degradation was linked to at least 10 percent lower yields for 1.7 billion people, including an estimated 47 million children under five experiencing stunting.

With the Sharm el-Sheikh Joint Work's four-year mandate concluding at COP31, this statement sets out what Parties must deliver across six negotiation tracks and four action-agenda axes — moving climate action in agrifood systems beyond passive carbon accounting toward intergenerational equity.

II. YOUNGO Strategic Policy Position

Agrifood systems are central to food security, livelihoods, and rural economies, yet climate finance reaching small-scale producers remains severely inadequate. Parties should recognize young people, women, smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, and Indigenous Peoples as rights-holders, decision-makers, and implementing actors — and translate negotiated commitments into locally led, adequately financed, and measurable implementation.

1. Advance Gender Justice and Protect Human Rights

• Translate the Belém Gender Action Plan into guaranteed participation, gender-responsive climate finance, and capacity-building for women, young mothers, smallholder women farmers, and Indigenous and Afro-descendant women.
• Formally recognize and support women farmers independent of land ownership or title, addressing the disproportionate burden of unpaid care and adaptation work rural women carry.
• Apply a gender-responsive, human-security lens to food systems governance in fragile and conflict-affected regions, protecting agricultural infrastructure and stopping the weaponization of food and water.

2. Safeguard Child Nutritional Security

• Reinforce child nutritional security as a primary climate adaptation objective, safeguarding school feeding programmes against extreme weather and loss and damage, and sourcing diverse, locally grown foods.
• Strengthen disaggregated dietary and food-consumption data so national food security indicators track nutrient diversity and micronutrient intake, not just aggregate caloric volume.

3. Safeguard Agrobiodiversity, Seed Sovereignty, and Indigenous Knowledge Systems

• Guarantee farmers' rights to save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved native and peasant seeds, protected against corporate patenting, and fund community-managed seed banks to conserve germplasm and agrobiodiversity.
• Protect Indigenous and traditional agricultural knowledge, supporting partnerships for genetic-resource conservation and intergenerational knowledge transfer with respect for territorial autonomy and free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC).

4. Strengthen Locally Led Action in Agrifood Systems

• Create an enabling environment for young farmer cooperatives, producer organizations, and Self-Help Groups by supporting shared infrastructure and cooperative extension services.
• Strengthen local agricultural markets through public procurement and direct-distribution mechanisms that guarantee stable demand for local smallholders and youth-led enterprises.

III. Negotiations-Aligned Demands for COP31

1. Sharm el-Sheikh Joint Work on Agriculture and Food Security (SJWA)

• Conclude the SJWA with a strengthened, multi-year follow-up framework with clear implementation milestones and accountability.
• Translate SJWA outcomes into NDCs, NAPs, and national policies, strengthening coherence across UNFCCC workstreams.
• Strengthen funding and partnership matchmaking through the Sharm el-Sheikh Online Portal.

2. Adaptation

• Operationalize the Belém Adaptation Indicators for food and agriculture, including nutrition, soil health, water resilience, and rural livelihoods.
• Strengthen simplified, direct access to adaptation finance for small-scale producers, youth, women, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities.
• Recognize frontline producers and traditional knowledge holders as adaptation experts and rights-holders, not merely vulnerable populations.

3. Climate Finance

• Scale dedicated, grant-based, direct-access climate finance for youth-led, smallholder, and community-driven agrifood initiatives.
• Simplify access and strengthen project preparation and technical assistance, including local-language applications.
• Increase non-debt-creating finance and strengthen transparent tracking of climate finance reaching frontline agrifood actors.

4. Just Transition

• Ensure agriculture and food systems are explicitly addressed in the operationalization of the Belém–Antalya Mechanism.
• Protect decent work, agrarian livelihoods, and social protection, including for informal, seasonal, and migrant rural workers.
• Embed children and youth in just transition governance, with targeted financial and technical support for youth-led pathways.

5. Loss & Damage

• Integrate agricultural loss and damage into the post-COP31 agriculture and food security work programme.
• Strengthen assessment and disaggregated reporting of crop, livestock, fisheries, ecosystem, and infrastructure losses.
• Provide rapid, direct-access, non-debt-creating support for recovery and locally identified technical assistance.

6. Global Stocktake 2 (GST2)

• Ensure GST2 captures grassroots evidence on agricultural adaptation, food security, soil resilience, and rural livelihoods.
• Expand accessible participation and improve age-, gender-, and socio-economic-disaggregated information on climate impacts.
• Use GST2 findings to inform future NDCs, NAPs, finance, and international cooperation.

IV. Priorities Towards the Action Agenda

Beyond the formal negotiating tracks, the statement sets out priorities across four action-agenda axes — from aligning the Rio Conventions to guaranteeing young farmers direct finance and secure land tenure, defending water and soil as climate infrastructure, and cutting food loss and waste across the value chain.

Axis 9 · Rio Synergies

• Strengthen implementation synergies between the UNFCCC, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) by aligning priorities in NDCs, NAPs, Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets, and National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), and pursuing joint capacity-building, implementation, and financing.

Axis 6 & Axis 3 · Intergenerational Justice in Food Systems

• Deploy dedicated, direct-access financing windows for young farmers and youth-led agrifood initiatives — grants, concessional finance, and guarantees that eliminate collateral requirements — paired with technology transfer, technical mentorship, and financial literacy support.
• Reform discriminatory land tenure frameworks and support secure, affordable long-term access to land, including succession, lease, and collective-tenure arrangements, to transfer agricultural land to youth, women, and local smallholders.
• Secure decent work, living wages, safe working conditions, and universal climate-adaptive social protection for seasonal, informal, and migrant rural labourers, in line with international labour standards.

Axis 3 · Food Security: Water Governance & Soil Health

• Integrate the water–food–climate nexus into national climate commitments, expanding rainwater harvesting, water-efficient irrigation, and aquifer recharge while keeping access affordable for smallholders and downstream communities.
• Treat soil restoration as critical public adaptation infrastructure for resilient agriculture, recognizing that reversing human-induced cropland degradation can feed an additional 154 million people annually.
• Redirect public agricultural subsidies away from synthetic and highly hazardous inputs toward composting, soil testing, cover crops, mulching, agroecology, agroforestry, and reduced tillage.
• Safeguard public land and soil finance from false solutions — high-input monocultures, land-grabbing for industrial biofuels, and unverified soil carbon offset markets.

Axis 1 · Zero Waste

• Direct public finance and technical assistance to youth-led enterprises and young workers across the whole value chain — food processing, storage, logistics, and retail.
• Invest in decentralized, clean-energy post-harvest infrastructure — solar-powered dryers, mobile cold storage, hermetic grain storage, and rural feeder roads — to reduce post-harvest crop losses.

Contributors

Authored by the Food & Agriculture Working Group of YOUNGO, with contributions from:

• Ayse Umay Bahcivan (Turkey)
• Aayush Dwivedi (India)
• Abdul'Mumin Musa (Nigeria)
• Bruna Almeida (Brazil)
• Carolina Gonzalez Llamas (United States/Mexico)
• Catherine Martinez (United States/Venezuela)
• Danielle Rita Ndangani Mouleho (Republic of Congo)
• Edeh Chukwuma (Nigeria)
• Fadwa Zenati (Morocco)
• Fathan Mubina (Indonesia)
• Gugulethu Mahlangu (South Africa)
• Hanna Della Casa (Switzerland)
• Helena Van Tichelen (Belgium)
• Jin Tada (Japan)
• Kelehoun Sylvestre (Benin)
• Lisa Reichelt (Germany)
• Luisa Fernanda Duque Buitrago (Colombia)
• Michelle Bidima (Burkina Faso)
• Nela Cadinanos Gonzalez (Spain)
• Ni Luh Putu (Indonesia)
• Krisna Angga Dewi (Indonesia)
• Peter Warui (Kenya)
• Ravindu Nawanjana (United Kingdom/Sri Lanka)
• Rita Lousa (Portugal/Sweden)
• Sebastian Pedraza (Colombia)
• Shaik Imran (India)
• Shakshi Barbariya (Nepal)
• Shalom Egbebi (Nigeria)
• Ssembuusi Enock Joseph (Uganda)
• Vanessa Garcia Polanco (US/Dominican Republic)
• Xiaoshang Deng (China)

Read the Full Statement