By Hugh Locke, President and Co-Founder of Futurra and Smallholder Farmers Alliance
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This piece was previously published in stages on November 11th and 17th, 2025 on the International Environment Forum website. It is being republished with permission. See the original article here.
If you were paying attention during Climate Week in New York City this past September, you might have noticed something striking. Among more than 900 events across the city, regenerative agriculture claimed about 100 of them. That is roughly 11 percent of all programming, making it one of the five most discussed topics of the week. Major corporations like Walmart, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Amazon were hosting sessions. The Rockefeller Foundation announced $100 million to provide regeneratively-sourced school meals to 100 million children worldwide. There was even an entire venue called RegenHouse that featured 56 sessions just on regenerative food systems.
The momentum felt real. Reports indicated greater numbers of smallholders in the Global South and small to mid-size family farms in the Global North are transitioning to regenerative. Governments were making joint statements. Corporate commitments were pouring in. Technology solutions were being unveiled. It seemed like regenerative agriculture had finally made the leap from niche methodology to mainstream climate strategy. Then came COP30.
Setting the Stage in Belém
For those unfamiliar with the acronym, COP stands for Conference of the Parties, which is the annual United Nations climate change conference where countries gather to negotiate global responses to the climate crisis. This year’s conference, COP30, is taking place in Belém, Brazil—a coastal city known as the gateway to the Amazon River. Taking place from November 10 to 21, this is the 30th such gathering and Brazil has positioned it as a conference focused on implementation rather than just pledges. Agriculture is objective number three on the agenda, and regenerative agriculture features prominently in their plans.
On paper, COP30 should be the perfect stage for regenerative agriculture to shine. Brazil is launching something called the RAIZ Initiative, which stands for Resilient Agriculture Investment for Net Zero Land Degradation. It is an ambitious global effort to accelerate investments in restoring degraded agricultural lands, with a goal of restoring 1.5 billion hectares by 2030. Earlier this year, Brazil mobilized $6 billion to restore 3 million hectares of degraded pastureland. Companies like Syngenta are announcing programs to recover 1 million hectares in the Cerrado region. PepsiCo partnered with other companies to support regenerative practices on thousands of acres of Brazilian farmland.
The corporate playbook from Climate Week appears to be getting deployed in Brazil. There are panels at something called the Agrizone Pavilion, with sponsors like Nestlé and Bayer. There are 27 sessions focused specifically on regenerative agriculture. The language is familiar: systems thinking, measurable outcomes, profitability for farmers, supply chain resilience.
Two Summits, Two Worldviews
Here is where things get complicated.
While the official COP30 proceedings celebrate regenerative agriculture as a climate solution, there is a parallel event happening just a few miles away. It is called the People’s Summit, and is expected to draw participants from social movements, Indigenous groups, traditional communities, and grassroots organizations. They are gathering specifically to present an alternative vision to what they see happening at the official conference. In fairness, it should also be noted that the Brazilian government has taken steps to include local voices at COP30 itself, including the participation of a record-breaking 3,000 Indigenous peoples.
The People’s Summit is focused on agroecology and food sovereignty, demanding land demarcation for Indigenous peoples and promoting what they call “living territories” in direct opposition to what they characterize as predatory agribusiness. They are emphasizing family farmers, peasant production, and Indigenous food systems as the real path to climate-resilient agriculture.
If you are wondering why the People’s Summit uses the term “agroecology” while those taking part in the official COP30 talk about “regenerative agriculture,” you are asking the right question. In terms of actual farming practices and environmental outcomes, the two approaches are roughly analogous. Both emphasize building soil health, enhancing biodiversity, eliminating chemical inputs, and creating more resilient farming systems. Both focus on working with natural processes rather than against them. And if you were to visit two farms, one agroecological and one regenerative, the practices followed would be almost identical.
But what unites both approaches is something more fundamental: a shared view that agricultural transformation must be approached holistically. Both agroecology and regenerative agriculture reject the notion that environmental, economic, and social outcomes can be addressed separately or sequentially. Instead, they understand that meaningful agricultural transformation requires these dimensions to be addressed simultaneously. Healthy soil, biological diversity, profitable farmers, and resilient communities are not separate goals but interconnected outcomes that must develop together.
Where they diverge is in the details regarding how this holistic transformation happens. Agroecology emerged from social movements in Latin America and explicitly connects farming practices to broader questions of social justice, land rights, food sovereignty, and challenging corporate control of food systems. The People’s Summit’s focus on agroecology reflects this orientation, linking agricultural transformation to demands for land demarcation, territorial rights, and fundamentally restructuring power relations in 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 rather than relying to a large extent on external structural or political changes. This makes regenerative agriculture 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… even if they do indeed need to change in many cases.
Because regenerative agriculture is still being actively defined without universal standards, there is an ongoing tension about whether its social dimensions will remain central or become diluted in favor of purely environmental and economic metrics. This distinction helps explain why there are two separate gatherings in Belém rather than one unified conversation about sustainable farming.
And skeptics are not alone in raising their concerns. While corporate leaders were preparing their regenerative agriculture presentations for COP30, more than 300 Indigenous people held a protest on the Tapajós River, intercepting soy barges and opposing the expansion of waterways and a proposed railway designed to make soy exports cheaper. One Indigenous leader put it bluntly: “It’s a contradiction for the government to speak about climate commitments in Belém while fast-tracking a railway designed to make soy exports cheaper, expand ports, and further pressure our lands.”
The timing reveals something important. Remember that sacred-centered worldview event during Climate Week, the one sponsored by the Fetzer Institute and Mad Agriculture that brought together Indigenous elders and wisdom keepers? The event that served as a counterpoint to all the corporate sessions about data and scalability and return on investment? That tension is not abstract anymore. It is playing out in real time in Brazil.
This sacred-centered approach offers another lens on the holistic transformation that both agroecology and regenerative agriculture are pursuing. Indigenous worldviews do not separate environmental health, economic wellbeing, and social relationships into distinct categories that must be balanced or integrated. Instead, they understand these as expressions of a single reality: the health of the whole system, including its spiritual dimensions. When Indigenous protesters demand land rights and decision-making power while corporate presentations focus on carbon metrics and supply chain resilience, they are revealing different understandings of what “holistic” actually means. One sees agriculture as embedded in sacred reciprocal relationships with land and community. The other sees holistic as meaning comprehensive, addressing multiple outcome categories simultaneously.
This deeper dimension of what constitutes holistic remains largely undefined in regenerative agriculture’s emerging frameworks, even as agroecology has wrestled with it through decades of practice and reflection. Whether regenerative agriculture will embrace this more profound understanding of holistic transformation, or whether it will settle for a more technical definition of addressing multiple outcomes, remains one of the central questions at COP30.
Promises and Contradictions
Critics point out that the term “regenerative agriculture” still lacks universally accepted definitions or standards. During Climate Week, this flexibility was presented as a feature, not a bug, allowing adaptation to local conditions. But in Brazil, that same flexibility is being called out as greenwashing. Independent scientists are questioning whether soil carbon sequestration can actually offset the methane emissions from Brazil’s 238 million head of cattle, despite what some corporate-sponsored research suggests. Brazil’s methane footprint has risen 6 percent since 2020, and agriculture drove 74 percent of the country’s total emissions in 2023.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that expansion of croplands and cattle operations has driven the significant loss of native vegetation in Brazil over the past six years. This is happening even as the country positions itself as a leader in regenerative agriculture.
The financial picture is equally revealing. While Climate Week emphasized that farmers need profitable pathways to transition to regenerative practices, and while billions are being invested by corporations in regenerative supply chains, only about 4 percent of climate finance is actually making it to solutions like restoring degraded land and agroforestry. The money isn’t flowing where it needs to go.
At Climate Week, there was considerable discussion about how regenerative agriculture bridges the divide between Global North and South, engaging large-scale operations and smallholders equally. The Rockefeller Foundation’s school meals program was held up as an example, taking inspiration from Brazil’s national school feeding program where 30 percent of food is procured from family farms at premium prices.
But at COP30, that bridge looks more like a divide. The official proceedings feature corporate partnerships and technology-enabled monitoring systems. The People’s Summit is focused on food sovereignty and territorial rights. An Indigenous chef named Tainá Marajoara is overseeing the COP30 kitchen, serving agroecological ingredients and calling it “an act of cultural and ancestral diplomacy.” It’s meaningful symbolism, but Indigenous protesters are being very clear that they need more than symbolic representation. They need land rights and actual decision-making power.
Brazil’s Agriculture Minister Carlos Fávaro says the country demonstrates it is possible to “produce, conserve and include.” But reports indicate the Brazilian government plans to resume the controversial Ferrogrão railway project immediately after COP30 wraps up, preparing for a 2026 concession auction and an international investor roadshow that will include stops in China. The railway is designed to make soy exports more efficient, which means more pressure on the very lands that regenerative agriculture is supposed to be restoring.
What Kind of Transformation
This does not mean the momentum from Climate Week was meaningless or that the corporate commitments are insincere. The technology breakthroughs in monitoring and verification are real. The financing mechanisms being developed are genuinely needed. The focus on farmer profitability addresses a critical barrier that previous environmental initiatives ignored.
But COP30 is revealing something that was easier to overlook during Climate Week: there are fundamentally different visions of what regenerative agriculture means and who it serves. One vision sees it as a way to make existing agricultural systems more sustainable while maintaining production growth and global commodity flows. Another vision sees it as inseparable from land reform, Indigenous rights, and a fundamental restructuring of food systems away from export-oriented agriculture toward local food sovereignty. These two visions are not mutually exclusive, but the precise area of overlap has yet to become clear.
During Climate Week, these tensions could coexist in the same city, even if they were in different conference rooms. At COP30, they are harder to ignore. The People’s Summit is not just offering a different perspective. It is explicitly positioning itself as a counterpoint to what participants are calling “the agribusiness summit.”
The question is not whether regenerative agriculture has momentum. Climate Week made that clear. The question is whether that momentum leads to the kind of transformation that actually addresses the climate crisis and supports the people who are most affected by it, or whether it becomes another way to greenwash business as usual with better marketing and more sophisticated monitoring systems.
As one climate researcher put it when discussing the scientific evidence, current food system trends present an “unacceptable risk” for staying within a livable climate. Absolutely huge reductions in livestock production would be required to align with the Paris Agreement, along with massive reductions in beef consumption. But the Brazilian Agribusiness Association’s position paper for COP30 promotes the industry as a low-carbon agriculture leader without mentioning the need to reduce livestock at all.
The sacred-centered worldview that got a single event during Climate Week raises a fundamental question: can regenerative agriculture fulfill its potential while remaining embedded in extractive economic frameworks? Can you have truly regenerative systems when the underlying incentive structure still rewards extraction and export over restoration and local resilience? 
The Implementation Test
COP30 is forcing these questions into the open. Brazil has positioned the conference as being about implementation rather than pledges, about moving from promise to practice. That focus on implementation is clarifying. It’s one thing to announce commitments in New York City conference centers. It’s another thing to implement them in the Cerrado, where corporate restoration programs and Indigenous land rights are colliding, where talk of carbon-neutral beef coexists with rising methane emissions and continued deforestation.
What happens over these two weeks in Belém matters. Not because COP30 will definitively answer these questions, but because it is making it harder to pretend they don’t exist. The momentum from Climate Week is real, but so are the contradictions it is running into on the ground in Brazil.
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Hugh Locke received his degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Manitoba. He serves as President and co-founder of Futurra, an organization that redesigns supply systems to build regenerative models for agricultural sustainability. He is also President and Co-Founder of the Smallholder Farmers Alliance in Haiti where he uses agroforestry to feed and reforest their island country. Additionally, he serves on the Board of One Tree Planted, a global reforestation nonprofit committed to environmental restoration and sustainable land management practices. His research focuses on how big data and technological innovations can enable a revolution in both sustainable supply chains and regenerative agriculture.