What’s on the Horizon for 2025?
22 Jan 2025
Edie Mukiibi shares his vision for 2025, a year that will mark his third anniversary leading the international movement, during which ensuring consistency of action and tangible impact will be crucial. We asked him a few questions to gain insight into his policy and strategy perspective for the year ahead.

Edie, which good news would you like to see realized in 2025?
2025 is the year of action for the agroecology transition. I would like to see more agroecological farms worldwide joining the Slow Food Farms network, strengthening our journey toward a good, clean, and fair food system. This initiative can bring new momentum to the movement while addressing something crucial to Slow Food: supporting agroecological farmers and connecting them to a broader local and global network of committed individuals, communities, and professionals.
We need to act as a widespread global movement to support agroecology farmers, indigenous territories, and the growth of our network. This is the year to work together toward a shared vision. Farmers, cooks, activists, experts, policymakers, leaders, youth, teachers, academics, and others must take complementary actions to combat the climate crisis and build a better food system.

A Slow Food Farm in Uganda_@SimoneDonati
Being president of a global movement presupposes a perspective that accepts complexity and differences. This can be an asset but at the same time a difficulty. How should Slow Food approach this challenge?
Slow Food is a global movement with roots in all corners of the planet. It is diverse yet strongly united as a grassroots movement. The diversity of our movement brings a beautiful complexity that enriches our ideas, initiatives, and approaches. This is something I deeply love about the movement, and as its leader, I both come from and represent this diversity.
As a global movement, we navigate diverse, complex situations that require contributions from people across the world to enrich our journey toward a good, clean, and fair food system. As our network grows, so does the need to identify effective ways to ensure its efficient management and to bring decision-making processes closer to where our leaders are—within the grassroots network.
The diversity and complexity of our network are more of an asset than a challenge, although I must admit that understanding this complexity is not easy. Addressing the daily political challenges our network faces is a significant mental and physical task, but it is one I embrace with hope and joy.
The complexity and diversity of our movement truly reflect the world itself, which is the essence of Terra Madre. I have dedicated my life to sustainable, healthy, and resilient agri-food systems and have always envisioned a world where every human being can freely express themselves, contribute, and act toward a shared vision. A world where biological and cultural diversity is celebrated as a unifying force.
I have found this vision within Slow Food, and I am proud to lead and uphold these values.
In 2024, Slow Food has announced its increasingly firm commitment to a transformation of the agrifood system toward agroecology. Why is this transformation urgently needed?
It is through agroecology that people everywhere can feed and nourish their loved ones with good, clean, and fair food. Agroecology is the approach with the potential to halt the worsening climate crisis. The transition of our agri-food system toward agroecology is a commitment of the Slow Food Movement. Through practical initiatives like Slow Food Farms, we mobilize the global community to support and actively participate in this transition. This is why I urgently call on our global community to act by protecting biological and cultural diversity, intensifying education on food and agroecosystem health, and advocating for local and international policies and programs that amplify agroecological food systems while ending exploitative industrial systems.
Our food system is at a crossroads, facing increasing climate disasters, the destruction of natural resources—including biodiversity and soil—pollution of water and air, rising hunger and poverty, and a worsening public health crisis. All of these issues are tied to exploitative industrial and ultra-conventional food production, handling, and consumption systems.
Food production and control over the most productive resources have increasingly been taken away from farmers and concentrated in the hands of corporate agribusiness entities, which prioritize profits and power above all else. This situation must be reversed. The only way to address this undesirable reality is by embracing the agroecological transition of our agri-food system.
Agroecology offers a system that protects and rebuilds biodiversity, regenerates degraded ecosystems, restores life and dignity to farming communities, and respects the well-being of all people and the planet—our only home.

How agroecology protects the environment and with what benefits for farmers and consumers?
Agroecology plays a vital role in mitigating and adapting to climate change. It restores and maintains healthy soils and pollution-free ecosystems, which are essential for producing healthy food. Agroecology also strengthens local economies by ensuring a consistent local food and income supply year-round for farmers and their communities. This, in turn, leads to improved food and income security as well as greater sovereignty.
Multinational agribusiness corporations seem increasingly powerful in thwarting this transformation. What tools can be used to fight back?
The first thing we must do is protect our local, traditional, and indigenous biological and cultural resources. Corporations intentionally drive our food system toward fewer breeds and varieties of edible species. Protecting and utilizing our biodiversity weakens their grip and control over the agri-food system. With biodiversity as the foundation of an agroecological food system, we become less dependent on patented varieties and breeds, as well as on synthetic chemicals and their tightly controlled supply chains.
It is also essential to intensify food education—not just for children or professionals, but for everyone. Understanding how the corporate-controlled agri-food system prioritizes profits over public and planetary health empowers us to make informed choices and collectively or individually take action to stop this injustice.
We should also join and support the work of millions of Slow Food activists who, every day, stand against the social, political, economic, and environmental injustices present in today’s food system. Many of these injustices—targeting indigenous peoples, women, youth, and other marginalized groups—are embedded in laws, policies, and strategies backed by agribusiness corporations.
Rising up as a Slow Food activist through our communities, chapters, convivia, and various organizations, and advocating for better policies that promote agroecology and food sovereignty, is one way to fight back against the undemocratic influence of multinational agribusiness corporations. Remember, even if they are giants, we are millions. Let us come together and harness our collective power to stop them.

Your personal history, the fact that you were born and raised in Africa, that you are an agronomist and work the land with your family — how do you think this can be an advantage for Slow Food, and how has it made it better?
As a young African farmer, agronomist, and someone who has lived and worked directly in the care of agricultural land, my leadership is grounded in this deeply personal and inclusive experience. I do not speak about food, seeds, farmers, or soils because I have read or heard about them—I speak from lived experience. I have witnessed the struggles of smallholder farmers, both in my home country and beyond.
This life experience is crucial in building a resilient and inclusive food movement that operates at all levels of the food system. Leading a diverse global movement like Slow Food requires a combination of political, technical, and practical knowledge. It is this blend of skills that has helped Slow Food evolve into a truly global grassroots movement.
In this movement, everyone—regardless of where they come from or the size of their contribution—plays an active role in creating a good, clean, and fair food system. We need everyone’s efforts, and each of us is a change-maker.

The year 2024 has been declared the hottest year ever. Governments and international institutions seem to have little incentive to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis and to take measures to adapt to the rise in temperatures already achieved. If you could implement three global decisions, what priorities would you address?
First: Defund industrial agrifood systems and redirect resources toward agroecological food systems. This shift would significantly reduce the climate footprint of agriculture. Agriculture must transform from being a contributor to the climate crisis into a solution, and this can only be achieved by transitioning from industrial to agroecological food systems.
Second: Dedicate UN Climate Change Conferences (COP) to real, actionable solutions to climate change rather than financial and economic negotiations. The largest polluters and contributors to climate change are deliberately avoiding making strategic and practical commitments to reduce emissions. We need tangible solutions such as transforming food systems, reducing fossil fuel use, and expanding clean energy initiatives.
Third: Support the work of indigenous communities and smallholder farmers in protecting fragile ecosystems and territories. The conversion of natural forests, mangroves, mountain ecosystems, and other ecologically sensitive areas into destructive land uses must stop. These territories have been safeguarded by local communities and indigenous peoples for generations. Their continued destruction only exacerbates the climate crisis.
Interview by Paola Nano

Blog & news
Contact Us
Get in touch
Do you have any questions or comments for our team? Don’t hesitate to get in touch!