The COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated the unsustainability and unjustness of the current neoliberal global consumption and production system that destroys ecosystems, privatizes public services such as health, water, education, forces unfair labor conditions, deprives people the right to food, and prevents them from exercising their democratic rights all in the name of economic growth that accumulates huge profits for an elite few while impoverishing millions.
Although the United Nations promotes Sustainable Consumption and Production through its Sustainable Development Goal 12, it does not acknowledge the structural problem involving the power and economic systems across the world which is dominated by a few corporate elites. In response, communities across Asian countries assert and advance practices that address food self-sufficiency, environmental degradation, and waste reduction. From this arises the need to popularize and build a global movement to oppose the dictates of the neoliberal market ideology.
This justifies that the world must never return to “business as usual”. The status quo where production and consumption systems are made and done according to the wishes of a few global elites must be totally overhauled and replaced with genuinely democratic systems which put people’s rights as its central element.
It is in this light that IBON International, Council for People’s Development and Governance, People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, and Climate Change Network for Community-based Initiatives invites all organizations and individuals working for just, humane, and sustainable alternatives to an Asia-wide webinar series on PP-SCP entitled “Beyond COVID 19: Promoting People-Powered Sustainable Consumption and Production”.
The first part of the webinar is on June 15, 2021, 2:00pm to 3:00pm Manila time and it will tackle the current state of unsustainable consumption and production in Asia.
Interested participants may sign up using this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtd-iorDgrHdddnmGRt4D8YHuCi7jWCy3C