Problem

Switzerland has been gradually transforming its food system for decades, even embedding the outcomes for the sector in its national constitution and introducing several agricultural reform policies. However, political polarisation over this transition has been growing and in 2020 a proposal for efficiency improvement and agricultural emission reduction was rejected by the Parliament. This triggered many parts of civil society and more than 100,000 citizens of Switzerland to sign a petition for a referendum on agricultural issues.

Since then, the Government has produced several new strategies and plans to move the agricultural policy forward, including a decarbonisation goal of a 25% decrease in the carbon intensity of final food demand. 

Responses

In 2022, three Swiss civil society organisations (Landwirtschaft mit Zukunft, Biovision and SDSN Switzerland) initiated the ‘Swiss Food Future’ project. As part of this project, a citizens’ assembly on the national food system was launched, supported by Government funding in partnership with philanthropic foundations. The assembly’s remit was to play a consultative role, and the participants were chosen randomly by another independent organisation, DemoSCOPE, to avoid bias. Another separate organisation, Collaboration Helvetica, was assigned the practical and logistical aspects of the consultation process.

To produce sufficient and informed recommendations, the participants were presented with expert information from various stakeholder groups working on the issue, including government officials, academics, and consumer alliances. The process was then broken down into parts focusing on specific themes. In total, each participant committed approximately 70 hours each for these consultations, excluding travel time.

The assembly’s final report of 2022 includes 126 recommendations that received a majority vote, along with the vote share for each, and relevant reasoning based on the discussions. National policymakers committed to taking these results into account when drafting new agricultural policy documents.

Find out more: Grantham Research Institute (p31-32), Landwirtschaft mit Zukunft