In 2021, the United Nations convened its Food Systems Summit with a promise to transform the way the world grows, distributes, and eats food. The gathering drew enormous attention from governments, civil society organizations, farmers, and food advocates around the world, all hoping for a serious, inclusive reckoning with the crises threatening our food systems. What emerged instead was a summit shaped largely by the corporate interests that have driven those crises in the first place.

The summit had been developed through a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum, an organization formed by the world’s top 1,000 corporations. Over 300 global civil society organizations representing small-scale food producers, researchers, and Indigenous peoples raised the alarm: the process was disproportionately influenced by corporate actors, lacked transparency and accountability, and had effectively sidelined the UN’s own Committee on World Food Security, which normally includes hundreds of representatives of smallholder farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous people, and civil society groups. Despite branding itself as a “people’s summit,” the gathering prioritized the perspectives and interests of large corporations and promoted solutions that served agribusiness rather than the farmers and communities who feed the world.

For Regeneration International and the Organic Consumers Association, this was a turning point. The people who actually grow the world’s food (small-scale farmers, pastoralists, indigenous communities, women, and young people) were being talked about, not listened to. So they decided to build something different.

A Summit of, for, and by the People

The People’s Food Summit was created as a direct response, a grassroots alternative that puts farmers and communities at the center of the conversation. While over 300 global civil society organizations gathered to protest and resist the UN process, Regeneration International and its partners were building a platform where real solutions could be heard, shared, and celebrated.

The vision was straightforward but genuinely radical: a free, 24-hour virtual event held every year on World Food Day, October 16th, that travels through every time zone on earth, starting in Oceania and moving westward through Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Not a summit about what corporations want food systems to look like, but a summit about what farmers, communities, and ecosystems actually need, built and run by the people who understand those needs firsthand.

Six years later, the People’s Food Summit has reached over 10 million people worldwide and accumulated more than 3.2 million views of session videos across social media platforms. It has featured hundreds of voices from every region of the earth, including farmers, researchers, indigenous food leaders, activists, and community organizers, all sharing what is working, what is possible, and what the world’s food systems can become when the people who tend the land are the ones leading the conversation.

Ronnie Cummins and the Vision Behind Grassroots Rising

This year’s theme carries a special significance. Grassroots Rising is drawn from the work of Ronnie Cummins, co-founder of Regeneration International and longtime director of the Organic Consumers Association, whose book of the same name laid out a blueprint for a worldwide regeneration movement built on farmer innovation, consumer activism, and the conviction that the solution to our planet’s greatest crises lies right beneath our feet.

Ronnie spent decades building the global organic and regenerative food movement, organizing across continents, writing with urgency and optimism, and refusing to accept that industrial agriculture was an inevitable or permanent reality. His core belief was that a properly organized grassroots movement could transition our world toward climate stability, food sovereignty, health, and peace, and that the tools and knowledge to do so were already in the hands of farmers and communities around the world. The People’s Food Summit is that movement made visible, once a year, for 24 hours, across every continent on earth.

Six years after the UN Food Systems Summit, the dynamics that made the People’s Food Summit necessary are still a reality. Corporate consolidation of seeds, land, and agricultural markets, and pesticide use continue. Small-scale farmers are losing ground to industrial systems that prioritize yield and profit over soil health, community resilience, and human wellbeing. At the same time, regenerative and organic food systems are taking root and expanding on every continent. Indigenous food sovereignty movements are gaining visibility and strength. Young people are choosing farming, land stewardship, and food advocacy as their life’s work. The corporate food system may dominate the headlines, but on the ground, in fields and forests and community gardens around the world, we find a different story. The People’s Food Summit exists to amplify those voices, connect those communities, and show the world that what is happening on the ground is real, it is working, and it is worth investing in.

What the 6th Annual Summit Will Bring

On October 16, 2026, the People’s Food Summit returns with one of its most compelling lineups yet. Dr. Vandana Shiva will speak on reclaiming our relationship with nature and the earth. Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef, will explore Indigenous food sovereignty and what the oldest food systems on this continent have to teach us all. Allan Savory will reflect on a lifetime of work regenerating millions of acres of degraded land. Shelley Cabrera, a young Indigenous Quechua lawyer from Peru, will speak to the vital role of women and ancestral knowledge in the world’s food systems. Jennifer Judith Chox Ixmatá will bring the voice of Indigenous Guatemala, defending food sovereignty through the milpa system and traditional maize culture. And Kaluki Paul Mutuku will explore how youth-led storytelling is reshaping the environmental and food systems narrative across Africa.

These are the voices the UN Food Systems Summit was never designed to hear. The People’s Food Summit was built to amplify them.

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READ: Hundreds of grassroots organizations to oppose the UN Food Systems Summit

READ: Coalition Slams UN Food Summit for Peddling ‘Corporate-Led False Solutions’ to Hunger