Bhutan Hosts World's First 'Conscious Food Summit' — SkimNews
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- Bhutan's Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay opened the world's first "conscious food summit" in Paro, hosting delegates from more than 60 countries and the UN for five days of talks that frame food reform as both an inner and outer transformation.
- Tobgay said food sits at the intersection of hunger, poor nutrition, poverty, climate change, biodiversity loss, conflict and geopolitical instability, and that "consciousness has value only if it influences our decisions and changes how we act."
- The World Food Programme warned that 50 million people could be pushed close to starvation as a "super El Niño" hits this year and next, after a northern-hemisphere summer of drought, intense heat and wildfires devastated harvests.
- Jerry Spooner of Pacific NGO Regenerative Vanua said climate change, biodiversity loss and global instability are pushing food systems past their resilience limits, and called the summit a chance to move "beyond how we produce more food" toward regenerating ecosystems and communities.
- The summit will feature mindfulness practitioners and "spiritual masters" rather than political speeches, promoting regenerative practices, Indigenous knowledge and conscious eating as alternatives to a system that treats food as a careless commodity.
- A glacial collapse in neighboring Nepal last week triggered floods and landslides that killed hundreds, an extreme-weather signal organizers cited as immediate context for the urgency of the talks.
Why it matters: With the WFP warning 50 million people could face starvation during the super El Niño, Bhutan's summit challenges the dominant global approach — focused on yields, markets and technology — by insisting that values, mindsets and inner change must drive food policy if systems are to become resilient.
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