Food Systems Transformation: in Which Direction?
There is growing resistance to the upcoming UN Food Systems Summit and a clash between consolidating corporate-driven industrial food systems and human rights-based, agroecological food system transformation.
The lack of decisive action at global level in response to the ongoing systemic food crisis has deeply impacted communities around the world, fostering hunger and malnutrition, as well as worsening structural inequalities and systemic discrimination.
Ahead of the UN Food Systems Summit +2 Stocktaking Moment in Rome next week, a new FIAN report Food Systems Transformation: in Which Direction? calls for deep food systems change, based on full respect for human rights and care for people and planet.
On the global governance level, there is an ongoing struggle between two different approaches: attempts to further democratize multilateralism, as advanced with the reform of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and attempts to replace multilateralism with multistakeholderism – where giant corporations sit around the table, with governments and food producers, to discuss the future of food systems – as advanced during the first UN Food Systems Summit (FSS) in 2021.
The FSS+2 Stocktaking Moment is poised to repeat the failures of the FSS itself and further consolidate the dominance of industrial food systems over global decision making. It will open the door of the UN to even greater influence from large private companies and their networks, ignoring the strong concerns expressed by many civil society, small-scale food producers’ and workers’ organizations, Indigenous Peoples, women, youth and academics.
The UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is heading in the same direction. Despite geopolitical rivalry in other arenas, the FAO leadership from China and the US have a common agenda on corporate food systems. They have established an unprecedented open-door policy for the corporate sector, with favourable funding schemes and generous multistakeholderism policies. All of this is occurring in the absence of any serious corporate accountability framework.
However, there is a counterbalance to this creeping corporate hijack of global food governance.
This report is a FIAN contribution to the larger efforts of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism for relations to the CFS in response to the global food crisis and the People’s Autonomous Response to the UN Food systems Summit.