Box 1

Political debates in the FAO and CFS get heated as governments stall

The long wave of the Covid pandemic, the food crisis, and multiple conflicts affected political discussion in the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) spaces. Trade shocks and their impact on food systems have been extensively discussed in the Committee on Commodity Problems (CCP). Most countries continued to support neoliberal policies, while some isolated voices mentioned local markets as a response to the global market volatility and fragility. The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM) joined the new Committee on World Food Security (CFS)’s workstream to develop an Action Plan that could serve as a roadmap to strengthen the dissemination and implementation of the policy documents agreed by CFS at local, national, regional and global levels.

The same need for implementation was raised by the fisheries movements at the Committee on Fisheries (COFI), where they advocated for the implementation of the Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines at the national level. Another space to promote the food sovereignty agenda was the Global Forum on Family Farming within the United Nations’ Decade on Family Farming (UNDFF).  The IPC Working Group on Youth participated to bring the voices of young farmers and Indigenous Peoples and create a toolkit to facilitate generational turnover in agriculture. In the meantime, negotiations in the Plant Treaty (ITPGRFA) are at a critical stage. By refusing to regulate digitised version of seeds (DSI), governments are allowing corporations to bypass the Treaty rules, creating space for a huge new wave of biopiracy on peasant and Indigenous Peoples’ biodiversity. The coming years will be pivotal for peasants and Indigenous Peoples movements, as efforts will soon converge towards organizing a new International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20).

Box 2

Let’s counter the corporate offensive on global governance!

Many fronts important for the food sovereignty movement

The right of communities to grow their food and to feed themselves is increasingly under threat, including in global policy spaces such as the United Nations. Large corporations and their political allies are taking advantage of current wars, climate, biodiversity and social crises to prioritise the industrial food system, serving profits instead of people.

The UN bodies negotiating climate (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – UNFCCC) and biodiversity (Convention on Biological Diversity – CBD) policies are in the cyclone’s eye. Over time, the UNFCCC has fostered a surge of false solutions such as carbon markets that are turning nature into profit, without bringing any benefit to the climate. Risky geoengineering technologies that are supposed to ‘fix the climate’ by manipulating solar radiation or industrially capturing carbon are also on the rise. All these ‘technofixes’ threaten to increase land-grabbing and could destroy ecosystems that food producers rely on. Even though the CBD has shown a lack of ambition and financial power at the last COP16 in Cali, it has maintained a de facto moratorium on geoengineering, thanks to a strong civil society mobilisation.

The digitalisation of agriculture and AI technologies are also entering policy spaces, threatening farmers rights, as seen in the recent UN Summit of the Future. Now or never, solidarity and strong resistance at all levels of power are needed and will allow us to transform the food system.

For more info: listen to the podcast mini-series “Who will control the food system?” , read Trojan Horses on the Farm: Challenging the digitalization of agriculture – and watch the animated video: Big Brother is Coming to the Farm (in 12 languages).