CFS, more than a talk shop for best practices

Today, the 44th session of the CFS will kick off and hold a week of discussions on international food security and nutrition policies. Accredited as the foremost international policymaking space on the issue, the CFS is key in developing policies that are human rights-based. Yet, it must reinforce its political role in addressing the multiple dimensions of hunger and malnutrition, so it does not become a talk shop for best practices.

Fighting against the separation of nutrition and food systems

There is an increasing trend towards delinking food from productive resources and local markets by small-scale food producers, as well as discouraging locally produced, diversified and healthy diets. This is accompanied by approaches put forward by the private sector, which are confining nutrition to the interaction between nutrients and the human body, the technical and medical domains, thereby minimizing the socio-economic and cultural context in which human beings feed themselves. Malnutrition, for instance, is reduced to “the lack of nutrients” that can only be rectified with external technical interventions. These mostly involve industrialized food supplements, nutrient pills and powders — that not so coincidentally also imply large-scale profit.

Food is not a mere commodity or a “medicine”,  but the expression of a social process of eating and nourishment within which nutritional well-being not only is the ultimate goal, but is also a prerequisite.

The CFS must keep stepping up nutrition governance by promoting policy convergence and coherence vis-a-vis the right to food and the resources that sustain it. Nutrition policies and programs must be grounded in human rights and address the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition through a holistic and cross-sectoral approach that takes into account their complex and multi-dimensional causes.

Addressing the root causes of famine

With today’s unprecedented famines and growing food insecurity and malnutrition, the CFS should be playing a crucial role in the development of strategies and policies to tackle them, and must maintain the political space to give a voice to those most affected. So far, no UN-wide global platform carries out collective and critical analysis of the policy responses to these crises, nor does it effectively address the root causes behind them.

The CFS, in the spirit of its 2009 reform, should assume its political role and ensure an analysis that corresponds with the individual, collective, domestic and extraterritorial dimensions of State commitments, as well as obligations under international treaties, in particular human rights treaties. It should also promote accountability of the different actors engaged in addressing food crises. It is not only about examining policy responses but the economic and political framework behind this.

By doing so, the CFS would carry out its roles of fostering global coordination, convergence, cooperation, coherence and accountability of policies and actions taken in the fields of humanitarian assistance, development, and human rights, as provided in the CFS Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises.

Political participation and accountability of human rights obligations

We are witnessing how governments across the world are moving towards authoritarian regimes, and oppressing or silencing social movements and communities via physical, social, and economic violence. This is accompanied with the increasing criminalization of people and movements mobilizing to claim their rights with the total impunity of government entities, who prioritize business interests over peoples’ sovereignty. The CFS must maintain the space to conduct a political analysis of these worrying trends.

And while this happens, States are decreasing both their political and financial commitment to supporting inclusive spaces, including the CFS. This context tends to open the doors to the private sector, which increasingly justifies its share in UN decision-making by contributing to the funding of policy spaces, leading in turn to conflicts of interest. While States need to increase their commitment to food and nutrition policies as part of people’s human rights, the CFS must build robust safeguards to protect itself from undue influence.

Democratic participation of civil society is increasingly shrinking at all levels, while also the space for corporate interests to unduly influence policy environments skyrockets. The legitimacy of the CFS rests on its ability to monitor accountability, and to ensure the voices of those most affected by hunger and malnutrition are at the forefront of policy processes.  

The CFS has a unique value in bringing different views on how to overcome the challenges preventing the world’s population from accessing adequate food and the means for its production. If we do not strengthen the political role of the CFS, and this space of participation, we will continue to move further away from the goals of ending global hunger.

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Read FIAN International’s assessment on the State of Food Security and Nutrition (SOFI) 2017