Issue: MONITORING & ACCOUNTABILITY

In the 2022 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report released yesterday, UN institutions presented their annual assesment of progress towards ending hunger and malnutrition, confirming that global hunger is still rising and the world is still not on track to meet the 2030 zero hunger target of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.  

This year`s SOFI report included a special focus on repurposing food and agricultural policies to make healthy diets more affordable and noted that last year, the number of people affected by hunger globally rose to as many as 828 million, an increase of about 46 million since 2020 and 150 million since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aditionally, almost 3.1 billion people could not afford a healthy diet in 2020, up 112 million from 2019, reflecting the effects of inflation in consumer food prices stemming from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures put in place to contain it. 

While the report compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development, UN Children's Fund, World Food Programme, and the World Health Organization highlights the “intensification of these major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition: conflict, climate extremes and economic shocks, combined with growing inequalities,” its focus on statistics is done is a way that pays too little attention to the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition, and the recurrent global food price crisis.

According to SOFI, “the evidence suggests that if governments repurpose the resources to prioritize food consumers, and to incentivize sustainable production, supply and consumption of nutritious foods, they will help make healthy diets less costly and more affordable for all.”

“However, the question is yet again who will get the subsidies to produce and distribute healthy foods: corporations or small-scale food producers? Global supply chains or territorial food markets?” FIAN International policy officer Angelica Castaneda points out.

Existing power imbalances between mighty industry players and local communities are mentioned only marginally. SOFI doesn`t propose profound food systems transformations towards food sovereignty and agroecology.

This year´s SOFI emphasises the need to reallocate limited public resources to reduce the cost of nutritious foods. However, it is the unjust global economic system that has caused these limited public resources and affects particularly the Global South:

“A genuine tranformation of the global food system won’t be possible without systemic changes in the financial and economic systems to stop the accumulation of unsustainable and illegitimate external public debt, including a tax reform”,explains Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International, and continues:“An unconditional cancellation of public external debt is urgently needed to free up immediate resources to re-shape unsustainable food systems. It’s the global economic system that is causing hunger an malnutrition.”

As the new layers of global hunger crises triggered by COVID and the war in the Ukraine have shown, food security and malnutrition will not improve until longstanding injustices in the global industrial food system are addressed.

FIAN International’s report, War in Ukraine: Recurring Food Crises Expose Systemic Fragility, sheds light on the main causes of hunger and malnutrition, including reliance on global value chains, marginalisation of local food production and repeated food price volatility caused by growing corporate concentration in food value chains, financialization, speculation practices and lack of market regulation.”

The Covid-19 pandemic was already a wake-up call and the effects of the war in Ukraine are further demonstrating the vulnerablility of global supply chains to shocks such as these. The highly concentrated global division of food production undermines local and national food sovereignty and reduces resilience in times of crisis, as stated in the FIAN report.

“Despite this, once again the authors of the SOFI report have failed to discuss the role of the industrial food system in causing hunger and malnutrition.” Monsalve points out. “Instead, the report continues to propose contentious solutions for food systems transformation centered on technology and the integration of small-scale producers into global value chains. Agroecology remains absent from the report’s recommendations for food systems transformation.”

“This will further entrench corporate dominance over food systems and undermine efforts around the world geared towards real transformation based on diversified, local small-scale food production and agroecology”, FIAN’s Secretary General concludes.  

For further inquiries please contact Sofia Monsalve: monsalve@fian.org

One in three people in the world suffer from food insecurity. Hunger and malnutrition have been on the rise for several years. As part of its response, the Global Network on the Right to Food and Nutrition is launching its People’s Monitoring Toolkit for the Right to Food and Nutrition, a tool to foster human rights-based food systems at a time when people’s fundamental rights and food sovereignty are increasingly under attack.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been documenting for years the number of hungry and malnourished people in its State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report. Yet predominant monitoring mechanisms such as this fail to provide a full picture of hunger.

“These are based on quantitative statistics collected by technical experts rather than on the lived experiences of people,” says Laura Michéle, policy officer for nutrition and food systems at FIAN International. “The multiple and interconnected forms of violence and structural causes that underpin hunger and malnutrition are often ignored.”

Developed with grassroots organizations and social movements in a four-year participatory process, the People’s Monitoring Tool departs from a holistic understanding of the right to food and nutrition that counters the dominant discourse on hunger and malnutrition. It covers areas of struggle and policy themes, which are essential for the full realization of the right to food and nutrition such as environmental and women’s rights, and healthy and sustainable food systems.

Toolkit

Structured questions in the toolkit help to assess whether and how states are complying with their human rights obligations. The responses build up a body of evidence for advocacy by communities, movements, civil society, academics and civil servants and help them promote policies that address the structural causes of hunger.

In a successful test of the tool in Mali, rural women and girls shared experiences and assessed how the toolkit’s women’s rights module worked in their context. They highlighted the rights they wished to defend, identified key legal instruments and brainstormed on an advocacy strategy, which included drafting recommendations to send to their government.

“It is critical that people affected by hunger and malnutrition are considered subjects, not objects, in monitoring exercises, and given the space and tools to analyze and articulate their experiences,” says Arie Kurniawaty from the Indonesian women’s rights organization Solidaritas Perempuan which carries out feminist right to food and nutrition monitoring in Indonesia. “They are best placed to know the problems they face in their daily lives and to find the right solutions.”

The Global Network on the Right to Food and Nutrition unites a diversity of social movements and civil society organizations in the struggle for the right to adequate food and nutrition. Its Secretariat is facilitated by FIAN International.

View People’s Monitoring Toolkit for the Right to Food and Nutrition

As large swathes of the population in all regions of the world plunge even further into a state of food insecurity, the most marginalized and vulnerable living on the fringes of society are hit the hardest. The pandemic has exposed the results of decades of failed policies that cut people’s social and labor rights, leaving them at the mercy of food banks and other charities. But COVID-19 is also a symptom of a broader problem: the ailing industrial food system destroys the environment and creates the conditions for the propagation of zoonoses, whilst producing ultra-processed foods that put people’s health at higher risk of non-communicable diseases such as obesity and diabetes, which in turn make them more vulnerable to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. 

It is within this context that the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) will start negotiations on how to transform food systems towards more sustainability, equity and justice.  After two years of lively discussions, the CFS starts the negotiation on the Guidelines for Food Systems and Nutrition this week: the first intergovernmental negotiation on the parameters to achieve this transformation. The notion of food systems and of sustainable healthy diets, as well as principles for this transformation and how to re-orient key policy areas shaping food systems are at the core of the negotiation.

So what must be at the core of this transformation?

Given the increasing corporate capture of public institutions in food systems, there should be strong safeguards to prevent  conflicts of interest: food systems governance should solely serve public interest. Building on the demands of small-scale food producers, it is key that agroecology is made the cornerstone of this transformation. Agroecology will significantly benefit people’s health and the planet through producing healthy food, protecting biodiversity and the environment, while further developing traditional knowledge and transforming cultural and social relationships. 

On the whole, the right to adequate food and nutrition and others connected rights, including the rights of women, indigenous peoples, workers, peasants and other people working in rural areas must be the parameters for food system transformation. A food system that is not anchored in human rights will harm as much as the current predominant food production model has done.

There is much at stake this week and the outcomes of the negotiations will have long-lasting impacts and determine our ability to respond to external shocks, conflicts or crises – such as to COVID. Member states of the CFS must engage actively and constructively in the negotiations, despite the challenges arising from online participation. At this historical juncture, they must be bold and listen to people’s demands and undertake the urgent transformation of food systems that the people and our planet urgently needs.  

Check our video series Civil society perspectives on Food Systems and Nutrition to learn more about the proposals for the transformation of food systems:

1.   What is at stake in the transformation of Food Systems
2.   The Industry`s False solution for fixing food systems
3.   Civil Society`s vision for food systems transformation