Towards People’s Food Power
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.
The latest Global Report on Food Crises estimates that 258 million people faced acute levels of hunger in 2022, up from 193 million in 2021 and 155 million in 2020. The State of Food Security and Nutrition report, published last week, confirmed that hunger and malnutrition are still on the rise.
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.
“In these times of multiple and intertwined crises, it is more urgent than ever that governments and the UN listen to the voices of the most affected constituencies, and change direction,” says Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International.
“The main stumbling block for taking effective action towards more resilient, diversified, localized and agroecological food systems are the economic interests of those who advance and benefit from corporate-driven industrial food systems.”
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.
“People’s food power is changing food systems from below,” says Sofia Monsalve.
“We must head towards a food systems transformation, based on respect for all human rights and care for people and planet, to advance agroecology, food sovereignty, biodiversity, gender justice and diversity, as well youth agency, climate justice, economic and social justice, in all dimensions of food systems.”
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.
For more information or media interviews please contact Clara Roig Medina, FIAN International Digital Communications: roig@fian.org
