DEVELOPMENT

This article helps lay a basis for the kind of deep analysis of the stakes of global food governance that is required today, under the impact of the COVID 19 crisis and with the threat of corporate capture of decision-making spaces. The article reviews the history of global food governance, identifies the critical questions that need to be asked, and suggests some directions that may contribute to strengthening the agency of rights-holders, weakening that of corporations, and democratizing multilateral governance.

What knowledges and ways of knowing are considered valid in the context of global food governance? What is the relation between the prominence that is given to science and technology in the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit and the attempt to redefine food systems? What are the issues with the capturing and privatization of knowledge that people of the land have been passing over from generations to generations? These are some of the questions that are discussed in this thought-provoking conversation in which Nettie Wiebe shares her insights and experiences as a long-standing women peasant farm leader.

African food systems are a rich and varied tapestry of production systems, crops, seed, territorial markets, cultures, biodiversity and ecologies. As the UN Food Systems Summit worked to retrench the many pathologies that have systematically eroded African food systems, African civil society organizations mobilized to push back. In the African regional people’s countermobilization, participatory dialogues opened space for continent-wide articulations of a future built on peoples’ choices and control of natural resources, territorially-embedded solutions, the human rights of all, family farming, and peasant agroecology.

This article focuses on the Farmer Input Subsidy Program (FISP) in Southern Africa. The FISPs are part of agricultural support by governments providing input subsidies to small-scale farmers from public resources. FISPs are intended to reduce the production costs of small-scale farmers. Rural women members of the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) in Southern Africa argue that the FISP is captured by the global agro-industry and that the FISP, far from providing real support to farmers, advances a green-revolution agenda and has become a tool of the political elites and MNCs.

What is the diagnosis of the main problems of the Latin American and Caribbean region, including the corporate capture of food systems? How did the regional counter-mobilization against the UN Food Systems Summit arise? What were the positions of the Latin American governments and regional organizations on the Summit? What is the common vision for overcoming corporate food systems? These are some of the questions that are discussed in this thought-provoking conversation with Sofía Monsalve and Saúl Vicente, in which they share their insights and experiences on the challenges of the Latin American region and the outcomes of the regional counter-mobilization against the UN Food Systems Summit.

In this contribution we approach the refusal of modern industrial agriculture, as an act of radical care. We begin by recognizing the unprecedented crises of biodiversity losses and climate disruptions, amidst widespread inequality in a global pandemic, which are linked with modern agricultural development. This development is underpinned by the objectification of ‘nature’ that is designed into strategies and technologies of extraction and control like chemical pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, hybrid seeds, genetic engineering and digitalization. Refusal of strategies and technologies of modern objectification, we argue, is an act of radical care that is geared towards nurturing alternatives grounded in the Earth’s pluriverse.

This article argues that the United Nations Committee on World Food Security can and must serve as a space for catalyzing and strengthening public interest-oriented food systems governance grounded in the human rights framework. This would necessarily entail confronting the fragmentation of governance and erasure of accountability promoted by corporate designed multi-stakeholderism, and democratizing multilateralism through genuine participation of rights holders, public scrutiny and participatory science. Pivotal to this endeavor is arresting the growing corporate influence in governance mechanisms and reorienting them towards reinvigorating relationships among people, communities and governments.

The unholy alliance between the UN and the World Economic Forum in staging a Food Systems Summit is the culmination of deepening public partnerships with the corporate food sector on an international scale. This article examines how the WEF has exploited this relationship to position its private constituency to oversee global food market governance at the expense of multilateral principles, and against China’s expanding state-centered model of international self-reliance.

Resetting international agricultural governance requires a collective commitment to changing the economic rules of production. This article reports on the challenging questions raised by the Disparity to Parity project, led by a group of farmer-activists, farmer organizations, and scholar-activists in the US. How can parity policies be updated, expanded, redesigned with and for Black, Indigenous, immigrant, cooperative, female and gender diverse farmers and would-be farmers? How does the parity movement join in global solidarity to reset the international agricultural economic and trade rules to reverse the globalization of agriculture that dumps surplus and undermines food sovereignty?

Given the failures of the UN Food Systems Summit and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to tackle the problems related to the corporate capture of food governance, this article calls for developing comprehensive legal frameworks for corporate accountability in food governance. In doing so, the authors identify key regulatory elements that need to be taken into account in food governance discussions. Their recommendations are borrowed from the guidance developed in the context of the negotiations for an International Legally Binding Instrument on TNCs and other Businesses with Respect to Human Rights, as well as in the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the WHO Framework of Engagement with Non-State Actors, and the WHO Financial Regulations and Financial Rules.

China is a major agricultural power. It dramatically reduced hunger and increased its role in many forums for international governance. However, the Chinese government and society neither played a prominent role in the UNFSS nor in its critique. This article exposes how tensions and ambivalence about agroecology and food sovereignty in China create silences in these discussions, and addressing them within China can also resolve the global tensions that marked the UNFSS as a whole.

Evidence of the impacts of corporate food systems on people’s health raised concerns about the multiple outcomes of malnutrition and climate change, including commodities production and high consumption of ultra-processed food products. The COVID-19 pandemic overwhelms this scenario, highlighting the urgency for improvements in governance spaces and regulatory measures that can tackle the advance of large corporations, which act exclusively based on their private interests.

Understanding how science, technology, and innovation is produced by the UN Food Systems Summit process offers a lens into how dominant actors in global food policy continually rework their power and legitimacy. Focusing on discourses and material networks, the article shows that the Scientific Group makes appeals to inclusivity—of people of colour, women, youth, smallholders, and more—while extending old Green Revolution ideas through new 4th Industrial Revolution innovations and governance ambitions.

Country-specific national pathways to sustainable food systems, reinforce how the ‘transformation’ of food systems envisaged by the United Nations Food Systems Summit is about endorsing hegemonic agribusiness capitalist markets control of global food systems. Using India as the site of analysis, the article argues that radical transformation is about dismantling and rebuilding a food system where social justice is central to Food Sovereignty. This is foremost a project of liberation from systemic structures of enslavement, and in the case of India these are capitalism, Brahminism and Brahminical patriarchy. It is an historic moment for movements (farmers, anti-caste, adivasi) to re-imagine, revision, and collectively act to create a democratic, egalitarian and just food system, core elements of which are redistributive agrarian land reforms and democratic territorial relocalizing of food farming systems.

The UN Food Systems Summit was an ambitious and hotly contested event that brought competing approaches to global food governance into relief. In this article, we unpack the rival visions that circulate around how food systems should be governed, focusing on two issues that we feel are at the heart of these divergences: authority and legitimacy. We illustrate how both corporate-philanthropic and food sovereignty networks are struggling to establish epistemic authority of food systems as well as produce legitimacy through very different approaches to participation and accountability.

For the capitalist way of organizing people and nature, food is nothing but a commodity. Any meaningful transformation of the dominant food system must thus be based on the decommodification and liberation of food and all the elements that make food systems possible (labour, land, seeds, etc.). The notions of commons and commoning can be allies in this journey, helping different anti-capitalist fights to converge and avoid corporate cooptation.