Advancing livelihoods or promoting corporate interests?

“As a human family, a world free from hunger is our imperative. Food systems hold the power to realise our shared vision for a better world.”

- UN Secretary-General António Guterres

The term ‘Food System’ refers to the constellation of activities involved in producing, processing, transporting and consuming food. Food systems touch every aspect of human existence. The health of our food systems profoundly affects the health of our bodies, as well as the health of our environment, our economies and our cultures. When they function well, food systems have the power to bring us together as families, communities and nations.

But too many of the world’s food systems are fragile and vulnerable to collapse, as millions of people around the globe have experienced during the Covid-19 crisis. The failure of food systems threatens our education, health and economy, as well as human rights, peace and security. And those who are already poor or marginalised are the most vulnerable.

The UN Food Systems Summit last month discussed these challenges, under the leadership of UN Secretary-General António Guterres. It was a completely virtual event during the UN General Assembly High-Level Week. It served as a historic opportunity to leverage the power of food systems to drive recovery from the pandemic and get the world back on track to achieve all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

The summit brought together all UN member-states and constituencies around the world – including youth, food producers, indigenous peoples, civil society, researchers, private sector, and the UN system – to bring about tangible, positive changes to the world’s food systems. As a people’s summit and a solutions summit, it recognised that everyone, everywhere must work together to transform the way the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food.

Judging by the pre-summit confabulations that involved a variety of stakeholders, the policy briefs that were prepared and the deliberations that took place, the summit’s objectives may seem to have been realised, particularly in terms of raising public awareness about the need to reform the existing food systems around the world, and the principles that should guide governments and other stakeholders to ensure that food systems play a central role in building a fairer, more sustainable world.

But movements and civil society organizations like La Vía Campesina were not impressed with the summit and its outcomes. La Via Campesina is an international farmers’ organisation founded in 1993 by 182 organisations based in 81 countries. It is an international movement that coordinates peasant organisations of small and middle-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe. It advocates sustainable agriculture, and was the group that coined the term ‘food sovereignty’. It carries out campaigns to defend farmers’ right to seeds, to stop violence against women, for agrarian reform, and generally for the recognition of the rights of peasants.

La Via Campesina was among scores of other social movements of organised small-scale food producers, workers and indigenous people that called for boycotting the United Nations Food Systems Summit and to denounce the attempt by transnational corporations to usurp the institutional spaces within the United Nations.

According to critics, the summit followed a ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach as against a ‘multilateral’ arrangement. Multilateral summits -- based on human rights, with transparent decision-making processes and accountability mechanisms -- are meant to prioritise the voices of rights-holders and hold governments responsible for upholding those rights. But the UN summit was based on the idea of ‘multi-stakeholder’ – treating all stakeholders as equal, without considering power imbalances or their position in the system. This fiction of equality leaves the powerful both unchallenged and unaccountable, hiding or ignoring any conflicts of interest. By conflating private corporate interests with the public interest, it overrides and erases the latter.

Despite the use of progressive language, critics point out that the summit remained firmly rooted in corporate interests. It highlighted a narrow range of partisan scientific data, while ignoring the traditional and experiential knowledge of small-scale farmers, indigenous, peasants and rural peoples. Digitalisation, genetic modification, precision agriculture, and other chemical-, capital-, and fossil fuel-heavy approaches took centrestage, because these so-called solutions are the most profitable to corporations.

It was also pointed out that the summit undermined existing global policymaking spaces and institutions like FAO and the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The summit encouraged stakeholders to form “coalitions of action” to implement “solutions”. Governments are encouraged to develop “national pathways” with stakeholder coalitions, many of which will inevitably be dominated by those who can afford to fund them. There is a clear intention to erect a parallel architecture to suit agri-business interests. Middle and low-income countries are being coerced into entering into “coalitions” with investors, philanthro-capitalists, and multinational agri-businesses to carve out “national pathways” profitable for their coalition partners.

Need for transformation

The development of sustainable food systems requires significant structural changes, guided by the conviction that a more radical transformation of agriculture cannot be promoted without comparable changes in the social, political, cultural and economic eco-systems surrounding agriculture. Only by changing the export-led, free trade-based, industrial agriculture model of large farms can the downward spiral of poverty, low wages, rural-urban migration, hunger and environmental degradation be halted. Rural social movements embrace the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ as an alternative to the neo-liberal approach that puts its faith in inequitable international trade to solve the world’s food problem. Food sovereignty focuses on local autonomy, local markets, local production-consumption cycles, renewable energy and technological sovereignty and farmer-to-farmer networks. It is indeed worrying that the UN Food Systems Summit chose to ignore these fundamental and critical issues.

(The writer taught Political Science at Bangalore University. He is currently Hon. Professor at Karnataka State Rural Development and Panchayat Raj University, Gadag).