Abstract
This article analyzes the development and organization of the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), which is being convened by UN Secretary General António Guterres in late 2021. Although few people will dispute that global food systems need transformation, it has become clear that the Summit is instead an effort by a powerful alliance of multinational corporations, philanthropies, and export-oriented countries to subvert multilateral institutions of food governance and capture the global narrative of “food systems transformation.” This article places the upcoming Summit in the context of previous world food summits and analyzes concerns that have been voiced by many within civil society. It elaborates how the current structure and forms of participant recruitment and public engagement lack basic transparency and accountability, fail to address significant conflicts of interest, and ignore human rights. As the COVID-19 pandemic illuminates the structural vulnerabilities of the neoliberal model of food systems and the consequences of climate change for food production, a high-level commitment to equitable and sustainable food systems is needed now more than ever. However, the authors suggest that the UNFSS instead seems to follow a trajectory in which efforts to govern global food systems in the public interest has been subverted to maintain colonial and corporate forms of control.
Highlights
On World Food Day in 2019, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced to the Plenary of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) that he was organizing a high-level UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) as part of the Decade of Action to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals
UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s announcement of the UN Food System Summit may be easier to interpret in light of the history of past world food summits and the struggles described above, in which powerful states have continuously undermined the public vision of global food governance to maintain control
Peoples’ movements and civil society organizations struggling for food sovereignty fear that the outcomes of the UNFSS are baked into its structure and actions to date
Summary
On World Food Day in 2019, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced to the Plenary of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) that he was organizing a high-level UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) as part of the Decade of Action to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals. Globalization of food systems (Friedmann and McMichael, 1989) since formation of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a shifting ensemble of individuals, states, and social movements have sought to build institutions with public regulatory capacity to promote global food security, selfsufficiency, and the human right to food This vision of what we call “public global food governance”—that is, a system of multilateral coordination and regulation premised on democratic deliberation—has been routinely undermined by powerful actors that have instead promoted international finance institutions, global regulatory fragmentation, and public-private partnerships that push industrial agriculture, productivism and trade liberalization at the expense of global food security and the livelihoods of small-scale producers and rural workers. In a moment when the global pandemic is exacerbating food insecurity and malnutrition, and as global social movements demand public global food governance that promotes the public good over private profit, powerful states in partnership with those multinational corporations aligned with the WEF are seeking to thwart emerging institutions of democratic public global food governance This is an undertaking that centers on the UN Food Systems Summit. We conclude with specific challenges to the UNFSS and Member States of the UN, and our warning that failure to change current ways of operating risks a momentous failure to move toward equitable and sustainable food systems that provide food security and nutrition for all
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